Authors: Eugene Robinson
Among those who came to the intersection of Fourteenth and U streets—the heart of what was left of the U Street business district, and the place where King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had its local headquarters—was a young activist named Stokely Carmichael. Born in Trinidad, Carmichael had attended nearby
Howard University and was a former national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. According to an account written later by editors and reporters of
The Washington Post
, Carmichael led a group of his student followers into Peoples Drug Store, an outlet of a local chain, and demanded that the white manager close the store immediately out of respect for King’s death. The manager, G. N. Simirtzakis, immediately complied, and the students moved on to tell the rest of the U Street area’s stores to close down.
Carmichael spent the rest of the evening shuttering all the area’s stores and trying to keep a lid on the crowd’s rising emotions—at one point noticing a young man who was brandishing a gun and wresting the weapon away from him. He was only partly successful, however. Grief and anger turned into widespread looting.
From the
Washington Post
account:
Youths with television sets, electrical appliances, clothing, shoes, and other items began streaming past Carmichael at 14th and U. Slipping away, he ducked into the doorway of the SCLC office, stood for a moment, and then dashed across 14th Street to get in a waiting Mustang and speed away. It was 10:40 P.M. Carmichael knew his actions were being watched closely by federal authorities. He has since said he was determined to give them no cause to arrest him. Clearly, his decision to close the stores was an important factor in collecting the crowd. But he and his aides made strenuous efforts to check the mob when it grew unruly. He took his exit at the precise point of no return—as the memorial street demonstration exploded into riot.
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Similar scenes were being played out in more than thirty cities nationwide and scores of smaller towns. The King assassination was too much to bear. It was not just a murder but a taking—the theft of our leader, our future, our reason for continuing to hope that America was finally ready to accept us as true Americans. The paroxysm of violence that followed was deliberately destructive: They take from us, we take from them.
In the end, of course, we took from ourselves. The self-destructive nature of the 1968 riots was evident to all, even as the mayhem was unfolding. Everyone could see what came of such explosions—the scars were still fresh from the riots in Watts in 1965, and Detroit and Newark in 1967. For most of the century, the term “race riot” had referred to rampages by white mobs—Atlanta in 1906, Washington in 1919, Tulsa in 1921. Now it was black America’s term to explode with inchoate, insensate, indiscriminate rage.
In Washington, the night of April 4 saw widespread looting in the blocks around Fourteenth and U. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Friday, April 5, that the fires began. Scores of buildings were set ablaze, not just in the U Street corridor but also in Columbia Heights, stretching up Fourteenth Street to the north, and along H Street Northeast, another historic black business district across town. Crowds estimated at up to twenty thousand clashed with police; firefighters had a hard time getting into the war zones and a harder time getting back out, in the end watching helplessly as the many individual columns of smoke merged into a funereal pall. The city’s black mayor-commissioner, Walter E. Washington, who exercised limited authority by leave of Congress, was helpless to end the anarchy; a curfew and a ban on the sale of firearms and alcohol
had little effect, as the rioters had already smashed their way into the gun stores and the liquor stores and taken what they wanted.
Federal officials were alarmed. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the deployment of more than thirteen thousand federal and National Guard troops in an attempt to restore order—the biggest armed federal occupation of an American city since the aftermath of the Civil War. Marines with machine guns were sent to guard the Capitol, while soldiers from the Third Infantry ringed the White House. The military presence succeeded in containing the violence to U Street, Columbia Heights, and H Street—Washington’s white neighborhoods and commercial districts were untouched, as was the city’s core of monuments and federal offices—but rioting in the affected areas continued until April 8. It petered out, finally, as white-hot anger cooled, supplies of looted alcohol were exhausted, and new targets became scarce.
Twelve people were killed in Washington—a remarkably small number, given the scale and duration of the riot—and 1,097 were injured. Six thousand people were arrested. Much more shocking than the human toll, however, was the physical devastation of the cityscape: More than 1,200 buildings were burned, including 900 stores. The historic African American commercial districts had been destroyed. Even amid the charred, still-smoking ruins, civic boosters pledged that U Street, H Street, and Columbia Heights would be rebuilt. In terms of physical and commercial infrastructure, they were right—although it took forty years for the phoenix to rise. But if they meant that those neighborhoods would someday be what they once had been, that they would be centers of black American prosperity, the optimists were dead wrong. The
neighborhoods burned in the riots were gone forever. They had been disintegrated.
* * *
Such nihilistic spasms of arson in urban black centers, beginning with Watts in 1965 and culminating with the riots of April 1968 in Washington, Baltimore, Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities from coast to coast—which the writer James Baldwin had predicted in 1963 in
The Fire Next Time—
had the effect of thinning out black communities that once had been dense and full of life. In the 1960s, for example, nearly 125,000 people lived in the neighborhoods for which Chicago’s Roosevelt Road—the focus of that city’s 1968 riot—served as the major commercial strip. By 1990, fewer than 50,000 remained.
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Nationwide, thousands of stores, apartment houses, and other buildings were burned to the ground; many others were damaged but left standing and unoccupied. Only a relatively small percentage of buildings in any neighborhood were actually destroyed or ruined. But the fires left rips in the fabric of the affected areas, and these voids were like sinkholes that drained away vitality and promise. Housing prices in riot-torn neighborhoods fell sharply; families sold out so they could spirit their children to safer surroundings, while longtime landlords decided that the risks and headaches just weren’t worth it. Into the vacuum came a new breed of slumlords, whose business model made no accommodation for frills such as maintenance or repairs. More town houses, storefronts, and apartments became abandoned, some finding new use as trick pads for prostitutes, shooting galleries for junkies, and temporary domiciles for homeless squatters. Often the
only way to deal with such a nuisance was to tear the building down—leaving yet another hole, yet another spirit-draining void.
