D.C.
Riots of 1968
How Activist Stokely Carmichael and
Friends Accidently
Started 3 Days of Rioting that Burned 1000
Buildings and Left 12 People Dead,
mostly burned to death in their homes
"[R]ioting is not revolutionary but
reactionary
because it invites defeat. It involves an
emotional
catharsis,
but it must be followed by a sense of futility."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Also see Progressive Review
Editor
Sam Smith's Personal Story
of the riots at:http://prorev.com/mmfire.htm
FROM TEN BLOCKS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968 by Ben
W. Bilbert and the Staff of the Washington Post, 1968
CHAPTER I:Thursday Night: First Sparks of Anger
The intersection of 14th
and
U streets, N.W., was filling up with its customary nighttime crowd. It
was a balmy Washington spring evening, but tension was in the air. The
transistor radios many youths carried in their hands had announced at
7:16
P.M. that in Memphis. Tennessee, an assassin had shot the Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., director of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) and America’s most respected civil rights leader.
Homeward-bound black workers
were thronging the 14th and U intersection, changing buses or stopping
to shop in the drug and liquor stores, before moving on. Transients and
other newcomers to Washington’s “Harlem” often wound up here looking
for
action. This was a spot to pick up a woman, purchase narcotics, make a
deal. It was also the unofficial nerve center of active black
leadership
groups—the place to go with a grievance.
Dr. King’s SCLC Washington headquarters
was on the north-west corner in an old, high-ceilinged converted bank
building.
Both the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee and the> National Association for the
Advancement
of Colored People’ had offices not too far away.
Police considered 4his intersection
the most volatile in the city’s crowded Negro sections. Angry people
had
gathered here often in the past. Only two nights before, a crowd of
several
hundred youngsters and young adults had tossed bottles and stones at
white
policemen responding to a trouble call at the Peoples Drug Store outlet
next to the SCLC office. Stokely Carmichael, former national chairman
of
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had told that
crowd
to “go home.” Lieutenant Joseph Frye, a resourceful white
plainclothesman
who was on the scene, sensing that the presence of uniformed policemen
was provocative, had sent them away. He had stayed alone to listen to
the
complaints of the crowd. Eventually, it dispersed. A fireman, using a
hand
hose to put out a small fire lit with lighter fluid in a nearby tree,
was
told, prophetically, by one of the youths:“Don’t worry, motherfucker.
We’ll
just light it again.”
By 8:00 P.M. Ofl
Thursday,
April 4, prostitutes, pimps, and female impersonators were lining the
fronts
of buildings between T and U streets, and the cafes had their doors
open.
Youths in their teens and twenties loitered in small groups on the
corners,
with the sidewalk in front of the SCLC office drawing the largest
congregation.
At 8:19 P.M. came the news
bulletin everyone had feared. Martin Luther King, the
thirty-nine-year-old
Nobel Peace Prize winner and apostle of nonviolent protest against
poverty
and racial discrimination, had died fourteen minutes earlier. Memphis
police
flashed a bulletin for a white man seen darting out of a flophouse near
Dr. King’s motel.
Hollie 1. West, a reporter for The lVashington
Past, arrived at the 14th and U intersection just after word came that
Dr. King was dead. The crowd was unusually large, even for this
normally
busy place; the atmosphere, unusually tense.
Betty Wolden, a reporter for NBC News, who
appeared
to be the only white woman in the predominantly black crowd, said to
the
black newsman that the sudden quiet in the area just then struck her as
“ominous—like before a hurricane strikes.”
She told West she thought
she should leave the area. He agreed.
As Miss Wolden sought a
taxicab,
an elderly Negro woman said to her, “I hope no one picks you up.”
The news of Dr. King’s death spread rapidly along
the 14th Street shopping strip and its narrow tributary streets. As
minutes
passed and the gathering crowd in the intersection of 14th and U
swelled,
expressions of shock at the tragedy in Memphis began to turn to hot
words
of anger.
“They did the
wrong thing this time,” was one comment.
West went inside
the Peoples Drug Store, the third busiest in the prosperous area-wide
chain,
where a dozen persons were huddled around a transistor radio on the
camera
counter in the rear. They were listening to the muted voice of
President
Johnson speaking from the White Hottse: “America is shocked and
saddened
by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King. I ask every
citizen
to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by
nonviolence.”
On receiving the report of
the events in Memphis, the President had canceled a scheduled
appearance
at a Democratic Party fund-raising dinner and postponed a trip to
Honolulu,
where he was to confer on Vietnam. His concern was evident in the tone
of his words.
“1 know every American
of good will joins me in mourning the death of this outstanding leader
and in praying for peace and understanding throughout this land,” he
said.
“We can achieve
nothing by lawlessness and divisiveness among the American people,” he
went on. “Only by joining together and only by ~corking together can we
continue to move toward equality and fulfillment for 11 of our people.”
The President’s
cautious phrases seemed to anger his listeners around the crowded
counter.
“Hoiikie,” said
one.
“He’s a murderer
himself.”
