Time and again, it was a rebellion, not a riot

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

So said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his words resonating again today as never before.

Sadie Woods, an award-winning Chicago DJ and multidisciplinary artist, has melded Dr. King’s words with volumes more — music, poetry, speeches and news reports — in a weighty mixtape, “It Was A Rebellion.”

In 2017 Woods, set out to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the 1968 assassination of Dr. King and the riots that followed nationwide. She then released her compendium, “It Was A Rebellion,” last year on the eve of Juneteenth.

The singer-songwriter earned a master’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and serves on its faculty. On Monday, she will perform her work at the Chicago History Museum’s daylong virtual program, “MLK Day: King in Chicago.”

Woods, 42, grew up in Humboldt Park and has researched Dr. King in Chicago. Her mixtape reflects on the anger and despair that ravaged the West Side on April 4, 1968. “It Was A Rebellion” punches through history with musical tracks from The Roots, Donny Hathaway and Marlena Shaw, the poetry of Amiri Baraka, and the exhortations of the Black activist H. Rap Brown.

Words are powerful and can be powerfully abused. The word “riot,” commonplace in 1968, is still too prevalent and abused now.

“What has become clear to me,” Woods told me last week, “is the perspective that has been shared through media over the years, labeling protests or rebellions as riots (is) very racialized.”

Woods’ mixtape excerpts King’s speech “The Other America” from April of 1967.

“I will always continue to say that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating,” the great orator reminds us. “But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots.

“I think America must see riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Words like “riot,” “protester,” “agitator” and “looter” have been weaponized to discredit people of color and their calls for justice.

“There hasn’t been much change over 50-plus years,” Woods said.

Those words are “not really addressing the issues that create these circumstances in the first place,” she said, “but rather judging or, you know, creating these moral standards of how people should respond.”

And those words are not addressing “the deeper-seated issues, or acknowledging that their protests or rebellions against police, systematic oppression.”

They don’t acknowledge “a cry for change.”

In 2020, those cries reached a cacophony in the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd.

Today, many view King as a peace-seeking preacher, viewing him through the gauzy, sentimental lens of his famous 1963 March on Washington and his uplifting “I have a Dream” speech.

Yet when he was alive, King was viewed as a radical. His good words and deeds were despised by the power establishment.

“He was seen as one of the most dangerous people in America, almost treated like a terrorist,” Woods said. “I don’t think that that history is shared enough.”

In 2021, King’s radical fight to undo the racism and injustice continues.

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