In an important sense, however, the riots were more symptom than disease. They came amid a larger historical context—the relocation and eventual hollowing-out of the American industrial base. By the mid-1960s, the jobs that had sustained urban working-class black communities had already begun to pick up and move away.
Detroit is perhaps the most vivid example. When my father was growing up in nearby Ann Arbor, the Big Three automakers were the economic lifeblood of the region and an abundant source of steady, good-paying jobs for African Americans—an escalator, in effect, that led directly to the middle class. A union job at a Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler plant meant the ability to own a home, the security of a comfortable retirement, and, most important, the promise of a better life for the next generation. The factories of Dearborn, Flint, and Pontiac were full of black men who might not have made it past high school but whose children damn well would. The dream that had inspired the Great Migration—a job, a home, a better life for the children—was coming true. But it didn’t last.
Between 1948, when Detroit was enjoying an expansive postwar boom, and 1967, the year of the devastating Detroit riot, the city lost more than 130,000 manufacturing jobs.
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Most of these were in the auto industry, which was already well advanced in the process of abandoning its storied birthplace. Building and retooling old factories in crowded, expensive Detroit no longer made sense, given the alternatives; the automakers had begun shifting their operations to new, more versatile and efficient plants built on former cow pastures in the rural Midwest and
South. Even the legendary Detroit-area plants, the ones so big they were worlds unto themselves—Dodge Main, with its thirty thousand workers, or Ford’s gargantuan River Rouge complex, which employed ninety thousand at its height—had begun to shrink.
Similar transformations were taking place around the country. The steel mills left Pittsburgh, relieving the city of a noxious pall of smog but also taking away a reliable source of employment. The stockyards and slaughterhouses left Chicago, revealing a magnificent—but largely jobless—waterfront. (Washington was an exception; it didn’t have any heavy industry to lose, and its main employer, the federal government, was recession-proof.) Of course, this wasn’t just happening to black America; it was a wrenching adjustment for the whole nation, and the impact on working-class whites was profound. But blacks had been systematically kept at a disadvantage—they were generally the last hired, the first fired, and the least insulated against the cold new reality. Changes that were difficult for all working-class urban communities proved devastating for black America.
The combination of industrial transformation, devastation from the riots, and the advent of new options led many African Americans to move out of the inner cities. For years they had been streaming out of Washington to the northern and eastern reaches of the city and then beyond, establishing footholds in the suburbs. After the riots, the stream became a flood—especially to Prince George’s County, Maryland, which in those days was mostly white and semirural, a land of pickup trucks and good old boys.
This movement would not have been possible before the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited
“discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, and in other housing-related transactions, based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status (including children under the age of 18 living with parents or legal custodians, pregnant women, and people securing custody of children under the age of 18), and handicap (disability).”
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With that legislation, restrictive housing covenants banning blacks and other “undesirables” were invalidated—and black people, for the first time, had the right to live in neighborhoods like mine.
From today’s vantage point, it is hard to imagine how pervasive these covenants were or what a big role they played in keeping blacks (and often Jews) out of neighborhoods where they were not wanted. Researching a planned remodeling of my suburban house in 1997, I discovered that technically I wasn’t supposed to be living there—a longstanding covenant constrained property owners to sell only to whites. These restrictions are now patently illegal, of course, but once they were valid contractual agreements and enforceable by law. As far as I can tell, the whites-only covenant in my neighborhood has never been formally erased, although the Fair Housing Act made it not worth the paper it was written on.
It’s wrong to think of the 1968 riots as the One Definitive Moment when black America ceased to exist as a coherent entity or to serve as a useful concept. The fragmentation of America’s once-whole black communities—a process which, it is important to keep in mind, was greatly beneficial overall—had begun at least a decade earlier, and it took decades longer to progress to the point of being fully recognizable. But it is true that black America was different after the 1968 riots, physically and psychologically.
Earlier that year, the report issued by the Kerner Commission on the 1967 Detroit and Newark riots had ventured a famously pessimistic assessment: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
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In fact, those separate but unequal societies had existed for decades; perhaps the grandees of official Washington hadn’t noticed that the lunch counters they patronized all those years were segregated, or maybe all of them were out of town when the March on Washington took place in 1963. But the riots came at a moment when things were changing, when walls were being demolished. White America was opening doors that once had been closed to black citizens. What the riots accomplished was to give some African Americans—those who were best prepared—a powerful incentive to walk through those newly opened doors and participate fully in the larger society.
No one quite realized it at the time, but black America was being split.
Some moved out—to neighborhoods unscarred by the riots, to the suburbs, to new developments in what once was farmland—and moved up, taking advantage of new opportunities. They moved up the ladder at work, purchased homes and built equity, sent their children to college, demanded and earned most of their rightful share of America’s great bounty. They became the Mainstream majority.
Some didn’t make it. They saw the row houses and apartment buildings where they lived begin to sag from neglect; they hunkered down as big public housing projects, conceived and built as instruments of “progress” and uplift, became increasingly dysfunctional and dangerous. They sent their children to low-performing schools that had already been forsaken by the brightest students and the pushiest parents. They remained
while jobs left the neighborhood, as did capital, as did ambition, as did public order. They became the Abandoned.
* * *
The year 1967 saw the beginning of another form of divergence in black America. On June 12 of that year, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. In the second paragraph of his opinion, Warren set out the facts of the case: