The Breaking Point

As dusk settled over Washington on April 5, 1968, awful black clouds merged into the darkness, granting for the first time that day a fragile semblance of serenity to the nation’s capital. But even nightfall could not mask a riot-torn city still in flames: broad swatches of the sky remained eerily luminous, and the drifting smoke below obscured, at times, the marble dome of the United States Capitol.

In the early afternoon hours that Friday, man-made clouds spread above Washington’s skyline, casting dark, terrifying shadows over much of the city. Evidence of a full-scale riot was in the air: stinging traces of tear gas wafted through downtown and beyond, and the squeal of sirens from fire engines and police cars joined the blare of automobile horns in a macabre, cacophonous symphony.

Fear, inflated beyond rational dimensions by rumor, spread as quickly as the flames. Entire government agencies, private office buildings, and department stores emptied soon after lunchtime, abruptly spilling thousands of panicky commuters onto Washington streets. Most of them shared one impulse: to get out of the city.

Had news spread that a bomb was about to be dropped on the nation’s capital, the scenes could have been no worse. Many frenzied drivers, if they were lucky enough to have a choice, ignored traffic lights. Some sped the wrong way down one-way streets. Others circled areas willy-nilly, blindly hoping to find a single unclogged artery out of Washington. Later, the sorry state of the city’s streets would come to be known as “gridlock.” It was, by any reckoning, Washington’s worst traffic jam since the public transit strike of 1955.

In an astonishingly brief span Friday afternoon, broad strips of Washington’s sky turned gray. The reason, in large part, was 14th Street: an eight-block stretch of it was on fire. Up and down the commercial corridor, clouds of thick black smoke billowed from burning buildings, thinning only on their journey skyward. The first fire on 14th Street broke out shortly after noon in the Safeway Supermarket just below U Street, but others followed so rapidly — twenty to 30 of them an hour — that city firefighters were unable to keep up. And in some areas, the streets were so thick with people that the fire trucks and ambulances could not pass.

As crews of firefighters struggled with the blazes along 14th Street, Charles Macklin’s Furniture Store, near the corner of 7th and O streets, N.W, was being set on fire. Its two buildings, more than 80 years old, had been the site of some looting the night before, but soon they would send twin columns of dense smoke into the skies of downtown Washington.

Four blocks to the south of the store, near Mount Vernon Square, marauding mobs took over the streets. District of Columbia police barricaded the intersection of 7th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, N.W, with squad cars to seal out northbound traffic and keep mobs from moving into the heart of the downtown mercantile district.

But the blockade had the unintended effect of turning the area above it into a vast area of looting. At the Cavalier Men’s Shop, entire racks of clothing were rolled out on the sidewalk and methodically emptied. A music store nearby yielded a grand piano, which two men pushed down an alley. As gangs of looters moved from store to store, the police, huddled in clusters of three or four, simply watched. They had little choice.

By late Friday afternoon, Washington fully resembled a war zone — whole sections of the city looked as if they had been bombed. Along one block of H Street, N.E., for example, fires collapsed everything but the three-story façades fronting the sidewalk, making its row of retail stores mimic the back-lot set of a Hollywood disaster movie. On the steps of the Capitol, troops from the 3d Infantry installed tripod-mounted machine guns, the first such show of military force since Pearl Harbor. Another company from the 3d Infantry surrounded the White House, where intense floodlights scanned the upper floors of nearby buildings in search of potential snipers.

The incredible exodus continued, with the southbound lanes of the bridges across the Potomac River still clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic. West of Rock Creek Park, in some of the tall apartment buildings off Connecticut Avenue, residents took cocktails to their rooftops to swap “war stories” of the day and gaze upon a smoky, smoldering Washington. More than 200 fires flickered in the distance, some as far away as Anacostia.

Washington’s long, hot summer already had begun.

 

On March 31, 1968, the same day President Lyndon Johnson told the nation he would not seek re-election, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Washington to plan his Poor People’s Campaign, a nonviolent mass occupation of the nation’s capital scheduled to start April 22. That Sunday, the nation’s most respected civil rights leader addressed 4,000 persons at the National Cathedral.

“We are not coming to Washington to engage in any histrionic action, nor are we coming to tear up Washington,” he said. “I don’t like to predict violence, but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will not only be as bad, but worse, than last summer.”

Federal troops had moved into Detroit and Newark the year before to quell summertime riots, but Washington had escaped serious violence. Many con- sidered the nation’s capital riot-proof — there had been no full-scale racial disturbances for nearly 50 years — owing to its special status as the seat of government and the trickle-down of federal largess. And the District of Columbia had a sprinkling of blacks in leadership positions, including its mayor, Walter E. Washington, and majorities on both the city council and school board.

