On Thursday, April 4, 1968, Louis “Hop” Kendrick, then a narcotics detective for Allegheny County, was at a meeting at the Kay Boys’ Club on Wiley Avenue when someone ran in and yelled that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.
The meeting adjourned, and by the time he’d walked to Centre Avenue, he said, there were people “as far as the eye could see.” There was no immediate rioting, Kendrick said, because Harvey Adams, one of the few Black police officers in Pittsburgh at the time—and later NAACP president—calmed the situation.
“Harvey told them, ‘You can’t win this. Someone will end up a widow, someone will end up an orphan if you do.’ He cooled it down that first night.”
But it didn’t last. Decades of frustration—not being able to skate at the ice rink in East Liberty, not being allowed to swim at city pools, having to take food from restaurant windows because Blacks weren’t allowed inside, not being allowed to stay in Downtown hotels—all boiled over. Dr. King’s death was the death of hope, and the last straw. The city’s Black neighborhoods burned.
“They yelled about burning Lutz’s market on Centre—we said, ‘Are you crazy? People live upstairs.’ I remember they looted the beer distributor, and that Sunday, I saw people with palms in their lapels—just been to church, carrying cases of eggs,” he said.
“The Podolsky brothers, who owned the Mainway Supermarket, had been in the Hill for years. They pleaded with the crowd, said take what you want, just don’t burn it. So, they took what they wanted and burned it anyway.”
Ralph Proctor, professor at the Community College of Allegheny County, formerly at Pitt, was working at H.J. Heinz and living in Squirrel Hill at that time, but as soon as the trouble started, he made daily visits to his family’s home in the Hill.
“I was in and out of the Hill every day to check on my parents—they say they had the Hill cordoned off, but they didn’t know all the ways in and out of the Hill,” he told the New Pittsburgh Courier. “I remember my daddy standing at the front window with a rifle—if you were walking by and had a match, you better be lighting a cigarette, or you’d be dead.”
Proctor also recalled that on the second or third day, with embers from fires still blowing through the air, a new store suddenly opened across from the Hill House.
“I’ll never forget the name—Black Bazaar and Books for Freedom. I took the girl who was working there to lunch—she was the girlfriend of one of the younger civil rights leaders—and she told me the guys were asking who started the riot,” he said. “So, I went home, and the phone rang—it was the FBI, they wanted to know what we talked about at lunch. I said, ‘We talked about you.’ The next day the place was empty, gone. It was an FBI front.”
Proctor said they weren’t the only odd faces in the Hill at the time. He recalled New Pittsburgh Courier Editor Carl Morris writing about strange men with long cases checking into the Ellis Hotel. That, said Proctor, tends to back up Kendrick’s personal observation that of all the people he saw throwing Molotov cocktails—he didn’t recognize any of them.
“Yeah, there were a lot of outsiders. I think they wanted Pittsburgh to blow—and if the police had shot someone like they did in other cities, it would have been a bloodbath.”
Proctor also concurred with Kendrick and Civil Rights Icon Alma Speed Fox that much of the burning was spurred by personal vendettas, or grudges.
“Some folks just wanted to loot, some to get even, some had long-term grievances with exploitive store owners, but there were others—like the one on the fringes of Homewood—that the owners burned for insurance and blamed it on us,” he said.
On the other hand, Fox said some stores were protected in the community.
“Certain businesses stayed open, people wouldn’t let them burn—like Gordon’s Shoes,” she said. “Others, I think a lot of it was personal.”
Her most vivid recollection of the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination was how she almost started a riot while trying to prevent one.
“With his assassination being on a Thursday—I was executive director of the NAACP at the time—it gave us time to organize a peaceful march, so we go get the permits and everything to do it that Sunday after church,” she said.
“On my way home from church, a radio announcement said the march had been canceled. Well, I had the permit in my pocket. So, we get down to Freedom Corner, and cops are in a line blocking Centre Avenue, keeping us from going Downtown—they thought we were going to riot. So, I squeezed through and made a break for it, and they threw me in the police van. (Now, according to Proctor, the crowd is chanting: ‘Let the sister go!’) Byrd (Brown, attorney and later NAACP president) negotiates with them to let me go—but I told everyone, ‘No, this is my van.’”
After that, the police let the march continue, and it proceeded peacefully down to the point where people made speeches. Fox said it raised a lot of money for the NAACP, which even then, she said, couldn’t deal with the devastation caused by the fires.
“People were coming to us, asking us for help,” she said. “It was a terrible time. It was hard to get through that summer.”
Though Black Political Empowerment Project founder Tim Stevens had been active in the Civil Rights Movement, he said Dr. King’s death and the aftermath increased his involvement immensely.
“We were fraternity brothers. When he spoke at Pitt in 1965, or ’66, me and some guys from our chapter picked him up at the airport. He was very low-key, a regular guy, despite being this national figure,” Stevens told the Courier about Dr. King.
“The day he was killed, I was with members of the fraternity and we were supposed to be at Chatham for a discussion. We ended up talking about our responses to his death. There was a professor from Pitt there, and afterwards he offered me a fellowship. I took it. A lot of my activism stemmed from that. Byrd Brown asked me to be NAACP youth director in 1969 and later executive director. Dr. King was an inspiration.”
As for the aftermath, he remembers sitting in front of his house with a toy gun after someone tried to firebomb the store next door. And then there was the military.
“It was kind of like an occupation for a few days, I don’t remember how long,” he said. “It’s almost like a movie now. That you would have guys in your neighborhood with guns saying you can’t go any further than right here. You can burn up your neighborhood, but you’re not burning Downtown.”
But it wasn’t just the Hill that burned. So did Manchester. Bill Strickland, now President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, was a 16-year-old art student at the time, and says he’ll never forget it.
“There were tanks sitting right here on Chateau Street where my building is now,” he said. “The Giant Eagle that was here was burned down. It was an armed camp. It was like living in a war zone—it was a war zone. There were curfews, I remember family and friends were terrified. It was like that for months.”
He said losing one of your idols at that age, and seeing what followed, will never leave him.
“It was 50 years ago—but I’m talking to you about it like it was yesterday—that’s how deep of an impression he made on me. He was one of my heroes, to lose one of them at that time in my life, it was heavy,” Strickland told the Courier.
“What else was heavy was seeing photos of the Mt. Washington lookouts where the White community stood and watched the Black community burn. So, 50 years later, I think we have to be even more determined to realize the dream that Dr. King gave his life for.”
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Pittsburgh residents recall the state of the city following Dr. King’s assassination in 1968
