Before Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, much of Newark's Central Ward was a tinderbox waiting for the torch and in the incendiary aftermath of the assassination, dozens of blazes were set by arsonists. They might have done much worse damage, except that in contrast with last summer black slum dwellers raced to help firemen, not hin der them. The major reason was that black militants such as Playwright Le-Roi Jones had reached a grudging armistice with the city's white authorities (TIME, April 26) and passed the word down to the streets: Cool it.
Last week that racial refrigeration...