Smitty’s Seaway Barbershop, straddling the corner of 89th Street and Hough Avenue for 57 years, is like so many Black hair care establishment across America. It’s worn vinyl furniture testify to a steady clientele, dust-covered JET and Ebony magazines add spots of color while the tinny sounds of an ancient stereo serve as a backdrop for voices raised in fierce debate or raucous laughter. For people in Cleveland’s Hough community, however, Smitty’s is also carries special significance: it was one of three businesses to survive the 1967 Hough Riots.

Clarence Mitchell, a 28-year-old state Senator from Baltimore, was 131 miles away, working on behalf of another Black political trailblazer, when the lightning bolt of history flashed from Memphis, Tenn. and shook up the world.

Bitter sweet memories remain vivid for those who’ve lived to tell the story of havoc wreaked on Baltimore’s streets following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Fortunately Baltimore only saw a fraction of the destruction inflicted on other cities, but for two major areas in the city, visible remnants of social and economic despair still remain.

“Turn the radio on. Dr. King has been shot," the Rev. Walter Fauntroy said he heard people crying out that day in April 1968. All of a sudden he began to hear glass shatter and hundreds of people shouting in the streets.