1968 New York City riot

The 1968 New York City riot was a disturbance sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. Harlem, the largest African-American neighborhood in Manhattan was expected to erupt into looting and violence like it had done a year earlier, in which two dozen stores were either burglarized or burned and three people were killed. However, Mayor John Lindsay traveled into the heart of the area and stated that he regretted King’s wrongful death which led to the calming of residents. Numerous businesses were still looted and set afire in Harlem and Brooklyn, although these events were not widespread and paled in comparison to the riots in Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago in which federal troops were needed to quell the disorders.