AARON WIENER: 50 Years After DC Burned, the Injustices That Caused the Riots Are as Urgent as Ever
For a moment, the
peace seemed to hold. It was the evening of April 4, 1968, and
Martin Luther King Jr. had just been killed by a gunman in
Memphis. An angry crowd had gathered at 14th and U streets NW, the nexus
of African American commerce and culture in Washington, DC. The demonstrators
were making a simple request of local shopowners: Shut down to pay your
respects. The owners readily complied. The crowd moved on.
King was declared dead
at 8:05 p.m. Eastern time. At 9:25 p.m., the first window
shattered. It belonged to a Peoples Drug Store—part of a large DC chain—which
had just closed its doors in accordance with the crowd’s demands. From there,
the chaos metastasized. A 15-year-old boy broke into the Republic Theatre and
emerged with a bag of popcorn. A Safeway supermarket up the street fell to
looters, and then an appliance store. By midnight there were fires, first on 14th
Street, and then in other black neighborhoods: 7th Street NW, H Street NE,
and communities east of the Anacostia River. Violent clashes, fire
bombings, and widespread property destruction rocked the city. Eventually, the
Army and National Guard were called in and strict curfews were imposed. On April
6, order was partially restored, but by then, the damage was vast. When
the dust finally settled, the toll stood at 13 dead, 1,201 injured, 7,640
arrested, 5,248 tear gas grenades launched, and more than $27 million in
damage, or around $200 million in today’s dollars.
At the height of the
bedlam, Gen. Ralph E. Haines Jr., the Army’s vice chief of staff, reported,
“Most of 14th Street is gone.” Historian J. Samuel Walker takes that bleak
assessment as the title of his new
book, which explores the question that policymakers around the country
were asking after the 1968 riots that rocked DC, Baltimore, Kansas City,
and Chicago, and those the year before in Detroit,
Newark and
other major metropolitan areas: Why did African American
residents visit such destruction upon their cities?
But 50 years later,
with racial inequality and police violence still rampant, the converse question
might be more relevant: Why haven’t people similarly risen up
in recent decades? After all, Walker says
in an interview, “the conditions in most cities are still there.”.. read more:
