Note: Map shows present-day streets. Sources: April 16, 1968 Chicago Daily News map, Tribune reporting

Sixteen-year-old Betty Johnson arrived home to find her mother frantically loading the station wagon with clothes and canned goods, and her father and brothers on the roof futilely directing a garden hose at a neighboring building going up in flames.

It was April 5, 1968, one day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the West Side had exploded in tumult.

National Guardsmen fanned out across the street with rifles armed with bayonets as Johnson’s mother corralled the rest of her 10 siblings.

Note: Map shows present-day streets. Sources: April 16, 1968 Chicago Daily News map, Tribune reporting

As the family sped away from their West Side home, Johnson wondered whether she would ever see their treasured two-flat again.

Two days later, only ash and rubble remained along a 2-mile stretch of Madison Street and some areas of Roosevelt Road and 63rd Street. The majority of residents took no part in the destruction and were left to return to their daily lives amid the ruin. Many believed their neighborhoods would be rebuilt. But today — a half century later — many of those corridors are still devastated.

After scouring hundreds of archived stories and historic photos, the Tribune found North Lawndale and East Garfield Park in particular look almost exactly as they did after the destruction 50 years ago. Reporters spoke with defiant residents, retired police officers, an admitted rioter, civil rights leaders, scholars and public officials to seek perspective on a disturbing question: Why are pockets of the West Side still decimated?

While only 5 percent of Chicago is classified as vacant or undeveloped, approximately 14 percent of land sits idle in the community areas of East Garfield Park and North Lawndale, according to a 2013 land-use inventory from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

“After the riots came, everything just stayed just like it was,” Johnson said. “It was just a desert. Nothing was here. Just lots of vacant lots.”

Gone were the local businesses: Imperial theater, Rosenau Jewelers, Brotman’s Clothing Store, Frank’s Furniture House, Beesen Hardware. Most of the institutions that burned down never returned. Vacant lots, boarded-up buildings and barren swaths of pavement now scar the neighborhood. They collect wrappers, cigarette butts and empty bottles of all kinds. Little except for a flicker of hope remains here — that and liquor stores, social services agencies and a few check-cashing joints.

Former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris, a member of the Kerner Commission that studied the riots that plagued American cities in the 1960s, recently visited Chicago and observed the desolation in parts of the West Side.

“It’s like cities like New Orleans, where they suffered a natural disaster, Katrina,” said Harris, comparing the man-made destruction in North Lawndale and East Garfield Park to the aftermath of a hurricane.

The issues affecting these communities are more than cosmetic. In some ways, sections of black Chicago are worse off today than they were in 1968, data compiled by Chicago demographer Rob Paral show.

Over five decades, the East Garfield Park and North Lawndale communities have lost more than two-thirds of their population as nearly anyone with means has left for the suburbs or other areas of the city.

Many of those who remain are poorer. In East Garfield Park, the community area hardest hit by the riots, the median household income was nearly $31,000 in 1970; it was just under $24,000 in 2016. In North Lawndale, the backdrop of the Roosevelt Road riots, median income fell within the same period — from nearly $37,000 to just under $24,000, all adjusted for inflation.

Median income Adjusted for inflation East Garfield Park North Lawndale Source: Analysis of Census data by Rob Paral and Associates

While academics and public officials are split on how to solve some of these enduring issues, nearly all agree parts of Chicago’s West Side were destroyed after 48 hours of rage following King’s death. Some never recovered.

The riots

The morning of April 5, 1968, started quietly. It was a sunlit Friday as springtime weather had started to take hold and green grass had just begun to poke through the West Side lawns.

The calm initially convinced police they might escape the day without major incident. By midmorning, small bands of a few dozen young people, mainly of high school age, marched on the Civic Center, now known as the Daley Center, and down State and Madison streets in the Loop.

Within an hour, windows were being broken in six stores on Madison between State and LaSalle streets. Extra police were called in to disperse the crowds. By 2 p.m., the police superintendent requested the assistance of the National Guard. Thirty minutes later, the first fire had broken out at a furniture store near West Madison and Oakley Boulevard on the Near West Side.

