Several thousand blacks surround the police station and after a week of arson and looting, the Watts ghetto is all but destroyed. Violence flares in 43 cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Ohio, Atlanta, Georgia, and San Francisco, resulting in 11 deaths and more than 400 injured. A heated dispute between two white police officers and a black taxi driver sets off rioting in Newark, New Jersey. For five days, in stifling summer heat, rioters wreck the district, leaving 26 dead and 1,500 injured. Race riots in Detroit, Michigan, kill 43 and leave more than 2,000 injured.
Trouble spreads to Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee and Maryland.
The death toll in 128 cities nationwide for 1967 is 83 dead. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, violence erupts in 125 cities, leaving at least 46 dead and 2,600 injured. In Washington, President Lyndon B. Johnson sends in the elite 82nd Airborne Division to quell riots. Four days of rioting in the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn, New York, between Hassidic Jews and blacks. The violence was set off by the acquittal of four white police officers who were caught on camera beating up a black man, Rodney King, after stopping his car.