“This will mean
one thousand Detroits.” (Note: Giant 1967 Riots)
Alive, Dr. King
had been unable to avoid the eruption of violence in Memphis, where a
protest
march of garbage workers on March 28 had ended in looting and
window-breaking
and the fatal shooting by police of a sixteen-year-old looting suspect.
A curfew had been imposed, and 4,000 National Guardsmen were summoned
to
restore order.
It was almost too much
to hope that violence could be avoided after his death. Waves of
disorder
were to spread that night and during the weekend through the Negro
sections
of more than 120 American cities. And damage was to be heaviest in
Washington.
At 14th and U that first
night,
the President’s statement was still coming over the radio in the back
of
the Peoples Drug Store when a group of about thirty youths burst inside.
“Martin Luther King is dead,”
they shouted. “Close the store!”
In the group was a tall, sum
twenty-six-year-old, with a startlingly handsome face—Stokely
Carmichael,
Trinidad-born, acknowledged revolutionary, and black activist, who had
put together a “Black United Front” of Washington Negro organizations
to
provide a sounding board for black leadership. He sought out the
manager.
“It’s closed; it’s closed,”
Carmichael excitedly told the white manager G. N. Simirtzakis. As soon
as he understood what was happening, Simirtzakis agreed.
Youths roaming store aisles
told customers, “It’s closed now, you can go,” and steered them to the
door. The fluorescent lights began to flicker off as Carmichael and his
group left.
On the sidewalk outside, they
joined more people, mostly L young men in their twenties, and the
growing
crowd rushed diagonally across the busy intersection to Carter’s liquor
store, which had been about to shut, anyway, because the usual
closing
hour was nearing. The crowd then began moving farther south on 14th
Street.
When Carmichael first heard
of the shooting of Dr. King he had gone at once to the SCLC
headquarters.
There, sitting between two desks, with one foot on each, he had started
making telephone calls to Memphis to find out what happened.
“Well,” he was heard to state
over the telephone, “if we must die, we better die fighting back.”
Older men and women stepped
inside the SCLC office to ask over and over again, “Is it true? Is it
true?”
Off the telephone, Carmichael muttered:
“Now that they’ve taken Dr.
King off, it’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit. We gotta get
together.”
He then went two blocks north to the 14th Street
storefront Washington office of SNCC. In an inner office, Carmichael
conferred
with Lester McKinnie, Washington head of SNCC. Sumner Stone,
former
ediior of the Washington AJro-American newspaper and one-time aide to
ousted
New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Eleven other men and four
women,
-mainly SNCC members, were in an outer room, where a radio —was tuned
to
Station XVOL, popular “soul” outlet in Washington
Bearded disk
jockey
Bob Terry, who usually works in an undershirt and sunglasses, tapping
his
feet and bobbing his head to the big beat and shouting, was talking
calmly
and quietly There was organ music in the background.
“This is no time to
hate,” Terry was saying. “Hate won’t get you anywhere.”
“And let me tell you
something, too, white man,” he continued. “Tomorrow, l)efore you get
back
in that car and go out to the suburban house, you better say something
nice to that _ black man on the job beside you. You’d better stop
hating,
too.”
McKinnie came out of
the inner office to tell the others that he and Carmichael and Stone
had
considered calling a black strike and asking stores to close in tribute
to Dr. King, but that he felt it might be better “if we took some time
to react to thisgreat tragedy.” . .
But at that moment,
Carmichael, wearing his familiar green fatigue jacket, burst out of
tIme
inner room, with Stone at his heels. Waving his hands, Carmichael
shouted:
“They took our leader
off, so, out of respect, we re gonna ask all these stores to close down
until Martin Luther King is laid to rest. If Kennedy had been killed,
they’d
have done it.”
And then demandling,
“So why not for Dr. King,” he bolted out the front door. All but
McKinnie
and Stone followed him By now, it was 8:45 P.M.
Heading south for the
intersection, the group stopped first at Eaton’s Barber Shop, where
Johnny
Jones, the only barber and a Negro, readily agree(l. “The black man has
just been pushed around too much,” he later remembered thinking.
Next was the YanKee
Restaurant, owned by I-low K. Chen Chen nodded his head in
acquiescence.
“Solid,” said Carmichael and left.
Like a Pied Piper, Carmichael
made his way toward the Peoples Drug Store at 14th and U, collecting a
crowd as he went.
“Stokely, you’re the one,”
a youth told him.
“Now that Dr. King’s dead,
we ain’t got 110 way but Stokely’s way,” another said.
Mostly young men fell in with
Carmichael. Many wore light jackets over flashy sports shirts or
turtlenecks
and slacks. Some had put on raincoats against the on-and-off-again
drizzle
that had begun. Others were in workclothes or blue-collar uniforms.
Although
it was dark, some did not remove their sunglasses. Many of the men wore
their hair in natural Afro style and had goateed beards. Dotted through
the growing crowd walking with Stokely were past and present students
of
nearby Howard University. Tension rose as the crowds were swelled by
more
and more teen-aged youths and adults under thirty.
A short while earlier, the
Reverend Walter Fauntroy, vice chairman of the Washington City Council
and an official of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
had come to the SCLC Poor People’s Campaign office immediately adjacent
to the drugstore in response to a call that an angry crowd was
gathering.
He found only a few persons
outside tile office when lie arrive(l and went upstairs to meet with
some
of the SCLC staff. Looking out a window, he spotted Carmichael and his
following, moving diagonally across the intersection from the
drugstore.
Fearing trouble, Fauntroy hurried downstairs and outside.
Carmichael and the crowd
around
him headed south on 14th Street for a time, crisscrossing the street,
stopping
at open stores, and asking them to close. (Berkeley Chaney, night
manager
of the Wings ‘N’ Things chicken carryout, remembered that the group was
polite when it asked him to close, about 9:10 P.M.)
Catching up with Cannichael
a block south of U Street and grabbing his arms, Fauntroy said,
“This is not the way to do
it, Stokely. Let’s not get anyone hurt. Let’s cool, it.”
Carmichal, a foot taller than Fauntroy, continued
to walk, rocking back and forth to free himself. “All We’re asking them
to do is close the stores,” Carmichael said. “They killed Dr. King.”
Convinced that
Carmichael
was finding a “useful channel of frustration,” Fauntroy returned to the
SCLC office, stopping to tell a plainclothesman in an unmarked car that
he thought everything was going to be all right. He advised against
bringing
many unifonued policemen into the area, fearing such action might be
provocative.
By now, it was 9:25 P.M.
When Fauntroy again reached
the second floor of the SCLC _ office, he heard glass breaking in the
Peoples
Drug Store window next door. It was the start.
Corners such as 14th
and U streets in Washington’s northwest Negro community exist in most
large-
and medium-sized cities in the nation. New Yorkers would recognize it
as
125th Street and Lenox Avenue; Chicagoans would call it 63rd Street and
Cottage Grove; San Franciscans, Fillmore and Ellis; Atlantans, Ashby
and
Hunter. In Cleveland, 55th and Hough or 105th and _ Euclid; in Memphis,
Third and McLeiuore; in Minneapolis, Plymouth Avenue and Broadway; in
Pittsburgh,
Center and DeVilliers.
The report of the
President’s
Commission on Civil Disorders says that such intersections, with a
‘relatively
high concentration of pedestrian and automobile trahlic,” are places
where
riots are likely to start.
The l4th and V Street
intersection is on the southern end of a twenty-block strip bordering a
congested and dleteriorated area.
Among the more than
300 businesses on the twenty-block stretch of 14th Street and some of
its
side streets are clothing specialty, five and (lime, hardware,
al)phiance,
pawn, dry cleaning and other shops that bring daytime crowds to the
street.
Some are branches of stores and national chains found in middle-class
Negro
and white neighborhoods; others are ghetto-oriented businesses selling
on credit at highs interest.
At night, this stretch
of 14th Street turns on in neon. There are movie houses, bars,
rock-and-roll
palaces, other night spots, -the rooming houses where the prostitutes
take
their clients, as Ten Blocks from the White House
well as the after-hours joints that open up after
everything else but the carryout stores close down.
The crowd with
Carmichael
had come back to 14th and U and turned east onto U Street, moving along
the north sidewalk and passing the Jumbo Nut Shop, where Katina Mandes,
a white woman an(1 a co-owner of the shop, was working that night. She
did not close when first asked. But, when the crowd passed her a second
time a few minutes later, she was told this time that she had five
minutes.
She closed the store and hurried home.
As the crowd passed
the Republic Theater, a block farther west on U Street, a stocky
fifteen-year-old
boy, wearing dungarees, a tan sweatshirt, and a sailor cap, suddenly
punched
his fist into one of the movie theater’s glass doors. The glass
shattered,
and a younger boy slipped through the door frame into the theater and
came
back with a large bag of popcorn. The fifteen-year-old stood by the
door,
rubbing his fist, which was not cut, and smiled broadly.
“Way to go, kid,”
somebody called to him.
But Carmichael
came up to the teenager and pulled him away from the front of the
theater.
“This is not the way,” he shouted, so that others could hear him. Some
SNCC members rushed over to the broken glass and told other youths in
the
crowd to stay out of the theater. The swirling crowd had grown large by
now, and, on its eastern fringes, farther down U Street, a few
twenty-yemolds
went into the Lincoln Theater and told the manager and the customers
that
it was closed. They shouted at the people sitting in the dark theater,
ordering them out onto the street. By now, it was 9:45 P.M.
Carmichael grew more
and more concerned about what was happening. He turned around and
headed
back to 14th Street. Most of the crowd followed him. Reaching 14th and
U, Carmichael turned north on 14th Street, walking along the sidewalk
on
the east side, across from the Peoples Drug Store.
After stopping
at the Zanzibar Restaurant and asking owner Moy Hon Toon to close (he
did),
the crowd crossed to the west side of 14th Street, still heading north.
The mob was so large now that it covered the entire block from U Street
north to V Street. Those at the rear, in front of the Peoples Drug
Store
began kicking in the rest of its broken plate-glass window. Some
knocked
over display cases before SNCC workers could get back to the store to
stop
them.
A middle-aged man walked
up to the shattered drugstore window and aiiued his foot at a piece of
the glass that remained in place. There were tears in his eyes, and he
was angry. He began shaming about the ~vliite man’s evil. He picked up
a city trash can off tile sidewalk and threw it through the drugstore
window.
Still screaming, he went across the street and threw a bottle from tile
street gutter through tile win(low of the National Liquor Store.
The mood of the entire
crowd grew uglier. “This is it baby,” someone said, “The shit is going
to hit tile fan now. . . . We oughta burn this place down right
now.
Let’s get some white motherfuckers. . . . Let’s kill them all.”
The cries became so
loud that Carmichael stopped tile crowd again and began arguing with a
young man who had been among those suggesting tllat they should act to
avenge Dr King’s deatil.
“You really ready to
go out and kill?” Carmichael asked . “How you gonna win? What you got?
They’ve got guns . . tanks. What you got? If you don't have your gun,
go
home. We’re not ready. Let’s wait until tomorrow. Just cool it. Go
home,
go home, go home.”
There were echoes of
his words in tile crowd, probably repeated by SNCC workers.
“We’re not ready,”
they said. “We’ll be back. This ain’t tile way.” Carmichael began
telling
the people to go home.
“Get off tile streets.
This is not the time, brothers,” lie shouted.
And Carmichael began
walking nortll on 14th Street fast, tile crowd still following him.
As they walked up the
steep 14th Street hill, some of the teenagers began chanting: “Beep,
beep,
black power. Beep, beep, black power.”
On a fringe of the
crowd,
a man ran into the street, went up to a D.C. Transit bus, and put his
fist
through the small window next to the driver. Others in the crowd ran
out
to grab him and pulled him away, as blood ran out of cuts in his hand.
From the SCLC office,
Fauntroy could hear and see the trouble growing on 14th Street. With
two
of his nine brothers, Billy and Raymond, he drove to radio station WOL
to broadcast an appeaj’ for order. He was speaking as a SCLC leader and
as vice chaignan of the City Council. Then he got a police escort and
rushed
to all four major television stations and made brief appearances on the
air, with the same plea for order. At each stop, there were tears in
his
eyes, sorrow in his voice.
Carmichael and the crowd
passed
the SNCC office on 14th Street and continued north. When they reached
the
corner of 14th and Belmont streets, five blocks north of 14th and U, a
heavy-set woman in her thirties, wearing a raincoat, leaned against the
window of the Belmont TV and Appliance Store and started bumping it
with
her broad backside. The window cracked and then fell in. The woman
stepped
away, smiling as the fifteen-year-old had smiled at the Republic
Theater.
A few young men in the vanguard of the crowd, mostly SNCC workers,
rushed
to the shattered window and stood in the way of anyone who might want
to
take the television sets that were left exposed, an arm’s reach inside.
Carmichael, hearing
the breaking of glass, ran over and grabbed a yout.1~ who was trying to
get past the SNCC workers an(t through the broken window. He took the
teenager
by the shoulder and shook him. Then, Carmichael produced a large, black
revolver.
“If you mean business,”
he told the boy, “you should have a gun. You’re not ready for the
‘thing.’
Go home. Go home.”
The mob had turned south
and was heading back toward 14th and U. Its size had shrunk and it
seemed
to be out of steam. As it passed the SNCC office, more people dropped
off,
some going inside SNCC, some appearing to start home. A light rain was
falling steadily now.
But Carmichael could
see that crowds were gathering again down the hill at 14th and U. He
continued
walking south, and some of the people around him followed. No uniformed
policemen could be seen on 14th Street yet, although there were
plainciothesmen
in the milling crowd.
Just as Carmichael
reached
14th and U, he heard what sounded like gunshots a block away. It was
10:24
P.M. At police headquarters, the sounds produced the first two trouble
calls from 14th Street—windows breaking at Sam’s Pawnbrokers and the
Rhodes
Five and Ten store, both a block south of U on 14th Street. This time,
youths in the crowd made it to the stores before SNCC workers could
intervene
and began pouring through the display windows to grab watches, jewelry,
radios, and television sets.
As Carmichael heard
the two loud sounds, he saw a man in his twenties iii the crowd
brandishing
a gun. Carmichael wrested it away from him, ending another argument
about
whether the crowd should act to avenge the assassination.
“Go home, go home, go home,” Carmichael
shouted. “None. of this,” he cried, waving the man’s gun in the air.
“None
of this, we’re not ready.”
“But we’ve got no
leader,”
a voice in the crowd called out. “We lost our leader. They killed him.”
Carmichael answered:
“You won’t get one like this. You’ll just get shot. Go home. go home.”
Down the street, two
SNCC workers, one a high-school youth who was wearing a
Carmichael-style,
green field jacket and had two binoculars around his neck, began
pulling
looters out of stores and display windows and telling them to “go
home.”
The pair soon became discouraged. As soon as they cleared one store,
rioters
hopped into another to grab what they could.
A girl in her twenties,
who had been in the SNCC office earlier, reached through one of the
store
windows. She came out with several transistor radios cradled in her
right
arm and a large cooking pot, which she rhythmically hit against her
left
hip.
“Got me something; got
me something,” she shouted to the thumping beat.
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.
By 11 P.M., windows
were breaking on all sides of the intersection. Display dummies from
the
Federated Five and Dime on I 14th Street were stripped and tossed on
the
sidewalk. Persons went by carrying suits on display hangers, cases of
liquor,
and expensive appliances. A man in a heavy jacket, work pants, and -z
work
shoes paused on the sidewalk to get a better grip on the portable
television
and three-piece portable stereo he was carrying.
“They got London, they
got London,” shouted excited teenagers, as they ran down the street.
Looters were coming
out of the London Custom Shop just -down U Street with shirts, slacks,
suits, and hats. Trails of clothes were left behind. (Later that night,
nineteen-year-old Carl McKinley Harris was arrested in front of London,
carrying seven new hats. Just three hours earlier, at his grandmother’s
-z house a few blocks away, he had seen the television bulletin about
Dr.
King’~,.shooting and he decided to go out to see “what would happen.”
He
was charged with attemptect burglary and released on $500 bail pending
trial.)
The evening had started
with a hostile, antiwhite tone. Now some of the hostility seemed to be
forgotten in the carnival ex- -citement produced by the looting.
The crowds continued
to grow, as more and more persons poured out of the tenements on either
side of the 14th Street strip to join the activity. They gathered along
the twenty-block area in clusters.
Looting on 14th Street
consisted mainly of hit and run attacks on display windows, the looters
hurrying off to elude the police, who began to appear in force. By
midnight,
the police had effectively sealed off and occupied the 14th and U area.
But farther north, where there was a concentration of larger clothing
and
specialty stores, more widespread looting occurred.
Six blocks above U
Street,
at the intersection with Clifton, youths stood in the middle of the
street
and tosse(l rocks an(l bottles at passing cars and busses. A teenager
threw
a bottle through the windshield of one of the first police cars on the
scene, hitting the driver on the shoulder.
As police strength
increased,
the officers began arresting any looters they could pull away from the
crowds. One of the first to be put in a paddy wagon was
thirty-one-year-old
Charles Her-juan, who was standing in front of the Belmont TV and
Appli.
ance store, where the plate glass had been broken ninety minutes
earlier
by the heavy-set woman in the raincoat. Herman, who lived nearby on
Belmont
Street, was carrying a brand-new portable phonograph. He was charged
with
burglary and jailed to await action of the U.S. Grand Jury.
Shortly after 11:30
pj~j~, the evening’s intermittent light rain suddenly erupted into a
heavy
downpour. For a time, the rain helped break up bands of looters along
the
strip, but it ended only a few minutes after it began.
Up the 14th Street hill,
a dozen blocks north of 14th and U, a crowd of abouClOO youths grew
quickly
to 300, and then 500. as the rain ended. Singly and in groups of 6 to
20,
they spread over a six-block area, between Girard Street and Park Road,
smashing windows and looting dozens of the clothing and specialty shops
there. The stores were in low structures built on what had been the
lawns
of six. and eight-story apartment buildings and old mansions, now
overcrowded
with large families. These buildings had been occupied by whites,
mostly
Irish and Italian Catholics, in the 1920’s, when the first commercial
incursions
of the lawns began. Just before World War II, Negroes began pushing
into
the area from the 7th Street and Georgia Avenue neighborhoods to the
east.
Only a handful of white families remained immediately east of 14th
Street.
The police were still
badly outnumbered on upper 14th Street. They rushed at the massed
croWds
of looters, flailing nightsticks to break them into small groups that
could
then be isolated and arrested or chased away.
A group of touring city
officials, including Mayor Washington, drove north on 14th Street from
U just before midnight and saw the shadows of looters darting in and
out
of darkened storefronts. Police cars raced by, heading for the more
serious
trouble farther north. As the official party proceeded up the hill,
looters
were seen coming out of hardware stores, clothing shops, milk and ice
cream
stores, and package liquor stores, with loaded arms.
“Look at that stuff,
will you,” the Mayor commented as the car passed two teen-aged girls
carrying
dozens of dresses, coats, and skirts.
At 14th and Kenyon,
the street was filled with frenzied blacks. An occasional rock or
bottle
sailed through the air. A policeman -z who stopped the car and
recognized
the Mayor advised, “You better get out of here.”
The official party,
which included Corporation Counsel Charles Duncan and Julian Dugas,
Director
of Licenses and Inspections, went on to the Thirteenth Precinct House
near
16th and V streets, where a temporary command post had been set up.
<more description of rioting and police
activity
that night deleted>
At dawn Friday, with
hundreds of policemen still lining the sidewalks, 14th Street was
quiet,
The rays of the rising sun glinted -on those store windows that still
contained
unbroken glass. White 7 foam, sprayed by street-cleaning crews, ran
(lOwfl
the steep hill, -carrying broken glass and debris along with it. Mayor
Washington had ordered the crews out early and in force. Failure to
clean
the streets, it had been learned from the 1967 riots, invited more
damage
the next day.
Eye-stinging tear gas
still liming in the air. Burglar alarms --continued to jangle in aim
unsettling
chorus. An early riser, viewing a ransacked clothing store for time
first
time, turned away, shaking his head.