But the city had serious, simmering racial problems. While one in four federal employees were black (some 75,000 in all), substantial numbers of black Washingtonians earned wages at or below the poverty level. Many blacks could not secure credit with the city’s large department stores or other major merchants — for some, simply cashing a government payroll check became a humiliating experience —so they often were forced to turn to smaller stores and finance companies that preyed upon the ignorance of their customers to extract exorbitant interest rates. In February 1968, for example, representatives of Greenbelt Consumer Services discovered one neighborhood store charging 300 percent interest (hidden, of course, in an impenetrable mass of fine print). One snaking line throughout the District separated the city racially, for the most part, and blacks had lost a series of struggles to build public housing projects outside ghetto neighborhoods.

Even with a black mayor, the District government remained under the thumb of the congressional committees charged with supervising it. The police department, in particular, was perceived as kowtowing to powerful politicians on Capitol Hill, many of them southerners with little interest in the problems of Washington’s black citizens. In 1966, when the District itself was two-thirds black, its police force remained four-fifths white. The city’s police chief, John B. Layton, at times seemed insensitive to the concerns of blacks: When the department in 1967 assembled a list of banned trigger words, Layton inexplicably decided not to include “boy.”

In one of his early acts as mayor, Walter Washington appointed Patrick V. Murphy, a former police chief of Syracuse, New York, to serve as the District’s Director of Public Safety — sort of an umbrella official over the police, fire, and civil defense departments. The appointment was viewed as a back-door means of bringing some progressivism to the city’s police department, and Murphy appeared to fit the bill. He put the controversial trigger-word list under review, and maintained that the key to avoiding racial disturbances was in the improvement of community relations.

Murphy’s unorthodox views did not always sit well on Capitol Hill. He said publicly that recent court decisions expanding defendants’ rights had made police work no more difficult, and added that for a long time some police had been “tramping” on the rights of citizens.

Murphy stepped up police department recruitment efforts to bring more blacks into the force. In late March, appearing before a meeting sponsored by seven Capitol Hill community groups, Murphy said the police force, understaffed by 250 officers, would be up to full strength by summer. “Frankly,” he said, “l am completely confident that we are going to be able to prevent any serious disorder in the city this spring and summer.”

 

Washington’s rioting began shortly after 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, when a nineteen-word bulletin spread over the United Press International wire with the news that Dr. King had been shot outside his Memphis hotel. By the next morning, additional details were revealed: King had been standing alone on the balcony of his motel room, apparently the victim of a single shot from a sniper’s 30.06 Remington rifle; two white men had been taken into custody and released; four others were sought.

But the first news reports on Thursday evening suggested that King’s wound might be superficiai. As white Washington listened to the radio or watched television for more news, a crowd of blacks gathered at the intersection of 14th and U streets, N.W. The area had long been a major commercial center for the neighborhood, as well as a transfer hub for the city’s bus lines, but that night it became much more than a congested crossroads. The Washington headquarters of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was located on the northwest corner of the intersection, and Stokely Carmichael’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was a half block west on U Street. For the large number of blacks wondering what to do, 14th and U became the place to find out.

At 8:19 p.m., the bulletin no one wanted to hear —news that King was dead — moved across the wires. Soon President Johnson was on national television for the second time in a week, his voice palpably tinged with fear of what might come.

“America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King,” Johnson said. “l ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by nonviolence.”

During the next several hours, the intersection of 14th and U streets was transformed to an all-out battle zone. On Tuesday night, police officers responding to an urgent call from the Peoples Drug Store there were met with a shower of bottles and rocks, but the confrontation produced no injuries. The angry crowd of teenagers and young adults slowly dispersed after police left the scene.

But on Thursday evening, news of King’s murder electrified the milling mob, infusing it with a hostile, vengeful mood.

“There is a dividing line — a thin line — that keeps lots of people from breaking a window or, once a store window is broken, from taking what has been left exposed inside,” Public Safety Director Murphy later told a reporter. “Once that line is crossed, usually law-abiding people join in, and everything breaks out of control.”

That “thin line” was crossed just before 9:30 on Thursday night, with the shattering of glass at the Peoples Drug Store. As the crowd moved up and down U Street, fists, bottles, and trash cans were used to break store windows. Teenagers took up a “Beep, beep-black power!” chant. Those at the front edges of the mob, led by activist Stokely Carmichael, entered stores and theaters and demanded of proprietors that they close in tribute to Dr. King. At the Lincoln Theater, where Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was playing, moviegoers were ordered to leave.

