MLK deplored violence like Raleigh’s in ‘68. Leaders now can learn from that | Opinion

With the unique 2025 overlap of Martin Luther King Day and the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Americans are confronted with one irresolvable difference: One group of observers consists largely of those who will acknowledge inconvenient truths. The other willingly rewrites the past. The same day will definitively split Americans into two groups: those who practice either remembrance or revision.



The day presents North Carolinians with a chance to again reflect on the challenge of acknowledging our own violent past.



Violence erupted nationwide after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. For one full week Raleigh was forced to ban all alcohol sales, instill a curfew and call in over 1,300 National Guardsman.



At the start, the response here to King’s assassination was non-violent. Shaw University President James E. Cheek anticipated his students’ desire to march. Cheek said: “There was no riot up to this point. If we had a riot in Raleigh, it was because of the police.”



Confronted by helmeted officers wielding nightsticks, Cheek demanded the police retreat. Instead, his students were ordered back to campus. They were taunted by sniper fire coming from Memorial Auditorium’s parking lot. At least one student was injured by this unprovoked gunfire.



Leaders such as James Cheek acted in a moment of crisis to preserve peace and save human lives.



But just after midnight, the lot of Weaver Brothers Used Cars on South Blount Street had multiple cars overturned and burned. To imply blame, newspaper images framed Shaw University’s Estey Hall in the background.



Curfew was invoked the next day beginning at 5 PM.



In the week that followed, the Green Brothers Seed building was burned to spent matchsticks. One of the two Shamrock Apartment buildings was also torched. In 2025 numbers, that loss alone amounted to $1.8 million in damages.



Able to experience regret, every serious citizen acknowledges these events happened.



Accompanied by police motorcade, two-hundred St. Augustine students marched peacefully to Memorial Auditorium. Their unexpected sit-in ended when National Guardsmen dispersed them using tear gas.



White protesters received different treatment. Two-hundred students and faculty from across the area assembled at N.C. State on April 9. The group was politely stopped at the east corner of Winston Hall where they were met by pleas amplified through a police car’s loudspeaker. The man speaking? Chancellor John T. Caldwell.



Economics professor Leonard Housman assured Caldwell the group would cease their march downtown when he learned paddy wagons were staged to detain them at the Velvet Cloak Motel.



The undeterred drove to the capitol. Instead of being dispersed by tear gas, they delivered typed comments calling for “affirmative action to place Negros in governmental positions of responsibility.”

No arrests were made. The group’s formal demands were read aloud in the Senate Gallery by David Campbell and then hand delivered to Gov. Dan Moore’s legal assistant George Y. Ragsdale.

Only the calendar ended a week unlike any other in Raleigh’s history. The alcohol ban was lifted, and Easter was observed without curfew.

King was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and openly expressed remorse when a 1968 march to support sanitation workers in Memphis turned violent. President Donald Trump, a convicted felon, has suggested he may pardon many of the January 6 insurrectionists.



While visiting the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1965, Dr. King unequivocally condemned rioting: “Let me say first of all that I profoundly deplore the events that have occurred in Los Angeles. I believe that violence is not the answer to social conflict whether it is engaged in by white people in Alabama or by Negroes in Los Angeles.”

All leaders of our country should follow King’s example and condemn violence no matter who is breaking the glass and their intent.