Violence Spreads To San Francisco

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31652, 11 April 1968, Page 11

Violence Spreads To San Francisco

(N Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) SAN FRANCISCO, April 10.

Sniper fire killed a bus driver and wounded a sailor in San Francisco last night.

Police said the white bus driver was killed in a street of Hunter's Point, a predominantly Negro area, by shots fired from a hilly area. The driver was reported to have volunteered for extra evening duty because half the city’s bus crews stayed away from work in mourning for Dr Martin Luther King. It marked the first outbreak of serious violence in San Francisco since the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. Hunter’s Point was the scene of the city’s worst racial disturbance in September, 1966. More than a dozen false fire alarms were raised in the Hunter’s Point and Fillmore

neighbourhoods. No serious fires were started. Fires and looting spread in Kansas City and a new outbreak of racial violence hit Trenton, New Jersey, in the hours after the funeral of Dr Martin Luther King, the Associated Press reported. Deaths in Trenton, Baltimore and Kansas City brought the national toll since Dr King’s assassination to 33, all but five Negroes. Nearly a dozen fires broke out almost simultaneously last night in a racially-mixed Brooklyn slum that had been the scene of violence twice since the slaying in Memphis last Thursday. There were sporadic out breaks of fire-bombing and looting in half a dozen suburban towns on Long Island, near New York City. The violence in Kansas City spread as darkness fell, in spite of a curfew enforced by police and national guardsmen. An estimated 1000 Negroes were routed by tear-gas outside the Kansas City hall earlier in the day. A Kansas City police spokesman said a Negro man

was shot to death in a store in a Negro area, the scene of looting. At least nine persons were wounded in other incidents as looting spread to a fashionable business district.

A Negro youth was shot to death by a policeman in Tren ton and officials sealed off the New Jersey capital. Police said the youth, aged 19, was looting a shop across from city hall. Trenton police declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew and called in State troopers to help fight the disorders. Crowds of young Negroes smashed windows in furniture and clothing stores in the centre of the city.

For the first time, incidents of arson were reported in Newark in the Negro area where last summer’s bitter riot claimed 26 lives. Five major fires and 13 smaller blazes erupted in the Negro central ward.

The Newark Housing Authority said about 65 families roughly 300 persons, were burned out by the fires that hop-scotched across the central ward.