AFTER THE

RIOTS
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE DELAWARE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

046-Feat Riots-DT-April-18.indd 46 2/28/18 11:36 AM

 Fifty years since citizens of Wilmington reacted angrily to the death of
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it’s past time to evaluate what we have
learned and how far we have come. Social commentator John Sweeney
asks our leaders—and what he learns is troubling, to say the least.

T he world remembers 1968 as the year Dr. Martin Luther

King Jr. was assassinated. Wilmington, however, remem-
bers 9 as the year of the riot and, worse, the nine-month
military occupation that followed.
Fifty years later memories linger of armed white National
Guard soldiers patrolling black neighborhoods months after
the streets were calm and the mayor pleaded with the governor
to end the occupation. efore 9 was out, s top-rated
untley- rinkley news show featured Wilmington as some
kind of national oddity, with citizens going about their every-
day lives while -toting guardsmen eyed them suspiciously.
National jokes and ridicule followed close behind.
It was an unforgettable and embarrassing “only in Dela-
ware” moment. Historians and witnesses of the riot and oc-
cupation are still debating why Gov. Charles Terry refused
to remove the Guard when the rioting stopped. Governors in
every other state where riots broke out pulled the National
Guard from the streets hours after things quieted. Wilming-
ton had to wait until a new governor was elected more than
nine months later. The riot and occupation are looked upon as
a nasty watershed moment in the city’s history.
But 1968 and the years that immediately followed saw the

Wilmington was under military

occupation for nine months
after the riots of 1968.

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 emergence of trends that would harm
Wilmington far more than National
Guard patrols.
Few people noticed at the time. We
notice now. Fifty years later we’re liv-
ing with the consequences of those
trends. The question is whether we
have learned anything in those five
decades.
First, go back to 1968. Delaware’s
portion of Interstate 95 was finished
that year. Out-of-staters could zip all
the way through Delaware without
stopping. But Wilmington workers
also could easily drive to the suburbs
each night, leaving their jobs and their
old neighbors behind in the city. Cars
began undermining the local shops
that had served neighborhoods for gen-
erations as suburban strip malls lured
away business. Downtown suffered,
too. Local department stores lost out
to chains built for suburbs. Even the
city’s infrastructure damaged the
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046-Feat Riots-DT-April-18.indd 48
community. I-95 ripped through sev-
eral west side neighborhoods—neigh-
borhoods with churches and schools
and a strong sense of community. The
decades-long trend of suburbanization,
prompted by federal mortgage subsi-
dies, accelerated. More of the city’s tax
base drained away.
White middle-class and work-
ing-class neighborhoods soon became
black middle-class and working-class
neighborhoods. Jobs soon followed the
people out to the suburbs and, as glo-
balization closed in on America, facto-
ries began closing. Industries shipped
production overseas. Automation lines
replaced workers or consolidated func-
tions in far-off offices.
Wilmington’s population dropped.
Affordable housing outside the city low-
ered the value of city neighborhoods.
People with lower incomes moved in.
Poverty inevitably took hold in what
were once thriving neighborhoods.
It took decades, but it was a complete
transition. It is a cycle familiar to every
small city across America. The chal-
lenge is to find a way to break that cycle.
In the 50 years since the riot, laws
have been passed and money has been
spent trying to undo the harm of that
occupation and the preceding gener-
ations of legal and illegal racism that
shaped the relationships between the
whites and blacks living in Wilming-
ton. Even a casual look at today’s prob-
lems—violence, drugs, unemployment,
troubled schools—shows that those ef-
forts have not been successful.
Did we learn anything from them?
We asked more than two dozen experts.
Here are three lessons that Wilming-
ton and Delaware learned the hard way.
Schooling is Hard
This sounds simple, but it isn’t, as
repeated efforts at school reform have
shown. Worse, schooling is crucial. If
3/2/18 12:22 AM

