Programs

THE ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND THE BALTIMORE RIOTS OF 1968

A "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Remembrance and Reconciliation" Presentation

During the 1960s, Cambridge, Maryland was the home of one of the most vibrant locally based struggles for racial equality in the United States. Catalyzed by the arrival of freedom riders in 1962, the movement in Cambridge expanded in 1963 and 1964 under the leadership of Gloria Richardson, one of the most prominent and one of the few female civil rights leaders in the nation. In the years after her departure from Cambridge, the movement went into decline until 1967, when it underwent a brief revival that culminated with a riot allegedly incited by black power spokesman H. Rap Brown. Peter Levy agrues that Cambridge demonstrates that the goals of the movement were not universal, the strategies underwent constant social and political change, and that its impact on the micro level was not as clean and immediate as historians would have us believe. Adult and high school audiences.

Peter Levy is Professor of History at York College, Pennsylvania. He has numerous publications on the Civil Rights movement. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.