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.)

Back to the top