In the 50 years since the riot, laws have
been passed and money has been spent
trying to undo the harm of that occu-
pation and the preceding generations
of legal and illegal racism that shaped
the relationships between the whites
and blacks living in Wilmington. Even a
casual look at today’s problems—
violence, drugs, unemployment, trou-
bled schools—shows that those efforts
have not been successful.
it fails, crime can ourish and obs can
disappear.
Our experts said Delaware s biggest
failure over the past 5 years has been
education. It is Delaware s failure be-
cause the issue was largely taken out
of Wilmington s hands by the federal
courts and the state legislature.
ifty years ago, the Wilmington
school system was in better shape, says
anifa habazz, president of Wilming-
ton ity ouncil. hildren were walking
to school. ids could take part in extra-
curricular activities. They didn t have to
catch a bus right away to go home.
They could take part in sports, she
adds. igh school sports help build a
community. There was so much more
community engagement back then.
There were teachers who left an impact
on their students.
Desegregation was supposed to fix
it, she says. It didn t.
y desegregation, she means the
046-Feat Riots-DT-April-18.indd 49
court-ordered busing and consolidation
of school districts in northern ew as-
tle ounty. In 9 Wilmington had its
own school district, but it and several
other districts were combined into one
large district a few years later. That dis-
trict then was divided into four, each of
which served a portion of Wilmington s
students. This meant students riding
buses into and out of the city. egisla-
tors representing white suburban com-
munities waged an unrelenting guerrilla
war against busing. Today Wilmington
students are still bused to suburban
schools. ore important for many city
residents, Wilmington no longer has its
own traditional high school. The neigh-
borhood school, the kind that becomes
a family tradition, is gone.
That, and the failure to lift Wilming-
ton s students despite rhetoric, promis-
es and lawsuits, has been noticed.
Why can t we get education right
says Theo regory, who spent years
on city council. When we needed
more skills like plumbing and carpen-
try, we created the vocational schools.
When we needed more training in
nursing and medical technicians, we
created Delaware Tech. If you can
fix those problems, why can t you fix
Wilmington s schools
Dan ich is a niversity of Delaware
professor. e has spent the past several
years as a member of the Wilmington
ducation Improvement ommis-
sion, a group looking for ways to
Why Did Terry Do It?
Dr. King was shot to death in Memphis
on April 4, 1968. Within hours, protests
broke out in cities across the country.
Some began to turn violent. Soon cities
like Washington, Detroit, Baltimore and
Newark, N.J., were burning.
Wilmington was peaceful—until the
following Monday, April 9. Crowds
gathered, bricks and bottles were
thrown. Several buildings were set on
fire. The state police were called in. Then
the National Guard arrived. The riot,
what there was of it, died down on April
10. Calm returned to the city. People
living in the riot-torn area, West Center
City, expected the National Guard to
withdraw. But the Guard stayed.
decrease the ine uities facing poor
Wilmington students.
As soon as the desegregation order
went into effect, ich says, the state
started working to undo it. And it has
been working toward that goal ever since.
Wilmington has no traditional high
school, ich says. It is as if we hol-
lowed out the city.
Wilmington schools are fragmented.
There are ,5 public school students,
but separate units, not counting the
state department of education and the
state school board, govern them.
And none of this governance in-
volved the city of Wilmington.
The failure has to do with more than
ust governance, ich and other experts
say. oor Wilmington students are at
the bottom of the pile. They suffer in a
number of ways. They start out behind,
and the uality of the schools keep
them there.
We did not have a full definition of
desegregation. says ebe oker, a civ-
il rights activist and a longtime advo-
cate for better schools. All that meant
to this community was that there had
to be diverse children sitting in those
seats. This was not thought through.
What black children needed back
then were proper learning resources
and effective teachers, she says. ack
then black teachers and schools were
not supported. They did not have the
needed financial backing. ven the
paint on the wall was not the same. We
Soon the mayor, business executives
and African-American leaders and
members of the city’s clergy began
calling for the Guard to be withdrawn.
Gov. Charles Terry would have none of it.
He said his intelligence sources told him
that violence could break out again at
any moment.
So the Guard stayed. For more than
nine months. It took an election and a
new governor to finally order an end
to the armed patrols through Center
City and black neighborhoods. In mid-
January 1969, the newly sworn-in Gov.
Russell Peterson signed the papers
ending the military occupation of
Wilmington.
APRIL 2018 I www.DelawareToday.com I 49
3/2/18 12:22 AM
 were begging for new equipment.
“Then, when they made the decision
to transport the children, all of a sud-
den this money was available,” Coker
says.
Leo Strine is chief justice of Dela-
ware’s Supreme Court. He has spoken
out frequently about disparities in the
state’s school system.
“In 1968, there was minority control
of schools, but segregation. Today, it is
the worst of both worlds—no control
and no desegregation,” he says.
“Ask anyone from out of state how
many school districts would a state like
Delaware have,” Strine says. “No one in
his right mind would guess 22.
“What would be hard about putting
in a bill to have three New Castle Coun-
ty school districts, one in Kent, two in
ussex and one o-Tech district It re-
uires putting people we serve first.
The challenge is putting the first-
step solutions on the table.”
Neighborhoods Are
Important
Paul Calistro asks two questions
about a city. The first is Where does
the pizza driver deliver The second is
ow many cranes can you count
The answer to the first uestion tells
you which neighborhoods are safe. If
the pizza driver won’t deliver there, it
is not a safe neighborhood. The answer
to the second question tells you about
how vital the city is. Cities must be
constantly rebuilding. Construction
