Streets of Fire

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Ben scribbled into his notebook, balancing the radio mike on his shoulder while he wrote.

‘I’m on surveillance,’ he said irritably, ‘and King’s still talking.’ He glanced up toward the church. He could see the crowd shifting excitedly as the people stood packed together tightly on its wide cement steps.

‘I got to pull you off for a minute,’ the dispatcher said. ‘We got a body down in that old football field off Twenty-third Street.’

‘Twenty-third Street?’ Ben asked. ‘Why don’t you let the Langleys handle it?’ He kept his pencil poised on the page.

‘Nobody knows where they are,’ the dispatcher told him. ‘You know what it’s like at headquarters.’

Ben knew exactly what it was like, and as he looked out toward the crowded cement steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, they reminded him of the chaos which had overtaken police headquarters as well since the demonstrations had begun. It was a hot May. The jails were already choked with everything from dentists and lawyers to half-blind old women, and every man in the department was on full duty to deal with them. Both uniformed patrolmen and plainclothes detectives slept in their cars or in makeshift dormitories which the department had set up in the hallways and storage rooms of City Hall. Sometimes, as Ben had already complained, the whole place looked more like a skid-row flophouse than a government building.

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