From Wilmington, Delaware 1968 to Twin Cities, Minnesota 2026—what can we learn?

The number of people who know that the Black community of Wilmington, Delaware was occupied by the National Guard for nine months after the 1968 assassination of MLK is minuscule.  That is not an accident. The Military/Historian/Media Erasure business is more robust than we realize.  It’s so effective that most of us have no idea how many things we don’t know. 

One of us, Say Burgin, is a historian who studies the movements of the 1960’s.  Frank Joyce is a movement Elder who was personally involved in the opposition to the Wilmington occupation in 1968.  We are thinking about Wilmington because of the news from Minneapolis. 

Here’s another relevant erasure from public memory.  The current brutal mass deportation is the third such program in the last 100 years, not the first.  Mexican Repatriation in the 1930’s brutally deported at least one-million people to Mexico.  Under the name “Operation Wetback,” the same thing happened again in 1954. 

Manufactured Amnesia has prevented any reporting on this.  But Donald Trump is very aware of the precedent.  In a convoluted way, he referenced it in his address to Congress on March 4, 2025. 

I have sent Congress a detailed funding request laying out exactly how we will eliminate these threats to protect our homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than current record holder, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders.  Americans expect Congress to send me this funding without delay so I can sign it into law.

Did Congress send the funding?  Did they ever.  ICE is best funded so-called law enforcement agency ever. 

The 1954 deportations were particularly egregious because many of those deported had been actively recruited to work in the U.S. during the labor shortages of WWII. 

Why does the Wilmington occupation matter now? 

Wilmington, Delaware and ICE in Minnesota are connected in two ways.  Extended occupation of parts of U.S. cities by heavily armed forces for dubious reasons is one.  The blackout of the Wilmington occupation and previous mass deportations by historians and media is another. 

Like the ICE/Border Patrol/National Guard/Palintir occupations currently underway in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, the Wilmington Occupation encountered resistance.  It also involved a civilian fatality. 

As a report issued by People Against Racism (PAR) and the National Committee Against Repression in Wilmington explained:

Sound familiar?  Yes, but only if you are aware of it.  Sad to say mainstream historians routinely contribute to the fragmented and ignorant awareness of our national past.

The 1968-69 occupation of Black Wilmington began during what historian Peter Levy calls the Holy Week Uprising. In the days after Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, cities around the country rose up in grief. As in other cities large and small, Black people in Wilmington had experienced destructive “slum clearing” programs that un-housed many, rising joblessness, and police brutality. 

A few days after the assassination, young people left a rally in memory of King and took their despair to the streets. Reports of looting and sniping followed. Delaware Governor Charles Terry called up the Delaware Air National Guard and Delaware Army National Guard.

Thirteen hundred Guardsmen roamed the streets, guarded public buildings, and escorted Wilmington police. Within days they had enabled hundreds of arrests, but Governor Terry would not demobilize them. Though the looting caused very little damage and the occupation quashed anything with a whiff of dissent. 

Terry insisted he would keep them there “until people are no longer frightened and afraid,” by whom he clearly meant white Wilmingtonians. Facing a reelection campaign that year, Terry leveraged white people’s fear of urban rebellions into a political stunt that, he likely hoped, would win him re-election. He would not back down from his occupation. He declared that roughly 50 troops would remain in Wilmington, riding nightly with Delaware State Troopers (who were authorized to arrest people). 

Just as with the Twins Cities today, there were few checks on the armed personnel roaming around Wilmington. A child informed a journalist that, “They [Guardsmen] point their guns at you and call you black motherf***r.” Another resident told Jet magazine, “I’ve seen them making insulting sexual remarks at Black women so many times, I can’t recall them all.” Journalists themselves reported being threatened, disrespected, or having their cameras and film destroyed. At one point, police showed up at a house where young Black people were having a party. Activists said the cops had no warrant, but searched the home, arrested those present, and at police headquarters forced the girls “to strip in front of male officers.”

Community groups, including Wilmington’s NAACP branch and the Delaware Black Alliance, mobilized to demand justice for Douglas Henry and the end of the occupation. By May, the city’s mayor called on the governor to remove the troops, but instead Governor Terry called in the Delaware State Police, basically expanding the occupation. Various activist groups in the city banded together under the banner of Operation Free Streets. Frank took part in building a national mobilization against the occupation, with a focus on helping to organize white communities. (Say played no part in the history but wrote about it later.) 

We generally agree with Hegel’s observation that the only thing we learn from the past is that we don’t learn from the past. 

But that doesn’t render the past irrelevant.  It’s not necessarily about learning from history, as that’s commonly meant. Hegel is right that we keep repeating war and other horrific and self-defeating activities. 

That said, it’s about understanding that there is history.  It’s about presenting history as itself a form of resistance.  It’s about educating about systems so as to better determine whether they can be fixed or need to be replaced. 

If the transmission of your car fails once, that’s one thing. If you know it’s failed several times previously, that’s another.  That’s why Carfax is a valuable service. 

Just as the mass movement that opposed the war on Viet Nam was unique in U.S. history, so too is the current resistance to mass deportation.  You might think that would make it interesting to historians, journalists, and media pundits, but it doesn’t.  Their loyalties and priorities lie elsewhere.

“Can we just go back to regular police brutality, please?”

This plaintive and poignant question, posed by Keri Ottesen on Threads, went viral across social media platforms.  (It was also highlighted by Dr. Allison Wiltz on Medium.) It sharply defines the questions we face.

Will we use the current moment to contemplate deep systemic change?  Can we recognize the recurrence of violent enforcement of entrenched inequities?  Or will we squander our time trying desperately to revert to the perpetual teeter-totter struggle that sustains the entrenched gender, race and class hierarchies that were institutionalized by 1776? 

Say Burgin is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies Steering Committee Member at Dickinson College. She is the author of Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit (NYU Press, 2024)

 Frank Joyce is a lifelong Detroit based activist and writer and member of the National Council of Elders (NCOE). He is coeditor with Karin Aguilar-San Juan of The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Anti-War Movement.