Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a leading African-American civil rights activist, on April 4, 1968, Washington, D.C., experienced a four-day period of violent civil unrest and rioting. Part of the broader riots that affected at least 110 U.S. cities, those in Washington, D.C.—along with those in Chicago and in Baltimore—were among those with the greatest numbers of participants. President Lyndon B. Johnson called in the National Guard to the city on April 5, 1968, to assist the police department in quelling the unrest. Ultimately, 13 people were killed, with approximately 1,000 people injured and over 6,100 arrested. Background Starting in the late 19th century through the 1960s, the ready availability of jobs in the United States government attracted many people to Washington, D.C., including African American men, women, and children. This era is known as the Great Migration. As a result, middle-class African American neighborhoods prospered, but the lower class was plagued by poor living conditions and fell deeper into poverty. Despite the end of legally mandated racial segregation after the 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education, the neighborhoods of Shaw, the Atlas District Northeast corridor, and Columbia Heights remained the centers of African-American commercial life in the city. Pre-existing conditions Housing Housing in D.C. was deeply segregated. Most of the slums in the city were in the southern quarter of the city, and most of the inhabitants of these slums were black. The United States Commission on Civil Rights said in a 1962 report that housing was much harder to attain for blacks than for whites, and that the housing blacks could find within the city's border was in a severely worse condition than the housing of their white counterparts. The Commission also stated that it was the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) segregationist zoning plot for the city that was to blame for housing inequality. HUD also came under fire from a group called ACCESS (Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in Suburbs) when they protested HUD for giving federal money to buildings that restricted blacks from living in them. Education Ghettoization resulting from housing discrimination led into a feedback loop of low property taxes and low funding for public schools in D.C., with many white parents sending children to private schools. Two-thirds of D.C.'s population was black, while 92% of public school children were black. Striking statistics such