As Chicago police Patrolman Frederick Pirjevec started his 3 p.m. shift, fires were raging along Madison Street. Pijevec, 32, a product of war-torn Slovenia, was largely unfazed as the billowing smoke signaled destruction and the radio buzzed with shootings.

“What can you think, you know? You just do your job, they (tell) you there was a shooting, there was a shooting, this and that. What can you do? Nothing. You just drove around,” Pirjevec said.

That was the only deterrent police had to try and control rioters, he said.

At the end of his shift, Pirjevec was shot in the elbow, an injury he downplayed as “just a scratch.”

We asked for your 1968 riot stories. You responded. Dozens send in recollections from their experiences 50 years ago, when chaos, confusion reigned on West Side after MLK assassination. Read their stories

When Pirjevec first came to the United States, he struggled to comprehend segregation, racism and the struggle for civil rights, and he didn’t understand why residents were destroying their own communities.

Those from poor black neighborhoods, like Randall Harris, who lived in Lawndale at the time, knew and understood these issues well. Harris, now a pastor at a Lawndale church, admits he set fires on Roosevelt Road during the raucous unrest after King’s death. Then 18, he grew up admiring King and his principles.

“It’s like if you came home and your parents were gone, somebody killed your parents,” Harris, now 68, said of the mood at the time. “What would you — how would you feel?”

Someone would pay for King’s murder, he and several of his friends decided that night, as they raced into the eye of the storm.

At Roosevelt and Homan Avenue, buildings were already ablaze. Using matches and lighters, some members of the group started smaller fires. Others lobbed rocks and bricks through store windows. The jagged openings became entryways through which eager looters climbed, most emerging later with armfuls of clothing and food. Others had their sights on pricier goods, Harris said.

“Folks would go in and come out with a TV set,” he said. “I wasn’t that brave.”

The thefts were time-sensitive: All around the crowd, the wooden buildings were quickly burning down. This made law enforcement’s work additionally difficult. Perhaps because of this, Harris escaped the chaos without being arrested, as did many others.

Even for trained fire officials, the massive inferno was formidable.

A city bulldozer in the 3300 block of West Madison Street clears rubble of riot-torn buildings on April 7, 1968. It was in this block that the worst damage occurred during the nearly 48 hours of virtually uncontrolled rioting and looting that raged in the glare of burning buildings. (Luigi Mendicino / Chicago Tribune)

“A Chicago fire department spokesman said the west side was like a wartime city under siege and said it looked like a million fires were burning.” April, 7, 1968, Tribune report

During the worst of the crisis, more than 2,000 firemen and 100 pieces of fire apparatus were fighting the blazes. Police officers worked in groups to guard the firefighters, who were being harassed by youths throwing rocks and bottles.

A thousand sanitation workers were also working on the West Side, helping firemen move hoses and debris. More than 6,000 guardsmen and 5,000 federal troops were mobilized and sent into riot areas. Police were on 12-hour shifts in an effort to marshal more manpower. At the height of the rioting, there were 2,500 policemen on duty.

Then Mayor Richard J. Daley gave police the authority to “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters. Less than a year before, in response to riots besieging cities such as Detroit and Newark, N.J., Daley had said it was “impossible for Chicago to go up in smoke,” according to Tribune reports.

On Saturday, April 6, looters returned to the streets where fearful business owners had boarded up their storefronts. Some black shop owners scrawled “Soul Brother” on hastily made signs that hung in their windows, hoping the message would spare them. But West Madison and Roosevelt were hit hard for a second night.

At least nine people were killed during the rioting, 300 were hurt and more than 2,000 were arrested. All told, 260 stores and businesses were destroyed, including 116 along a 20-block stretch of Madison between Damen Avenue and Pulaski Road. Another 72 were razed within 12 blocks of Roosevelt.

Although disturbances had also broken out on the South and Near North sides, the West Side took the brunt of the damage. Estimates for rebuilding were pegged between $9 million and $10 million, much of it uninsured.

In the days after the riots, bulldozers cleared away the wreckage. Federal troops and guardsmen left the city. Residents were left to try to sort out their futures.