Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on Thursday, April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. The next night there were riots in over 100 cities. Dr. King, the apostle of nonviolence, by far the most respected figure in the black community, had been gunned down by a white man.
Madison Street from the old Chicago Stadium to Garfield Park was in turmoil as the two newsmen slowly drove into the heat of the riot. Stores were in flames. Groups of young men roamed the sidewalks, darting in and out of looted stores. Silent crowds gathered to watch. Fires crackled, sirens screamed. Black unobtrusively took long shots of the crowds and the burning.
“The soldiers’ heads rotated from east to west, warily watching the ragged adolescent army pass in review.”
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Later that morning Heineman and another young reporter, Joel Havemann, were assigned to work on a detailed story about the riot casualties. Who were they? What were their lives like? The Detroit Free Press had done a similar story following the riots there in 1967, and it was agreed this would be one way to describe the participants in the riot.
Nine people had died on Friday night. They were all black men, ranging in age from 16 to 34. Four were married. Eight were employed. Seven had been shot to death. Another died in a fire and the ninth bled to death from a cut on his leg.
Several witnesses, including a small-business owner who’d sat in his store all night and watched the looting and burning along Madison, talked about a blue Chevy. They called it a “killer squad.” Four white officers in the unmarked blue car, each with a shotgun, had appeared at intervals during the night, firing into stores without warning. Two of the victims had been found in the backs of stores and two in the alley just south of the stores. A store owner on that block, the 4100 block of West Madison, said there were hundreds of spent bullets on the floor of his shop the next morning.
The two reporters looked at the draft of the story and then called city editor Ken Towers at his home and demanded a meeting. They drove there that evening in Heineman’s Volkswagen. Towers was friendly but stood his ground. After an hour of argument, the reporters left, now with the impression the editor didn’t have the authority to change the story.