cranes are a good indicator of economic
health.
Calistro is executive director of the
West End Neighborhood House. To
him, neighborhoods are important.
They make a city thrive. Neighbor-
hoods should have names and identi-
ties. That is what builds communities.
That in turn makes cities safer.
Sometimes the government destroys
communities—which is what hap-
pened when the federal highway system
built I-95 between Adams and ackson
streets in the western part of the city.
The federal government was as destruc-
tive with its “urban renewal” project on
Poplar Street near the train station in
the 95 s. ouses were destroyed as
50 I www.DelawareToday.com I APRIL 2018
046-Feat Riots-DT-April-18.indd 50
part of a grand “slum clearance” scheme.
But a community was destroyed as well.
im aker, three times Wilmington s
mayor, said in an oral history of the
riot, published by the Delaware Her-
itage Commission, that these actions
decimated the city.
“The riots had an absolutely devastat-
ing negative impact on the city,” Baker
said in the history. I-95 had a devastat-
ing negative impact on the city. Urban
renewal had a devastating impact upon
Former Mayor Jim
Baker writes that
the riots, I-95 and
urban renewal all
“had a devastating
negative impact on
the city.”
the city. So take those things together,
and, literally, you tore your city apart.”
Former University of Delaware pro-
fessor arol . offecker came to a
similar conclusion in her history, “Cor-
porate apital Wilmington in the
Twentieth Century.” She wrote, “Yet
these programs have been strongly crit-
icized by students of city life, because
they tore down more than they built
up, left slum dwellers with poorer hous-
ing than before, destroyed old neigh-
borhoods, and further encouraged the
multiplication at the urban heart of the
cities’ worst enemy, the automobile.”
Alan Mallach worries about what he
calls the middle neighborhoods. It is
his job. Mallach studies neighborhoods
for a living. He is a senior fellow at the
Center for Community Progress in
Washington, D.C.
Middle neighborhoods are the old-
er communities that for generations
housed working-class families. These
neighborhoods were all built for cou-
ples to move into and raise their kids
and then stay in them for the rest of
their lives,” Mallach says. “In many
cases, they worked nearby. The houses
were built near factories, train yards
or the docks. They had convenience
stores interspersed with the houses and
were crisscrossed periodically by larger
streets that offered shops.
“For the most part kids walked to
neighborhood schools. Many of them
went to Catholic or parochial schools.
The parishes divided cities, often along
white ethnic lines.”
In Wilmington, Philadelphia and
Baltimore, they are the rowhouse
neighborhoods. They are old. Most of
them were built starting right after the
ivil War into the 9 s. iddle-level
neighborhoods were widespread in the
9 s. They are greatly diminished
now,” he says.
Mallach says that not only did the
jobs and the shops disappear, but the
neighborhoods were built for married
couples. In many cities today, he says,
most of these households are headed
by single mothers. Their income tends
to be low—so low, in fact, that if some-
thing goes wrong, and Mallach says,
something always goes wrong if you are
poor—the family can uickly end up in
crisis.
Keep in mind, Mallach says, that
many of these houses are more than 5
years old. Something can easily go wrong
with a furnace, a roof or the plumbing.
A low-income single mother is unlikely
to be able to keep up the repairs. If the
family is renting, the landlord is likely
to be slow in maintaining the property.
Two or three troubled houses on a block
pulls down the whole block. Then the
troubles of that block can spread to the
next, and then the next. Then the drugs
and the violence arrive.
Mayor Mike Purzycki sees the prob-
lem.
The sin of the city—no, the sin of
state,” he says, “has been its neglect of
the poorest neighborhoods. You won’t
believe the conditions some people are
living in. We should be ashamed.”
The Purzycki administration
picked the West Center City neigh-
borhood to address.
Why West enter ity eason
number one,” Purzycki says, “we need
to focus. In the past, we tried to do
everything. If we got a million dol-
lars, we d spend 5 , here, 5 ,
2/28/18 11:37 AM
 there. Nothing would last. To get some- ikewise, I-95 brought dramatic chang- tomer is and it has to vie with competi-
thing done, we need to focus. es to Delaware. But it is already built. tors on product and price. Innovations
“We pick up trash twice a week,” he What good would another I-95 do like the container cars carrying goods
says. “We’re not allowing the trash or Added to that natural slowing of enabled the product supply chain to
debris to pile up. Police are doing their growth came two other disruptions spread across the globe. So today, auto-
job. People are used to seeing young that would hit Wilmington and the rest mobiles are assembled in one place but
men standing on corners. That is much of America hard: globalization and au- with parts from a dozen countries—
improved now. tomation. countries where labor is less expensive.
“We have conducted 300 rental in- Globalization was the hardest to The local impact o more obs at the
spections. ost fail. We re-inspect and recognize. At what point did DuPont Newark Chrysler plant or the GM Box-
then fail again. Three failures, and we stop being a Wilmington company A wood Road assembly.
start fining or moving to close down. Delaware company ven an American Automation was the next job killer.
“We are trying to add a remote health company Du ont, like all of the other Printers, for example, were once high-
facility, and we will encourage residents international businesses, has to com- ly paid skilled workers, members of a
to use it. Many residents skip health pete on a global scale. Like all other proud craft that reached back centuries.
services. That’s risking their health. businesses, it has to go where the cus- Automation drastically continued on page 78
“We’re doing simple things too,”
he says, “like painting the crosswalks
and replacing stop signs. We’re buying
houses at sheriff s sales. We re working
with the Land Bank and helping people.
The next step is we are going to try to
get people to buy homes. We have to
help people learn about mortgages.
“People in the neighborhood under-
stand what we are doing,” he says. “And
it will work.”

