<em>Holy Week</em>: Prophecy
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Matthew Nimetz: Do you want something?
Vann R. Newkirk II: I’ll take …
Nimetz: If anyone wants a cookie …
Newkirk: Thank you. I’ll grab one after we finish. [Laughter.]
All right, so did you actually start that July?
Nimetz: Let’s see … I started ’66, let’s see; I clerked in ’65, ’66—yeah, ’67 … July ’67.
Newkirk: So you started it in the long, hot summer?
Nimetz: Yeah, it was tough and we had the Detroit riots as I was arriving—actually, the day I arrived, the riots …
Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz started working at the White House in the summer of 1967—the long, hot summer, when Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other places erupted in riots for days. The summer before King was assassinated.
Reporter: This is part of Springfield Avenue, Newark. On the night of July 13, 1967, hundreds of rioters smashed windows and looted these stores. Losses in the city were put at $10,251,000. The rioting cost the lives of 23 persons. Hundreds of others were injured.
Reporter: We are back on 12th Street in Detroit’s northwestern district, where it all began early Sunday morning. The state troopers [and] city police, here on the scene of this particular fire and numerous others in the city of Detroit, for the first time are under orders to shoot any looters or arsonists seen running from the scene.
Nimetz: We did a lot of work on riot preparation, riot control, what we would do with riots. This whole idea of the military going into our cities was a unique thing and very, very difficult, very questionable.
Newkirk: By the time Matthew started working for President Johnson, the ghettos in America had gone up for three straight years. But the uprisings in Detroit and Newark in 1967 became notorious, both for their destructiveness and for how brutally police and the military cracked down on them. White Americans were perplexed: Why were the Black ghettos rioting so regularly, so often? President Johnson resolved to find out.
Lyndon B. Johnson: We need to know the answer, I think, to three basic questions about these riots: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?
Newkirk: To answer these questions, Johnson appointed a commission. They would travel to Black ghettos across the country, researching, interviewing, trying to find answers. He called it the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, nicknamed the Kerner Commission, after its chair. In order to head off another summer of riots, the commission had to work fast. By February ’68, two months before King’s assassination, the powder keg was already lit: State troopers fired into a crowd of Black students protesting a segregated bowling alley outside South Carolina State University.
Cleveland Sellers: See, the police were standing on the side of that hill, and while I’m going down, the shots hit me.
Reporter: Three Negros were killed and 36 others were injured in a fight with police.
Newkirk: The Orangeburg massacre, they called it. The Kerner Commission’s report was released to the public the same month.
Harry Reasoner (journalist): For the last few days, this country has lived under indictment: a charge of white racism, national in scale, terrible in its effects. The evidence to support that charge has now been presented—more than 1,400 pages of testimony, findings, conclusions, the full text of a