At police headquarters, the first trouble calls did not come in for nearly another hour, when gangs of looters smashed the windows at Sam’s Pawnbroker’s and the Rhodes Five and Ten, a block north of the drug store on 14th Street.

“They’re looting! They’re looting!” a police officer reported. “They’re carrying out TVs and everything.”

A nervous dispatcher asked for more details, and then another voice came over the police radio: “Our orders are not to send anyone up there.”

The pitch of his voice rising, the police officer radioed back: “Now they’re going into a five-and-ten cent store.”

The immediate reply from headquarters: “Sergeant, our orders are not to send anyone up there.”

Another hour passed, in fact, before police were given direct orders to arrest rioters for any violations of the law.

In that hour, from 10:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., all hell broke loose along 14th Street as random acts of violence turned into wholesale looting. One by one, store windows were smashed — the most popular weapon seemed to be umbrellas — and the contents methodically carted away. Liquor bottles from the display window of one shop became the projectiles for smashing glass at the next.

An off-again, on-again drizzle throughout most of the evening had not visibly slowed the action, and word quickly passed through the mobs that certain stores, with windows now broken, had become fair game.

Liquor and hardware stores were typical targets, but few enterprises along 14th Street were left untouched. Those arriving on the scene late often found mer- chandise lying on the streets; in front of the London Custom Shop on U Street, clothes littered the pavement, some still on hangers.

Police were just then showing up in force at 14th and U, led by a busload from the city’s Civil Disturbance Unit. Walking in a wedge-shaped formation, 40 of them cleared out and sealed off the troublesome intersection. They were joined by more carloads of police officers, but most of the looters simply moved up 14th Street to another area dotted with clothing and specialty stores.

Shortly before midnight, the intermittent drizzle turned for a while into a heavy rainstorm, which quieted the rioting; as soon as the rain ended, though, looting accelerated again. Only as more police arrived, carrying nightsticks and tear gas, were some of the large mobs broken up into smaller clusters. Hit-and run looting became the real problem: Teenagers darted through dimly lit alleys, turning corners to smash store windows and make off with merchandise before police caught up with them. The headlamps of roving police cruisers silhouetted the shadowy figures of looters racing through the stripped-out innards of stores all along 14th Street.

At half past midnight, the city’s firefighters got their first calls, from the neighborhood at 14th and Fairmont streets, N.W., less than a mile up U Street. The first blaze broke out at the Central Market, but in a matter of minutes another fire swept through the Pleasant Hill Market on the opposite corner. A hostile mob threw rocks, bottles, cans, and other objects at the firefighters, and police trying to protect them used more than 100 tear gas canisters to disperse the rioters.

For three more hours, police engaged in a kind of guerrilla warfare with rioters; the only effective weapon against them seemed to be tear gas. By three o’clock Friday morning, police could find no rioters left on the streets, but much of 14th Street was a wasteland: 200 commercial establishments had smashed windows, and all but 50 of them had been looted; seven stores had been set on fire. More than 200 rioters had been arrested, but they represented only a tiny fraction of those pillaging a twenty-block swath of 14th Street.

So far, the destruction in Washington neatly fit a pattern identified by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the Kerner Commission, appointed in 1967 by President Johnson to study the nationwide epidemic of urban violence. The commission had analyzed 24 disorders, concluding that riots almost always began in areas with a “relatively high concentration of pedestrian and automobile traffic” (intersections like 14th and U) and that major violence almost always occurred after dark.

The Kerner report was on the mind of Public Safety Director Murphy, who at three o’clock in the morning met at the Pentagon with officers of the Army Operations Center to figure out if and when troops should be deployed. The group decided to meet again at 2:00 p.m. Friday, several hours before a renewal of rioting was likely. Murphy sent members of the District’s Civil Disturbance Unit home at 5:30 a.m. with orders to report back for duty at five in the afternoon.

As it turned out, however, rioters in the nation’s capital did not follow the pattern outlined by the Kerner Commission.

 

A strong southward breeze cleared the sky above Washington on Friday, and at noon the National Cathedral held a memorial service for Dr. King. As those in attendance, including Mayor Washington and President Johnson, prayed, substantial sections of the city were going up in smoke. After the service ended, it was possible to see from the cathedral grounds huge carpets of smoke floating above the riot corridors. Dark clouds drifted with the wind, obscuring the dome of the Capitol.

