Pittsburghers saw frustration, fear and even some hope in the Hill as disturbances raged in the days after Dr. King's death.

Robert Johnson was a 31-year-old postal worker and father of two living in the Hill District when the Pittsburgh riots occurred.

"My wife woke me up and said, 'Something's going on.' She saw it on the news," Mr. Johnson said. "Next thing you know, things were blazing."

He recalls the looting and the fires.

"People were tearing up a little bit of everything, Gordon Shoe Store and the other shoe stores. I remember that very well."

He said a man at the Mainway Supermarket on Centre Avenue, just half a block from the Legacy senior citizens residence where Mr. Johnson now lives, told looters they could take all they wanted but begged them not to burn the store.

However, someone threw a Molotov cocktail on the store's roof and burned it down. There were several grocery stores in the Hill at that time, but all of them were damaged during the riots and eventually closed.

Once the National Guard arrived and a curfew was established, those entering or exiting the Hill had to have a reason. "The National Guard was checking everybody," Mr. Johnson said. "I worked at the post office at Seventh and Grant. I had to show my badge where I worked so I could get off the Hill."

Mr. Johnson, 71, said nothing positive came out of the riots. "Younger people didn't pay too much attention [to the ramification]," he said. "Older people realized it didn't help out nothing. It didn't save nothing. They just destroyed [things] for themselves."

-- Monica Haynes

During the local unrest that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Dennis Biggs was a 17-year-old student who lived in the Hill District and attended Schenley High School.

"I couldn't understand why all the looting and burning was going on, especially in areas where primarily black people lived. We were destroying where we lived," recalled Mr. Biggs, 57, a retired Pittsburgh police officer who lives in Beltzhoover.

Mr. Biggs grew up on Cherokee Street in the Hill District's Sugar Top neighborhood, which, he said, was "a good place to raise kids" because it was peaceful.

The day after Dr. King's death, Mr. Biggs said, "I was shocked and I was hurt. It was evil striking down a person who was trying to do good in the world."

A lot of jobs disappeared because of the burning and looting of the Hill, Mr. Biggs said, including one he had after school and on Saturdays at Gelman Loan Co., a pawn shop at Centre Avenue and Kirkpatrick Street.

"I liked working there. A lot of people came in there to pawn their rings and watches. They would come back and redeem them," he said, adding that the shop's sign said, "See Sonny for Money."

Today, Mr. Biggs returns to the Hill every week for Sunday services because he is an elder in Macedonia Baptist Church.

Mr. Biggs sees signs of hope, including construction of a half a dozen new homes on Clarissa Street, renovation of other properties and new townhomes being built on Whiteside Road, just one block from his church.

The business district, he said, "is trying to make a comeback," but the biggest problem is the lack of a grocery store. The neighborhood also still lacks the wide variety of stores that once sold shoes, clothing and hardware.

Members of Macedonia Baptist Church, Mr. Biggs said, are working to improve the Hill District through an organization called Family and Community Empowerment that offers job training, addiction counseling and HIV testing.

-- Marylynne Pitz

On the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Elaine Dyles was shopping Downtown with her mother. She heard the news on the bus ride home to Oakland, where she lived with her parents and attended Schenley High School. Riders were buzzing about the news but unsure if it was true.

Ms. Dyles' mother, a nurse at Children's Hospital, was stunned by television news reports that confirmed Dr. King's death. "She was very shook up,'' recalled Ms. Dyles, now a senior fraud recovery specialist at Mellon Bank's Client Service Center. "She started calling all her sisters. I remember she cried the day of the funeral."

Ms. Dyles' parents insisted she remember all the significant moments in the civil rights movement because they wanted her "to know what we have been through as a people and the sacrifices people had made."

When she turned 18, registering to vote was all important.

"Party doesn't matter, but you've got to vote," Ms. Dyles said. "People have gone through too much," she said, adding that she often asks young people who attend Macedonia Baptist Church with her if they are registered to vote.

Ms. Dyles sees the fruit of Dr. King's struggles in Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. African Americans, she said, are not supporting him simply because they identify with a black candidate but because "they believe he can make change."

-- Marylynne Pitz

John Edwin Hicks was serving with the U.S. Army in Vietnam when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis.

"My father would send me the Post-Gazette. I had a subscription," said the 65-year-old retired draftsman, who lives on Ledlie Street in the Hill District and works at a service station at 2166 Bedford Ave.

