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Chicago's toll of eleven deaths, 911 injuries, 3,965 arrests and $11 million in damage might have soared far higher without the efforts of Rumor Central, a ten-month-old agency that checked out reports and squelched unfounded fears. Praised by the Kerner riot commission for its work during last year's strife, Rumor Central added 35 volunteers to its staff of 47 and in this year's five-day flare-up handled 40,000 telephone calls—most of them concerning such fantasies as the lynching of two nuns and the landing of Stokely Carmichael from a submarine on Lake Michigan.
"Between Bloods." For the most part, Negroes rejected the call of Black Powermonger Stokely Carmichael to "get your gun." On the evening of King's death, Carmichael was undecided as to what response he should make. Then, intelligence sources said, he received a call from the Cuban press agency Prensa Latina in New York, after which he appeared on Washington streets waving a pistol and urging blacks to arm. "A lot of people who were afraid to pick up guns will now pick up guns," he said later. "They clearly made a mistake when they killed Dr. King. It would have been far better if they killed Rap Brown or myself. Then they could have said that 'they lived by the sword and they died by the sword.' '
Despite Stokely's call to arms, a number of major cities remained relatively quiet: New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Milwaukee, among others. In all of them, black militants were the most influential peacemakers. Watts's Ron Karenga, abrasive boss of "US," a black nationalist outfit, supported the "Committee for Operational Unity," which had cooled the ghetto the week before. The time was not right for revolution, argued Maulana (meaning teacher) Ron, urging that "differences between bloods" be forgotten. Harlem's Charles Kenyatta, a chieftain of the American Mau Mau, preached in favor of racial peace and praised Mayor John Lindsay's casual walking tours among ghetto dwellers: "They want to feel that someone is concerned, and he goes out and reads people's faces."
"Neighbor-to-Neighbor." The death of King also had a profound effect on the white conscience. Some 300 girls from Goucher, a private college outside riot-torn Baltimore, loaded cars, microbuses and a borrowed hearse with 300 cartons of food and relayed them into the city's burned-out core, racing against a 4 p.m. curfew. Many matrons in Washington and its suburbs contributed food, clothing and shelter to the capital's riot victims. In New York, 5,000 suburbanites signed up for a massive "clean-in" this week in the city's slums.