In less than an hour, the “thin line” — the invisible point at which crowds become mobs — again was crossed, and any semblance of order along the main riot corridors melted away. Because additional rounds of rioting were not expected until nightfall, only a handful of extra police officers were on duty in the troubled areas.

By lunchtime, thousands of the city’s black high school students streamed into the streets — some to loot, some to watch others loot. Teenagers heaved bricks and bottles at automobiles and buses that tried to pass through congested intersections; some white motorists stopped for traffic lights suddenly found gangs of jeering youths rocking their cars from side to side.

The whole of 14th Street, from the incendiary intersection at U Street all the way up to Park Road, was as crowded as it had been the night before. Two major fires, set nine blocks apart shortly after noon, sent plumes of black smoke into the sky, beckoning thousands of idlers and curiosity-seekers. Many of them soon became rioters.

Stores with broken plate-glass windows stood as invitations for looting, and the windows of others were shattered, domino-like, as gangs nroved up and down the streets. Even establishments with protective iron grates over their front doors and windows did not last long.

The moment a store was rendered defenseless, looters — men, women, and children — swarmed inside, soon emerging with armloads of merchandise. Supermarkets and other stores with shopping carts became particularly attractive targets for looters, simply because more stuff could be hauled away. And once a place was emptied, more or less, the flames would not be far behind.

So it continued, for hours into Friday afternoon. As fire engines screamed to the sites of the biggest blazes, their sirens swelled the crowds and increased the likelihood of violence. Through most of the afternoon, police were needed most desperately to protect the firefighters, and they rode along wearing riot helmets on many of the trucks.

On some blocks, police officers worked feverishly to evacuate looters from stores threatened by fires from adjacent buildings. But they fought a losing battle. As soon as fire trucks and patrol cars left an area — too many fires were started to  quickly to put them all out — the crowds returned for unimpeded looting.

And the combat zone no longer was confined to 14th Street: Riots raged simultaneously along 7th Street, N.W., along H Street, N.E., in Anacostia, and in other scattered sections of Washington. Rioters even invaded the city’s central shopping district, forcing the Hecht Company and Woodward & Lothrop stores, three blocks apart on F Street, to close.

As a gang of youths broke into Bruce Hunt’s, a men’s clothing store near the corner of 14th and F streets, scores of people looked on, including a large crowd of commuters and office workers in front of the Brentano’s bookstore and reporters from their office windows in the National Press Buiiding. The Rich’s and Hahn’s shoe stores were completely cleaned out, as was a branch of D.J. Kaufman’s at 14th and I streets. Later in the day, a hit-and-run arsonist torched the clothing store, gutting it and a restaurant next door.

A particularly brazen band of looters went to work within a stone’s throw of the White House, breaking into the display windows of the Lewis and Thos. Saltz men’s clothing store on G Street between 14th and 15th.

For at least two hours, it was painfully clear that the crowds, not the police, con- trolled the streets. Squadrons of patrol cars set up blockades at key intersections, but the strategy merely channeled rioters from one area to another; it didn’t stop them. The tear gas worked effectively, but the District police had never before used it as a riot-control measure.

Traffic tie-ups throughout much of central Washington got so bad that fire engines were forced, in many cases, to inch along like everyone else. Radio stations downplayed the seriousness of the situation (“Motorists are advised to avoid 14th Street north of Massachusetts Avenue”), but the most terrifying evidence of what was happening hovered above the city’s meager skyline. Hundreds of thousands of panic-stricken Washingtonians reached for their telephones, knocking out some entire exchanges and creating twenty-minute delays for dial
tones in others.

The use of federal troops to quell the riot seemed inevitable, but an incredible snarl of red tape delayed their dispatch into Washington. Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher, attending the 2:00 p.m. Pentagon meeting with Public Safety Director Murphy and military officials, insisted on touring the riot-stricken areas before recommending such a last-resort move to President Johnson. It took 45 minutes for Christopher personally to deliver the necessary paperwork to the White House, and then he, Murphy, and General Ralph E. Haines, Jr., the army’s assistant chief of staff, set out for 14th Street.

The situation there was grim, with entire blocks of burning buildings. The three surveyed the scene on 7th Street. It was the same there. General Haines wanted to inform the Pentagon of his decision, but the three concluded the car’s two-way police radio was a dangerous method of communicating such sensitive orders.

After a frantic journey from gas station to gas station along 7th Street, they finally found a pay telephone that yielded a dial tone. But the deputy attorney general wanted to review firsthand the situation on H Street, N.E., which police now considered the worst, before calling President Johnson. After a twenty-block crawl through traffic and another near-futile search for a working pay telephone, Christopher got through to the White House. Four minutes later, at 4:02 p.m., Johnson signed the proclamation and executive order authorizing the military to restore law and order in the nation’s capital.