Nobody Expects
Globalization
Even with all of 1968’s civil unrest
and worries about the Vietnam War,
most Delawareans felt confident about
the future. People were working. Fami-
lies were buying houses. Teenagers were
gobbling up consumer goods, like the
new stereo “long play” vinyl records.
But something important was about
to happen that few people noticed at
the time: America stopped growing.
The long, wild climb of the Ameri-
ca economy was coming to an end. A
few years ago historian Robert J. Gor-
don, combing through decades of eco-
nomic data, found that growth—the
kind that makes life easier—tailed off
around 1970. Look at inventions, he
says. They did not stop in 1970. They
just became less important.
We take a lot of those really import-
ant inventions for granted now. But
think of how indoor plumbing changed
the way we live and how we do business,
let alone how it affected public health.
Compared to that basic improvement,
the latest multi-head shower is nothing.

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 AFTER THE RIOTS continued from page 51

reduced their numbers. Even at auto

plants, much of the work is now done
by robots or by workers who know how
to operate robots. Hospitals were able
to outsource radiology work to India
and call centers operate from the Phil-
ippines, combining both globalization
and automation.
Former Gov. Jack Markell is close to
obsession on this point. Since leaving
office last year, he has served on three
national panels on developing the
country’s workforce.
“As a result of globalization, em-
ployers have more choices than they’ve
ever had before about where to hire,”
Markell says. “As a result of technol-
ogy and artificial intelligence, they
need relatively fewer employees. One
CEO of a company based in Califor-
nia—but with hundreds of employees
in Delaware—told me that across his
company, they will have 35 percent
fewer employees in five years because
the artificial intelligence is getting so
powerful so quickly.”
The jobs that will exist will require
great worker skills.
“The most frustrating conversation a
governor can have is with an employer
who says, ‘I have dozens of vacancies
but I can t find people with the right
skills,’” Markell says. “On the same
day, I could have had multiple conver-
sations with individuals who tell me
that they would like to work but no-
body will give them a chance.
“During my time as governor, I vis-
ited 2,500 employers. I asked one sim-
ple uestion—what can I do that will
facilitate your success —under the
theory that if they’re more successful,
they’re more likely to hire more Dela-
wareans, and that’s the single best way
to address the wide variety of issues so
many people face. inety-five percent
of the time, they told me that I should
do whatever I could to make sure they
could hire a skilled workforce. That’s
why we brought the Pathways to Pros-
perity program to Delaware, and it’s
expanded from 27 students to 9,000 in
ust five years.
Purzycki sees the same challenge.
“You have to look at workforce read-
iness,” he says. “Businesses look at an
area s high unemployment, the long-

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 term rate, not just the lack of opportu-
nity because of layoffs or plant closings.
A prison record or short work history
works against a community.
We have to figure out how to get
people working. We need to think in
terms of to people getting
obs. That would change the rhythm of
a community.
Robert Perkins, executive director
of the Delaware Business Roundtable,
sees a part for business.
ore than anything, businesses
hate surprises, erkins says. They far
prefer an environment they can rely
on to be receptive to their growth and
employment needs. In that spirit, Del-
aware lawmakers need to take a long-
term approach to the way state financ-
es are handled.
That means taking a hard look at
revenue sources and making changes
to ensure that they are sustainable and
will keep pace with economic growth,
erkins says. ut it also means impos-
ing spending discipline in Dover to not
only restrict spending to expected rev-
enues, but to ensure that spending does
not balloon in one year versus the next
because of an unexpected, one-time
surge in revenues. We will be unable to
attract businesses and jobs to Delaware
if the state has a fiscal crisis each year.
Wilmington is home to a growing
base on which to build a vibrant entre-
preneurship and innovation ecosystem.
According to one statistical index that
measures the innovative inputs/capacity
and outputs of an economy, Delaware
compares well to surrounding states
and the nited tates as a whole. reat-
ing, for example, a distinct innovation
district’ in the city would help to more
uickly establish Wilmington as the
home of future obs.
In addition, a more robust connec-
tion with higher education is essential,
erkins adds. igher education must Let the Good Times Roll at the
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