Scores of National Guard troops are expected to march through the bustling streets of Chicago, Illinois in coming days.
Their deployment to the US' third-largest city was long foretold.
US President Donald Trump mentioned the plan frequently in recent months — they would be deployed to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers pursuing illegal immigrants, despite Governor JB Pritzker's protests.
On Saturday, local time, he made good on the vow, authorising the deployment of 300 troops to Chicago.
They will be joining dozens of armed federal agents who have already been patrolling the streets of tourist and shopping areas.
The deployment is part of a broader escalation of Mr Trump's federal law enforcement in Democrat-run cities across the country, with Portland, Oregon; Washington, DC; and Los Angeles, California among the cities to have fallen within the president's sights.
"This is not making anybody safer — it's a show of intimidation, instilling fear in our communities and hurting our businesses," Mr Pritzker said in a statement.
While the National Guard has been deployed to Chicago several times in the city's history, for many residents the wounds of the military's previous activity still feel fresh.
City mourns Martin Luther King Jr
For the uninitiated, Chicago might not seem the obvious place for one of the most aggressive uprisings to break out following King's death.
The Civil Rights Movement was born in, and largely focused in, the South — far from the shores of Lake Michigan.
King, too, spent most of his activist career in the South, focused on dismantling Jim Crow, and most of his famous efforts, from the Montgomery bus boycotts to the Mississippi Freedom Riders, took place there.
Still, he had a particularly strong bond to the Windy City.
When he brought the Civil Rights Movement north in 1966, the city became his home base.
Living in the poverty-stricken, and predominantly Black neighbourhood of North Lawndale on Chicago's West Side, where rent was high, despite the squalid conditions, King led action calling for the end to "slums".
The campaign became known as the Chicago Freedom Movement.
King ultimately spent only a year campaigning in Chicago, but his influence was deeply felt in the northern city, where he encountered the most "hate-filled and hostile" mobs of his activism career.
"Chicago was hot and heavy ... It was interesting, it was exciting. You didn't want to go to sleep at night because you might think you going to miss something," Illinois representative Danny Davis, who was a teacher in Chicago at the time, said in 2010.
"I mean, you liked walking up and down the street listening to Martin Luther King's voice blaring out of the record shops … It was a very exciting time. It was wonderful, magnificent.
"Dr King had reached a level of being, a level of prominence, we had so much hope placed in Dr King in terms of what he was and what he meant and what he would be."
So, when the civil rights leader was shot and killed on a spring evening in Memphis, Tennessee, tensions rumbled beneath the surface.
As Chicago's Black community mourned, Mayor Richard J Daley sent thousands of police officers downtown, bracing for an upheaval.
On the morning of Friday, April 5, the morning after King's assassination, a group of students left their high school and began marching.
They were soon joined by others as they made their way west.
Police intercepted and fired a warning shot.
Tensions boiled over, and by the afternoon, chaos had spilled into the streets of the West Side.
Rioters began breaking windows, looting stores and setting buildings on fire over a 28-block stretch.
"When you have a race of people that's under a lot of despair, and then you have a leader that's willing to speak up and speak for them, and then you lose him, you will have an adverse reaction," historian Blanche Suggs-Killingsworth, who was a young woman at the time, told the North Lawndale History Project in 2017.
By evening, smoke was rising over the West Side as several fires burned. The electricity had been cut, and Mr Daley had called in the National Guard.
The shoot to kill order
Some 7,000 National Guard members and 5,000 US Army troops had joined police and firefighters on the streets of Chicago by Saturday, April 6.
A curfew was in place, and the sale of alcohol and guns had been banned.
Police were originally ordered to use tear gas on looters and rioters rather than shooting, but the stakes had now changed.
Mr Daley ordered responding police and troops to "shoot to kill any arsonist, or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand, … to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city".
National Guard troops patrolled the deserted streets with rifles and tanks.
"They had a loudspeaker," Malcolm Smith recalled for AREA Chicago's oral history project in 2008.
"'You are ordered to get off the street. Six o'clock is curfew. If you are caught on the street after six o'clock you will be arrested or you will be shot on site. That's what the exact words were.
"I remember it so plainly, those words. It made me feel really scared. It made me feel helpless too."
Jamsetta Mixon told AREA Chicago, "… we knew that 'shoot to kill' was aimed at no-one but Black people".
"To me it was like a Hitler thing, a mass genocide, only instead of putting people in gas chambers the police could shoot them down in cold blood on the street," she said.
By the following Monday, the uprising on the West Side was quelled, but the damage lingered.
