The Mother’s Day Disturbance of May 11, 1969, also called the Mother’s Day Riot, is viewed by many as the turning point in Tacoma, Washington’s civil rights struggle.  While Tacoma in the 1960s did not experience the violence that enflamed many northern cities, the Mother’s Day disturbance in the Hilltop community, the black ghetto of Tacoma, bore the seeds of similar frustration—a black population concentrated by residential discrimination in a deteriorating inner city neighborhood, the lack of economic opportunity and political representation, and the gulf between the promise of equal rights and the daily reality of black life. Continue reading Revisit: MOTHER’S DAY DISTURBANCE, 1969