If could be worse. In fact it was.

April 1968. Via Ghosts of Baltimore.

Michel Martin at NPR remembers the riots following the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., personally, from when she was a little girl in New York City: her father was that rare bird, an African American firefighter, so she has a wonderfully round perspective. It made her think to interview some veterans of 1968, a Baltimore cop and a Washington firefighter, both white, to put the current Baltimore disturbance in context.

One thing that stands out is how small-scale this disturbance seems in contrast to those days, when it was whole neighborhoods, not a few individual buildings, that were burning, and went on for much longer; there are areas in Baltimore that still haven't recovered from the property damage of 40-odd years ago, it's one of the urban-rot problems that makes the city such a mess. The current disturbance is awful, but it's nothing like the awfulness of back in the day. I think we really need to recognize this.