VIDEO | Youngstown ablaze in April 1968 violence

April 5, 2008 at 4:49p.m.

Rev. Lonnie Simon and Sheriff Wellington

YOUNGSTOWN — Hillman Street looked like a war zone.

Angry blacks threw Molotov cocktails at police, set cars and porches on fire, hurled bricks and rocks through windows and aimed a few projectiles at firefighters. Two patrolmen were shot and the 24-year-old suspect took a bullet in the hip.

The terrifying scene from 40 years ago is firmly implanted in Mahoning County Sheriff Randall A. Wellington’s mind. He was a 34-year-old patrol sergeant with the Youngstown Police Department and smack in the middle of the riots that began late afternoon on Monday, April 8, 1968, four days after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Memphis motel.

The violence, confined mostly to the South Side, continued for several days, quelled only by Ohio National Guardsmen brought in to help local police restore order.

Read more in Sunday’s Vindicator and at vindy.com