ANXIOUS ANNIVERSARY

The first anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. could have been a day of hope and affirmation. Instead, to millions of black and white Americans last week, it meant a renewal of anxiety. Little, after all, has been done since April 4, 1968, to extirpate racism or to clothe with reality King's dream of social justice. Even so, when brief flurries of violence roiled observances of King's death, they compared in no way to the hideous rioting that swept 168 U.S. communities last year.

Along Chicago's West Side, gangs of black teenagers surged out of schoolyards on the anniversary eve to attack cars, loot stores and hurl bricks at policemen. It looked like the prelude to a repetition of last April's anarchy. But Mayor Richard Daley moved swiftly, and, at his behest, Governor Richard Ogilvie had 5,000 National Guardsmen in the Chicago area by midafternoon. By nightfall, as Jeeps loaded with armed guardsmen crisscrossed the West Side, the city resembled a ghost town. Altogether, 90 persons were hurt, most of them only slightly, and 249 arrested.

Panther Plot. Nor was New York City spared. Fire bombers damaged several suburban Negro churches. Earlier, New York police seized 16 Black Panther party members and sought five on indictments charging they plotted to plant explosives inside crowded department stores on Good Friday. One of the jailed Panthers was Robert S. Collier, who has already served 21 months in a federal prison for conspiring to blow up the Statue of Liberty in 1965.

At the site of King's murder, Memphis, flecks of violence ended with a 7 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew. Tear gas and smoke bombs thrown by young blacks almost panicked a crowd of about 3,000 waiting outside city hall. As a wind whipped acrid gas through the ranks of demonstrators, youths began smashing store windows and looting. But there were cheers when Senator Edward Kennedy, making a surprise appearance at the rally, eulogized King and his own two murdered brothers, dedicating his public life to the principle "that we should not hate but love one another."

At Nashville, 300 militant mourners marched up to the walls of Tennessee's state penitentiary to chant We Shall Overcome just out of earshot of King's assassin, James Earl Ray, who is in solitary confinement inside a maximum-security cellblock.*

Little Comfort. Mrs. Coretta King, the widow of Ray's victim, shunned public ceremonies after placing a cross of red and white flowers on her husband's crypt in Atlanta. A personal note of sympathy from President Nixon was delivered by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Robert Finch, who stopped off in Atlanta for nearly an hour en route to Key Biscayne for a conference on domestic ills with the President. But little comfort for King's followers emerged from the meeting. With inflation and the need to slash government spending overshadowing other problems in Nixon's mind, the prospect of any marked advances in the fight against poverty by the second anniversary of King's death is bitterly remote.

* Ray has hired Memphis Attorney Richard J. Ryan to seek to overturn the 99-year sentence Ray accepted last month in return for a guilty plea. Judge W. Preston Battle, 60, the tough jurist who sentenced Ray, was found dead of a heart attack last week. Judge Arthur Faquin, appointed to take charge of Ray's case, must now rule whether a letter found among Battle's files constitutes a valid petition by Ray for a new trial.

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