In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. identified Chicago—not any southern location—as the American city most hateful toward Black people. 

"I've been in many demonstrations all across the South," King said, "but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and hate-filled as in Chicago."²⁵

98% of the residents living in Watts in 1965 were Black.²⁶

67 different American cities were struck by riots in the summer of 1967.²⁷

For 40 years (1932–72), the federal government sponsored a clinical study that used poor, Black patients as guinea pigs—without their knowledge—to test the effects of syphilis on the human body. The "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" denied 399 poor sharecroppers treatment for the debilitating disease, as doctors withheld drugs in order to monitor how the disease spreads through the body and eventually kills its victims. 

The doctors kept the study's true purpose secret, telling patients they would be treated for "bad blood" and would receive free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology to the patients and their families.²⁸