At the Pentagon, “Operation Cabin Guard” was put into effect. It marked the first federal occupation of Washington since General Douglas A. MacArthur booted out a ragtag army of “bonus marchers” in 1932.

 

By midnight Friday the worst was over. Some 6,600 troops patrolled the streets of Washington, detaining looters for arrest and enforcing a dusk-to-dawn curfew. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, another 5,000 soldiers arrived at the nation’s capital, a massive display of force that eventually would smother the city’s impulse to riot.

“Operation Cabin Guard” was developed in the aftermath of the coast-to-coast riots during the summer of 1967; its primary components were huge numbers of troops and liberal use of a chemical irritant known as “CS,” the military equivalent of tear gas. The plan allocated troops to specific police precincts within the District to ensure that the two forces worked hand in hand.

Yet the “Cabin Guard” blueprint had its weaknesses. When the first companies of soldiers converged on the twelve-block riot zone of H Street, N.E., they assembled in the shoulder-to-shoulder wedges they had practiced in riot-control training exercises. As the awesome formation marched down the street, small bands of rioters simply darted around the fringes.

Eventually, however, the troops effectively sealed off the three major riot corridors, and clusters of soldiers were stationed at major intersections. Rioters could not elude them, and many crowds resisting orders to disperse suddenly found tear gas canisters in their midst. The soldiers had no authority to make arrests, but detained suspected looters at the points of sheathed bayonets until police officers arrived. As order gradually was established, firefighting crews could methodically combat the blazes that continued to rage through entire city blocks.

In other areas of Washington, where danger remained that sporadic rioting and looting might flare up, troops were on call to zero in with a show of force at the first sign of trouble. The strategy seemed to stave off renewed outbreaks of violence in Anacostia and elsewhere.

At midnight, the city was choked with tear gas and fires flickered here and there, but an uncertain peace settled in. Mayor Washington toured the riot areas with Cyrus Vance, whom President Johnson had appointed earlier in the day to coordinate the army, the National Guard, and the District police. At 1:20 a.m., the pair appeared before television cameras for a news conference. Mayor Washington pronounced the city “quite calm,” but noted the sporadic looting in some fire-damaged stores. “The situation appears to be quieting down,” Vance said, “and, as of the moment, to be in hand.”

 

In the hours and days following the assassination of Dr. King, riots spread throughout the ghettos of more than 120 American cities. But for reasons no one has yet been able to explain adequately, the nation’s capital was the scene of the greatest destruction.

The total cost of the riot is estimated to have exceeded $27 million, including over $13 million alone in damage to buildings. More than 900 businesses were damaged or destroyed, and many of them would never reopen. Along 14th Street from Pennsylvania Avenue to Meridian Place, some 275 businesses were affected. Large numbers of businesses also were damaged along or around 7th Street, N.W. (334), and H Street, N.E. (103).

Nearly 8,000 men, women, and children were arrested for various riot-related offenses. Many of them were rushed through proceedings at the D.C. Court of General Sessions, which operated 24 hours a day beginning at 10:00 a.m. Friday. Judges sat in twelve-hour shifts until midnight Monday, by which time almost all of the cases had been processed.

One study found that 4,900 Washingtonians, most of them black, lost jobs because of the riot.

The victims included two youths who died in fire-bombed stores. As workers probed the charred rubble of Morton’s Department Store at 653 H Street, N.E., they discovered the remains of a fourteen- to seventeen-year-old boy whose body was designated as “John Doe, I” at the D.C. Morgue and never identified. A Molotov cocktail powerful enough to blast the entire roof off the store had killed him late Friday afternoon. The body joined “John Doe, E,” an unidentified young man found dead in the burned-out loading platform of the G.C. Murphy store at 3128 14th Street, N.W.

As the first weekend passed, Washington returned to a guarded state of normalcy. On Tuesday came an anomaly in the extreme: Not a single robbery was reported in the District of Columbia. The following day, more than 32,000 fans turned out for the baseball season’s opening game, which the Senators lost, 2-0, to the Minnesota Twins. On Saturday, the federal troops began leaving Washington and by Tuesday none remained.

But even after the last soldiers were gone, evidence of the disturbance remained: the burned-out shells of buildings, the boarded-up stores that made 14th Street resemble a plywood canyon, the leveled landscapes where rows of merchants once did business. It all happened in two days — a historical snapshot most Washingtonians, black and white, will never forget.