No official death toll was ever given for the uprising, but accounts have said between nine and 11 people — all Black — died. More than 3,000 were arrested, and 1,000 left homeless.
Six decades on from the riot that swept Chicago after King's death, the scars are still visible.
Those who knew the area before say West Side has never been the same.
Vacant lots and boarded-up buildings hint at the lingering effects of that weekend.
"They never redid the neighbourhood. It's still destitute," resident Diane Gardner told AREA Chicago.
"I remember waiting for help but help never came. To this day, help never came."
For many, the president's decision to deploy the National Guard to Chicago evokes the city's troubled past with altercations over civil rights and race issues.
"Back in the 60s, the city, parts of this city, particularly people of colour, were traumatised by the National Guard," early childhood worker Todd Jackson told Reuters.
"I mean, I know adults that still talk about it."
Helicopters, chemical agents
The Trump administration began an immigration crackdown in Chicago last month that has become increasingly violent and fuelled neighbourhood tensions.
An apartment building in the city's south was stormed by federal agents who rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters as families slept inside.
They went door to door, waking up residents and using zip ties to restrain them in an operation the Department of Homeland Security says resulted in 37 arrests.
Rodrick Johnson, a US citizen who was briefly detained, said agents broke through his door and placed him in zip ties.
"I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer," the 67-year-old told the Chicago Sun-Times.
"They never brought one."
Governor JB Pritzker has directed state agencies to investigate claims children were zip tied and separated from their parents.
Federal agents have also been accused of using chemicals on city streets during immigration operations, including near a school.
"ICE acted like an invading army in our neighbourhoods," said Democratic state representative Lilian Jiménez.
"Helicopters hovered above our homes, terrifying families and disturbing the peace of our community.
"These shameful and lawless actions are not only a violation of constitutional rights but of our most basic liberty: the right to live free from persecution and fear."
The Trump administration has defended the aggressive tactics by arguing the mission is dangerous, adding that National Guard troops are needed to protect federal officers and assets.
Deployment 'deepens trauma and mistrust'
The cities earmarked by Mr Trump for deployment of the military force — New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles — each have Black mayors, and demographics where minority groups make up the majority of residents.
Marc Morial, the president of civil rights organisation the National Urban League, accused Trump of playing the "worst game of racially divisive politics". The view that Trump's threats are rooted in racism are shared by other groups too, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
"Donald Trump is fixated on minority dense cities and is continuing his political bullying campaign to target them," NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement.
"What cities like Baltimore and Chicago need are resources and real investment, not troops in the streets."
The Trump administration argues the move is necessary to tackle a violent crime crisis.
But much like in Washington, DC, data shows crime rates are trending down in Chicago.
Civil rights groups and leaders have said the move is racially polarising.
"The president's threats to send federal troops to Chicago are a clear blatant attack on the Black community and the immigrant community," the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression said in a statement.
"That's what this is aimed at, repressing Black communities under the guise of fighting crime and repressing immigrant communities by implementing mass deportations and violating the right to due process of law."
As part of its sweeping budget cut efforts, the Trump administration terminated 365 grants for community violence intervention programs valued at $US811 million ($1.2 billion) in April.
Gun violence prevention programs that would have been directed at New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC and Baltimore, were slashed by more than half.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson suggested these funds, coupled with economic investments would do more to reduce crime in the city.
"The addiction on jails and incarceration in this country, we have moved past that," he said.
"It is racist, it is immoral, it is unholy, and it is not the way to drive violence down."
"We are calling on the Trump administration to release the $800 million for violence prevention funds that he stole back in April.
"We are calling for more resources to stop the endless flow of guns into our city, and we are calling for transformational investments into affordable housing and community safety."
Chicago draws up playbook
The president teased his plans for Chicago long before the official announcement was made.
In anticipation, Mr Pritzker and Mr Johnson made plans to "hold the line" against Mr Trump.
Mr Johnson signed an executive order on August 30, directing the city's police force not to cooperate with federal agents, and blocked them from wearing face coverings to hide their identities.
The state also plans to take the Trump administration to court.
"We absolutely will go into court," Mr Pritzker said, adding that he has not spoken with Mr Trump in order to legally shield himself.
"He wants to set into the fact pattern that the governor called him to ask for help. Why? Because he's going to end up in court," the governor said.
"He's going to end up in court, and that will be a fact that they will use in court — that the governor called to ask for help, and I'm sorry I'm not going to provide him with evidence to support his desire to have the court rule in his favour. I'm just not going to do that."
