In 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago’s West Side to protest against discriminatory housing practices.

The neighborhood went into an uproar following his assassination in 1968, resulting in numerous riots and looting.

A new “Chicago Stories” documentary called “When the West Side Burned” outlines the destruction and how the neighborhood has spent the last 50-plus years trying to recover.

The 1968 riots are some of the most notable because they directly followed the assassination of King, but the West Side previously endured hard times. Several residents were forced to live in the slums and deal with slumlords.

“He (King) settled on the West Side because at that time, the West Side was the most, I would say, revolutionary type group in the city, challenging systems,” said Benneth “Benny” Lee, founder and CEO of the National Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated (NAEFI). “You had the West Side Organization, the WSO, and then you had the Vice Lords protesting and demonstrating for better jobs and opportunities.”

Lee was the youngest chief of the Vice Lords during the late 1960s. History may remember them as a gang, but they started as an organization trying to better the community. When King settled into North Lawndale, he developed a relationship with the Vice Lords to strategize and organize on the West Side.

Though Lee was in his early teens during the riots, he still remembers the feeling of the community, his people, and the racial tension in the atmosphere. Despite the destruction and city’s uproar, members of the community made attempts to keep residents protected.

“The Vice Lords started the very first safe passage program,” Lee said. “They didn’t call it that, but they would come over there because they knew what we were dealing with in that era, and they would help us get through the community safe and get back home safe.”

Rage and grief ran rampant throughout the streets. The Black community was devastated and felt an extreme loss, and people wanted to make their frustrations known.

“People had started rioting and looting, and, you know, attacking, attacking White people in the community just out of anger and rebellion to the fact that Dr. King had been assassinated,” said John Preston, community representative of the Westside Justice Center.

Preston was around 13 years old at the time and had a paper route in the area. He continued doing his route after the news broke about King, and he recalls feeling a great sense of loss.

Over the next several days Preston worked his route despite the city going through tremendous turmoil — so much destruction that Mayor Richard J. Daley called in the National Guard. They set up encampments through the city and kept West Side residents contained to their neighborhood. Preston, however, was allowed some freedom due to this occupation at the time. The guards did not perceive him as a threat.

“One of the biggest things that I read was the fact that Richard J. Daley called in the National Guards, and he put out a shoot-to-kill order,” Preston said. “So that had me concerned, as far as being a threat.”

It was reported that police officers unlawfully shot and killed nine people during the riots, adding to the violence. The following week showed the aftermath of the wreckage. Stores residents normally shopped at were destroyed, forcing them to travel farther out into the city to buy their essentials.

“I remember going to a meeting the Vice Lords held,” Lee said. “They were explaining to the community that we had some people in our community that didn’t understand the significance of what they were doing. And now, when we look at it, those stores that we used to shop from and we depended on, now they’ve been dismantled. And now we are under strain.”

In many ways the West Side has yet to fully recover. Preston recalls the “White Flight” era and how several former business owners did not return to the neighborhood. Black businesses grew in their place; however, it still did not help the community prosper.

“Even though there was a growth there, there were other levels of racism that those businesses had to encounter,” Preston said. “A lot of distributors wouldn’t sell to them, or if they did, they sold to them at much higher prices, which meant those businesses had to raise their prices, which meant that they didn’t have the support of the community, because the community was saying, ‘They’re too high over here, so I’ll go shop over here’ or out of the community.”

The devastation caused more than physical damage and inflicted wounds that weren’t always visible.

“You have to look at the impact these conditions have on people’s psychology,” Lee said. “When you have a group of people that’s being oppressed by an oppressor, and the oppressed try all kinds of means of fighting back, and they find that their means are ineffective, even on the City Hall level, the legal system level, the economic level, then the oppressed start taking on the same tactics as the oppressor, and they become violent because the oppressor taught them how to be.”

“When the West Side Burned” will first air on WTTW at 8 p.m. Friday.