Mr. Hicks' late father, John Verious Hicks, ran Hick's Superette, which was at 2154 Centre Ave. The store stayed in business after the unrest.

Before the riots, Mr. Hicks said, the Hill District "was just like the South Side is right now. It was a complete community. You could get anything you wanted. It's really disappointing that in all this time, it hasn't come back."

"Before I went into the service, on Centre Avenue, where my father had his old store, there were clothing stores, shoe stores, a bakery, barber shops, record stores, restaurants, anything you wanted was right there. We had two movie theaters, the Roosevelt and the New Granada."

The damage done to businesses 40 years ago, he said, has deterred other merchants from locating in the Hill.

"I just don't think people consider this a viable business area after all the burning and rioting and looting. They just didn't want to come back."

Crawford Square, a community built in the Lower Hill, Mr. Hicks said, is "an improvement but you need more than just houses to make a community. You also need the businesses. They need the businesses to provide jobs. When the old Centre Avenue was in its heyday, it was easy to find jobs."

Mr. Hicks, 65, is encouraged that Ebenezer Baptist Church built Ebenezer Tower for the neighborhood's senior citizens and that Carnegie Library is building a new branch on the site of a former gas station.

"It's a start," he said.

-- Marylynne Pitz

"I was on my way to an NAACP meeting at Central Baptist Church when I heard the news," Robert Lavelle recalled of the day Dr. King was shot. "I couldn't believe it. That weekend was horrible. People forgot who they were. I tried to keep people calm, but they went crazy."

The Hill District businessman and community leader, dapper and cheery with the robust handshake of a man a generation younger than his 92, was talking in the office of his real estate firm and Dwelling House Savings and Loan, at the corner of Centre and Herron avenues.

In 1968, he had just taken out a mortgage on his home to remodel the offices, so the disturbances that followed Dr. King's assassination hit home. "People were talking about bombing me. Calls came on the phone, threatening me: 'You're going to be bombed.' "

His response was that he lived and worked in the Hill, as his son and grandchildren still do. "We're Hill District." To counter the resentment that was spreading from white-owned businesses to successful blacks on that explosive 1968 weekend, he says he pointed out that "black power is fine, but green power is important, too."

"That Saturday night, I was doing income taxes here -- I did that, too, to make a living. Then I went home about 9 p.m., saying, 'Lord, it's only property.' I locked the door and I slept."

The next morning, he went as usual to teach Sunday school. A friend came in to tell him, "Hey, Bob, your building's still standing!"

"Praise God!," he said.

Supposedly the first black-owned real estate firm in the Hill, Robert Lavelle Real Estate was started in 1951 at 2046 Webster Ave., in a print shop at the corner of Erin. In 1956, it moved into a former record shop beside a drugstore on a different corner of Centre and Herron, across the street from where it is now.

A year later, Mr. Lavelle expanded into banking, taking over the White Building and Loan, renaming it Dwelling House. "Black people couldn't get mortgages in red-lined areas," he said of the practice, so-called because lenders would draw red line around a neighborhood and refuse to lend money to people in it. Black-owned firms also were blocked from listing properties for sale on the widely distributed Multi-List -- another famous episode in the many civil rights battles of that era.

The 1968 riots helped establish his S&L because, in the aftermath, people sent money to help -- $5,000, $10,000. "No one would cash those checks. So we set up an organization to handle contributions."

-- Chris Rawson

Pittsburgh attorney and civil rights stalwart Wendell Freeland, 83, was at home when he learned of Dr. King's assassination.

"Ironically, I had a white law clerk who suggested to me, 'You guys, this is an opportunity for you to get together, there may be some trouble,' " Mr. Freeland recalled.

The next night, there was a meeting called at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the Hill District. Mr. Freeland, who is very fair skinned and could pass for a white man, was hassled a bit by some of the black people outside the church who did not realize he was black.

During the meeting, he and the late K. Leroy Irvis, who was a member of the Legislature and a Hill District resident, talked to Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond Shafer.

"We told him we could feel the tension in the community and we urged him to act by closing all the liquor stores and all the bars," Mr. Freeland recalled. The governor said he would not do that unless Pittsburgh Mayor Joseph Barr asked him -- something Mr. Freeland doubted would happen because Barr was a Democrat and Shafer was a Republican.

After the meeting, Mr. Freeland went to a liquor store on Centre Avenue just off Dinwiddie Street. It was around 8:30 p.m.

