This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of many of the most significant events of the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. Two years ago, we celebrated the March on Washington; last year we recognized the 1964 Civil Rights Act that ended Jim Crow apartheid in the South. This year, we have already seen commemorations of the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and summer’s end will see the fiftieth anniversary of the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles.

Of course, the country had seen rebellions in Rochester, New York; Philadelphia; and Trenton, New Jersey, to a name a few cities, in 1964, but up to that point, Watts was unprecedented in its scale, damage, deaths, and sheer ferocity in the summer of 1965. The uprising in South Central Los Angeles represented a stark conclusion to the nonviolent phase of the movement.

The acrid plumes of smoke that hung over the city of Baltimore are a stark reminder of the recent past of the 1960s. But the riots over the death of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray seen in Baltimore last week aren’t simply a replay of events that took place fifty years ago.