The deadly riot that shook Kansas City in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968 was part of a national rebellion, one of nearly 300 incidents of civil disorder across America during the civil rights era.

Historian Joel Rhodes looks back at the KC uprising and the context in which it occurred. Activists in the South had long used nonviolent protest to confront Jim Crow discrimination. But African-Americans in the urban North faced a different racism, rooted not in law but in economic and other inequalities, and expressed their grievances through violence.

Rhodes, a professor at Southeast Missouri State University, led research for the Library exhibit It Finally Happened Here. The presentation is co-presented by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee.