 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 Wikipedia article, NBC stories and video, Youtube Video
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
... 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.”...
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.
...
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.”
....
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.)
...
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.”
...
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.
....
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.
...
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....
[At Howard University Rally]
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.
...
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.)