Tracing civil rights legislation before and after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death

The outpouring of Americans demanding an end to police brutality and racism after the death of George Floyd recalls the turbulent 1960s fight for civil rights.

Charlamagne tha God, host of The Breakfast Club radio show, said he hopes more change will come from the 2020 demonstrations.

"Things will change after this moment," he told Michel Martin on CNN June 3. "I think about Martin Luther King Jr. after he got assassinated. I think it was like six days of riots in like 114 cities, 40-plus million dollars worth of damage all throughout the country, and Lyndon B. Johnson signed that goddamn Civil Rights Act of 1964. Something like that is going to come from this."

Charlamagne, whose given name is Lenard McKelvey, made a similar claim in an interview with Stephen Colbert. But his history is inaccurate: The 1964 civil rights law happened four years before King was killed.

When a Texas resident tweeted at him about getting it wrong, Charlamagne replied that he meant to single out a 1968 housing law that followed 10 days of widespread riots after King’s assassination.

That isn’t the only example of hard-fought civil rights legislation achieved after tragedy or upheaval in that era. With the new focus on national demonstrations, we wanted to review the connection the riots that Charlamagne described after King’s death and the influence it had on civil rights legislation. Here’s what we found when we looked back at what happened during the 1960s.