“Oh, my God,” was his only comment.
On Friday
morning,
April 5, the Washington, D.C., police department was concerned about
what
black activist Stokely Carmichael might do.
Although the
city was tense, no looting or burning had occurred that morning, and
the
authorities had high hopes of keeping the lid on.
Police
intelligence
had learned that Carmichael would hold a news conference at the former
headquarters of the New School for Afro-American Thought, at 2208 14th
Street, N.W., which had been taken over by the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating
Committee. After that, he was expected to appear at an outdoor rally at
Howard University.
The police felt
they had cause to worry about Carmichael. On Thursday night, the tall,
handsome, avowed black revolutionist had led a group of youths and
young
adults along 14th Street, ordering merchants to close their stores in
Dr.
King’s memory. That night ended in looting and burning. Carmichael had
tried to stem the violence, but, when it became clear that he was going
to be unsuccessful, he had vanished into the night.
The volatile
Carmichael had been in and out of Washington for several years,
appearing
and disappearing. For well over a year, however, he had made Washington
his base, leaving only occasionally for such diverse places as Atlanta,
Nashville, New York City, Havana, and Hanoi.
In 1966, he
had excited Washingtonians’ interest when he declared that his group
would
fight for local self-government in the capital “in the ways the boys in
Vietnam are fighting for elections over there.” He warned that, in the
event of failure, “we’re going to burn down the city.”
Early in 1968,
he had called together most of the city’s Negro activists to form the
“Black
United Front” organization and had talked about the black community’s
“taking
over” such local institutions as the police department and the schools.
To many whites,
Carmichael was the personification of the “outside agitator” who moved
from place to place creating trouble. Many were convinced that a
cause-and-effect
relationship existed between what he said and what happened
subsequently
in some of the nation’s cities.
Carmichael and Dr. King had come to an ideological parting of the ways
in 1966, during the Meredith march in Mississippi, when Carmichael
coined
the “black power” slogan as a rallying cry for a new antiwhite
militancy
that abandoned nonviolence as a way of effecting social change. Dr.
King,
by contrast, never accepted the concept of black separatism and shunned
violence, but he fretted publicly that time was running out on
nonviolence
in America.
In spite of
their differences, they had remained in relatively close touch, and
appeared
to have had a personal relationship almost akin to that of two
brothers—including
a certain amount of sibling rivalry. In February, 1968, when a
photograph
of Dr. King posing with Carmichael was published by The Washington
Post,
there was annoyance in Dr. King’s camp that it had happened; but Dr.
King,
himself, just smiled.
“I don’t know
why he loves that little rascal so much,” a ranking aide to Dr. King
told
an associate.
That the
affection
was reciprocated was revealed by Carmichael at his Friday morning news
conference.
He described
Dr. King as “the one man of our race that this country’s older
generations,
the militants, the revolutionaries, and the masses of black people
would
still listen to. . . . He was the one man in our race who was trying to
teach our people to have love and compassion and mercy for what white
people
have done.”
It did not take
Carmichael long to warn the white man that lie faced retaliatory
action.
“When white America killed Dr. King last night, it declared war on
us,’ he said. “There will be no crying and there will be no funeral.
“The rebellions
that have been occurring around these cities and this country is just
light
stuff to what is about to happen. We have to retaliate for the deaths
of
our leaders. The execution for those deaths will not be in the
courtrooms.
They’re going to be in the streets of the United States of America.
“The kind of
man that killed Dr. King last night made it a whole lot easier for a
whole
lot of black people today,” Carmichael went on. “There no longer needs
to be intellectual discussion. Black people know that they have to get
guns. White America will live to cry since she killed Dr. King last
night.”
As he warmed
up at the SNCC press conference, Carmichael became even more dramatic.
Here are pertinent exchanges with the newsmen:
Q.
Mr. Carmichael, are you declaring war on white America?
A. White America
has declared war on black people. She did so when she stole the first
black
man from Africa. . . . And black people are going to have to find ways
to survive. The only way to survive is to get some guns. Because that’s
the only way white America keeps us in check, because she’s got the
guns.
Q. Stokely, wh~2t
do you see this ultimately leading to? A bloodbath in which nobody
wins?
A. First, my name
is Mr. Carmichael, and, secondly, black people will survive the bath.
Last
question.
Q. What
accomplishments
or objectives do you visualize from the encounter? What do you think
you
will accomplish?
A. The black man
can’t do nothing in this country. Then, we are going to stand up on our
feet and die like men. If that’s our only act of manhood, then
goddammit,
we’re going to die. We’re tired of living on our stomachs.
Q. One last
question:
Do you fear for your life?
A. The hell with
my life. You should fear for yours. I know I’m going to die. I know I’m
leaving.
At the news
conference,
Carmichael addressed himself primarily to “whitey.” Immediately
afterward,
he went to Howard University, where he was the featured speaker at an
outdoor
campus rally called by student militants at that predominantly black
Washington
institution.
The student-run rally competed for student attention with a
University-sponsored
memorial service, in Crampton Auditorium, which was much different in
tone
and content.
Relations
between
the University administration and the students had not been good. Only
two weeks before, students had demanded a greater voice in the
management
of the University and had won some concessions, after occupying the
institution’s
administration building for four days.
That morning,
hundreds of students and faculty members quietly filled the auditorium.
The Universitychoir sang Brahm’s “Requiem,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our
God,”
and the hymn “Precious Lord,” which Dr. King had requested shortly
before
he was shot in Memphis. There was a printed program. The men on the
platform
were mainly ministers, who appealed to God for strength and vision.
Speaking in
the cadences of a minister, University President James M. Nabrit, Jr.,
said: “A shadow has fallen upon the land . . . the result of senseless
violence, rampant racism . . . a blow to mankind and its hopes and
strivings
throughout the world. Howard University weeps for him. . . . His death
shall not have been in vain if from his blood shall arise one thousand
Martin Luther Kings. . . . He was a man, a Christian man, a man of
love,
a man of nonviolence, a black man.”
A much younger man, Ewart Brown, Jr., president of the Student
Assembly,
struck a note of warning in his brief declamation: “The act which took
the life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., serves as an
indictment
of white society. . . . It would be wise for white America to realize
that
she has erased a great portion of the buffer zone which has prevented
daily
conflict between white racists and the more aggressive elements of the
black society.”
The program
ended at 11:45 A.M., with the singing of “We Shall Overcome” and the
traditional
joining of hands. A young black hesitated a moment before taking the
hand
of the white newsman, but then took it.
As the audience
streamed out into the sunlight, the outdoor rally was already under
way.
A loudspeaker was set up on the steps of Frederick Douglass Hall, and a
young woman was speaking vehemently into the microphone. Perhaps 600 of
the 8,600 students enrolled at Howard were in the crowd.
If a black man
went through a store window, the speaker said, she would go behind him
with a first-aid kit, for, if he were shot, she would not want him
bleeding
on the doorstep of a white hospital.
“Martin Luther
King compromised his life away,” she said, “He had to avoid bloodshed
If
I’m nonviolent, I’ll die. If I’m violent, I’ll still die, but I’ll take
a honkie with me.
Speaker after
speaker took the microphone to suggest that the white man was bent on
exterminating
the black man in America. The birth control program was cited as an
attempt
to drive down the black population.
A young man
broke in breathlessly to take the microphone and shout that downtown
Washington
was burning and that the flames were reaching the white man’s part of
the
city. There was a burst of cheering.
At one point,
the American flag was lowered, and the red and black banner of Ujamma
was
raised on the campus quadrangle. (Ujamma is a campus-based,
black-nationalist
organization, which favors a separatist American black nation.) After a
brief ceremony, the American flag was restored at half-staff, in honor
of Dr. King.
At another
point,
six students, wearing black turtle-neck shirts, brought in a dummy that
was wrapped in white cloth, stained with blood. They were carrying the
dummy in the manner of pall bearers.
John Anderson,
the education reporter of The Washington Post who covered the events at
Howard, later commented: “The tenor of the speeches was vehemently
antiwhite.
I was standing there, very conspicuously white, and yet hardly anyone
as
much as glanced at me. I never had the sensation of being in danger.
The
hostility was directed at an abstraction that was white, and powerful,
and downtown; it was not toward a specific white man standing in the
crowd
in the middle of the Howard campus.
Stokely
Carmichael
emerged from the back of the crowd and warned of violence ahead in
Washington,
even as smoke could be seen rising above 14th Street, ten blocks to the
west.
“Stay off the streets, if you don’t have a gun,” Carmichael warned,
“because there’s going to be shooting.”
He made the
same statement several times, his voice growing louder and louder. He
drew
a pistol from his jacket and waved it over his head. He was duplicating
his actions of the night before, when he had repeatedly urged
individuals
to go home because they did not have guns and were “not ready for the
thing.”
After finishing his speech, Carmichael dropped from sight and was not
seen
in public again that day.
There appeared
to be a contradiction between the basic violence of his “black power”
rhetoric
at the press conference, where he predicted that retaliatory action
would
occur to avenge Dr. King, and the restraint he urged with respect to
the
use of weapons by blacks on Thursday night and again at the Friday
rally
at Howard. His most menacing remarks were so phrased that they could be
construed as forecasts, rather than calls to action. Nevertheless, the
contradiction remained.
Carmichael told
friends that lie was determined to do nothing to court arrest. Perhaps
lie was remembering that H. Rap Brown, who had succ~èeded him as
head of SNCC, faced trial in Maryland for incitement to arson and riot.
Speaking to a group of blacks in Cambridge, Maryland, Brown had
suggested
that his audience burn down a decrepit and already fire-damaged
elementary
school. Within four hours thereafter, the school was burned down.
There was one
close call for Carmichael. On Saturday, he and three friends were
apprehended
less than an hour after the curfew went into effect. As he was frisked,
he shouted to the police, “Get your hands off me. If you’re going to
arrest
me, arrest me, but. keep your hands off me.” was reported that he lost
a new suit when a dry cleaning store was looted.
Agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation later interviewed dozens of witnesses
to
the rioting to find out whether any connection existed between
Carmichael
and the disorders. An FBI source has stated that the Bureau has no
evidence
of the existence of any conspiracy in the nation or the city of
Washington
to cause the riots that occurred after Dr. King was killed. They felt
that
existing grievances—not a plot—were behind the disorders, and that the
death of Dr. King, rather than a revolutionary conspiracy, plainly was
the triggering incident. However, they carefully sifted everything that
was printed and broadcast about Carmichael, including their own
undercover
reports, to reconstruct as best they could his activities during the
riot.
Their undercover men did not have much success keeping track of him. He
was always suspicious of being followed and “made” (spotted) any
surveillance
almost immediately.
Although there
was no plot—and the FBI’s judgment on this point had not been
disputed—there
were some who saw the tragedy in Memphis as an opportunity to pursue
their
objectives. Among them were those who were committed to assaulting and
overthrowing the system they considered to be racist.
By the time
Carmichael held his Friday morning news conference—about 11 A.M.—there
were already unmistakable signs of unrest in the inner city, although
actual
rioting had not started. It is doubtful that Carmichael had any better
intelligence on that score than the police. Some rioters may have been
moved to act when they learned what Carmichael had said, but the
pattern
of riot activity does not suggest that this happened in very many
cases.
But the comments Carmichael made at his news conference did contribute
significantly to the uneasy atmosphere in the city, particularly among
conservative white persons who reacted with indignation to Carmichael’s
violent tone. There were immediate demands on Capitol Hill that
Carmichael
be arrested and charged with inciting to riot.
Soon after,
Attorney General Ramsey Clark stated, “If we find evidence that meets
the
standards of criminal justice that Stokely Carmichael has committed a
crime
against the federal government, he will be prosecuted with all of the
diligence
and all of the energies at our command.”
By late summer,
no indictment had been returned. (Note: Today the feds indict and
imprison
people on much lesser evidence.) In an interview held after the riots,
Carmichael would not discuss his activities during that troubled
period,
but he did acknowledge that he had accepted a telephone call from
Havana,
Cuba, on Friday. Columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson somehow
obtained
a transcript of the conversation, which Carmichael authenticated.
The call was
from Mike LaGuardia, a commentator for Radio Havana. Significant
portions
of the conversation follow:
LAGUARDIA:
Say, Stokely.
CARMICHAEL:
Si.
LAGUARDIA:
We would like to have a statement from you on Martin Luther King’s
assassination.
CARMICHAEL:
Right.
LAGUARDIA:
And what has been the reaction of the Afro-Americans in the face of
this
crime?
CARMICHAEL:
Right, a white American has Rap Brown in jail right now. An American
killed
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., last night. When they killed Dr. King,
they
made a. mistake, because Dr. King was the one man who was trying to ask
black people not to burn down the cities. Now that they have killed Dr.
King, there is no black man who will ask black people not to burn down
the cities. What it means is that we have gone full swing into the
revolution.
Last night, thirty-five cities had major incidents—where there was
burning
and shooting and killing over the death of Dr. King. It is clear more
of
this will continue. It is going to become more and more a
guerrilla—urban
guerrilla— warfare, because it is clear that we cannot win with the
police
in open rebellion. So, more people are now beginning to plan seriously
a major urban guerrilla warfare, where we can begin to retaliate not
only
for the death of Dr. King but where we can move seriously to... [the
next
few words could not be made out] serious revolutions with this country
to bring it to its knees. It is crystal clear to us that the United
States
of America must fall in order for humanity to live, and we are going to
give our lives to that cause.
He ended the
conversation by sending greetings to “our brothers and sisters in Cuba”
and to “Prime Minister Fidel.”
The Havana
telephone
conversation seemed to indicate that Carmichael’s desire to avoid
arrest
for inciting to riot was not the only factor prompting him to urge the
black community to avoid gunplay. The police, in Carmichael’s view, as
expressed to LaGuardia, would win in an open confrontation.
A campus leader
at Howard University suggested similarly that the real revolutionaries
on the campus regarded the outbreak of rioting in the central city as a
mere protest action, rather than a serious revolt. The student
expressed
the belief that most of the radical black students who listened to
Carmichael
on the college campus did not riot.
“The end of
it was evident—National Guard and tear gas, shootings and jail,” the
student
said.
Some Howard students, of course, did participate in the rioting, and
a few were arrested on looting charges.
The Howard
open-air
rally continued for a while after Carmichael left, but subsequent
speakers
were not able to hold the interest of the students. At the end, the
crowd
dissolved into small knots of individuals who engaged in animated
conversation
in the campus quadrangle area.
As Carmichael
vanished, about sixty high-school students on the fringes of the crowd,
who had not been very attentive to the speeches, departed. They walked
off the University campus and headed down Georgia Avenue, N,W., to 7th
Street, following in the wake of perhaps 200 other high-school students
who had been moving south down the same streets.
Along the way,
the mass of youths was spotted by police, who advised headquarters to
expect
serious trouble shortly in the 7th Street shopping area.
(The rest of the
book describes the full scale, city wide rioting that developed after
this,
burning 1000 buildings and killing 12 people, most of whom burned in
their
homes.)