"There were three guys working there; two white, one black and they were all holding their brooms looking scared to death. I said, 'Do you guys wanna close up?' They said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'Well, I just talked to the governor, close up.'

"It was funny because I had no more authority then than I have today," Mr. Freeland said. "But I had talked to the governor. I just didn't tell them what he said. "

Mr. Freeland, who provided legal representation for folks arrested during the riots, recalls a group of people heading to the jail following a meeting at Ebenezer.

"You could actually see the tension rising as if it's a fog," he said. "The cops were out and all the cops were white."

Except one -- Harvey Adams, who was a police sergeant at the time. Mr. Adams, who later went on to become president of the Pittsburgh NAACP, could see the tension, too.

"He came out and called everybody to attention," said Mr. Freeland. "And the white cops had to fall into formation and so there was no confrontation."

-- Monica Haynes

Alma Speed Fox, now 85, doesn't recall the exact moment she learned of Dr. King's death. But she does remember the Hill District, where the NAACP office is located, being ablaze.

"People started setting fires and [there was] mayhem, complete unhappiness," recalls Mrs. Fox, who at the time was executive director of the local NAACP branch. "[They were] bent on the destruction of anything and everything black people had felt prevented progress for us and ultimately led to the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

The NAACP and some of the city's other civil rights groups planned a peaceful march to Point Park for the Sunday following Dr. King's death -- Palm Sunday. Mrs. Fox had the responsibility of obtaining the proper permits and notifying proper authorities. The march was scheduled for a time after most churches were done with their services. As Mrs. Fox and her husband, Gerald, headed to the starting point for the march at Centre Avenue and Crawford Street -- now called Freedom Corner -- she heard on her car radio that the march had been canceled.

"I said, 'How could it be called off?' I had the permit in my pocket." The only person who could have called it off was NAACP president and prominent Pittsburgh attorney Byrd Brown, and she knew he had not.

When Mrs. Fox and her husband arrived at Freedom Corner, they saw that the police had formed a line across Centre Avenue along Crawford Street.

"They were in their riot gear, with their helmets and their great big clubs," Mrs. Fox said. Their job was to keep the marchers from moving past Freedom Corner into Downtown. "People were hollering and screaming and you turned your head and looked back and the Hill was on fire," Mrs. Fox said.

During the verbal exchange Mrs. Fox looked down and noticed the wide stance of a police officer in front of her.

"I scooted right under there and got to the other side," she recalled. The crowd, encouraged by Mrs. Fox, surged forward and the police pushed back. "By that time the police had picked me up, one had each limb and threw me in the paddy wagon," she said. After some more angry words and negotiations between Mr. Brown and Public Safety Director David Craig, the march was permitted.

"Well, ... we walked to Downtown Pittsburgh, we walked past Kaufmann's, not one window was broken, not one thing was done that was disorderly .... It was a peaceful demonstration and we gave honor to Dr. King."

-- Monica Haynes

The 66-year-old third generation head of the West Funeral Home on Wylie Avenue wasn't on the Hill in 1968. But her grandparents certainly were.

The funeral home was founded by her grandfather, Thomas L. West, in 1932, when he was 49, after retiring from the post office. It began on Centre Avenue "above Soho." By 1968, it was at 2216 Centre Ave., in the heart of the main Hill business district -- now a dilapidated wooden building whose dormer windows you can see from the current brick West Funeral Home at 2215 Wylie Ave.

The founder's son, Raymond L. West, worked with him. But Karen's parents, Thomas L. West Jr., and wife, Thelma, also a funeral director, started a funeral home instead in Arnold, Westmoreland County. That's where Karen grew up, often visiting her grandparents in their house on Duff Street in the Hill. In 1968, she was away at nursing training in Kansas City.

She remembers that her grandfather started work every day at 8 a.m., then went home in the mid-afternoon for an early dinner, returning to work in the evening. On those turbulent 1968 evenings, he stood on Centre Avenue in front of his business. "You're not going to burn me out, are you?" he asked the rioters. "We're not going to touch you," Karen says they told him.

But 1968 was a heavy year for the West family. Thomas L. West died that June, age 75. Raymond West's wife died a month later. And Karen's grandmother had died in 1967.

"He was known as the 'Welfare Undertaker,' " she recalls. "He did what nobody else would do." After his death, the firm continued to prosper, drawing on the good will the founder had created. It moved into its new premises in 1970, leaving behind the site of 1968, but not the memories.

-- Chris Rawson