Photo by The Baltimore Sun

In 2008, the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies published its“ Kerner Plus 40 Report,” which was edited by DeWayne Wickham and Tukufu Zuberi. The book assessed this nation’ s response to the hundreds of race riots that occurred in the 1960s. One of those conflicts took place in Cambridge, Md., and resulted in the longest military occupation of a U. S. city since The Civil War.

The stories of what happened in Cambridge – written by Gregory Kane and DeWayne Wickham – examine the events and people that played a key role in this largely forgotten chapter of American history.

Now, with cities in this country again being occupied by the American military, the Morgan Global Journalism Review reprints these stories because we believe as Pulitzer Prize winning author Nikole Hannah Jones often says,“ history is memory.”

And we think readers should remember this painful chapter of American history.

By GREGORY P. KANE

CAMBRIDGE, Md. – In the matter of race riots and civil disturbances, it was this tiny town that pulled off the hat trick of the 1960s.

Three times National Guard troops patrolled the city’ s streets to keep order. The first two times were in 1963 – one of the most violent and turbulent years of the civil rights era.

On June 14, two days after Medgar Evers, NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was gunned down on his lawn by segregationist Byron de la Beckwith, National Guard troops descended on this town of 13,000 after nonviolent demonstrators here clashed with violent racists.

The troops returned in July and imposed limited martial law after

violence flared again. This time they didn’ t leave until the spring of 1964.

But three years later, the embers of discontent in Cambridge would flare again – and burned bright enough for the entire nation to see.

On July 24, 1967 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman H. Rap Brown arrived in Cambridge, a city in which tensions had already been ratcheted up by a speech that a member of the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist organization, made a few days earlier.

Brown used the same kind of inflammatory speech on black residents here that he’ d given to black audiences in other cities throughout the nation. But in Cambridge his words got a fiery reaction.

“ Burn this town down, if this town don’ t turn around,” he shouted to a crowd of blacks from the hood of a car.