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40 years since D.C burned
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A policeman climbs over a protective screen and through the shattered front of a liquor store on 14th Street in Washington on April 5, 1968. Violence broke out the day before in response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. – AP photos
WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Forty years ago tonight, Rick Lee and his mother stood guard inside the family’s flower shop on U Street, shielded from the rioting outside by a 12-gauge shotgun and a sign in the window marking the business as black-owned: “Soul Brother.”
Like Ben’s Chili Bowl a block away, Lee’s Florist weathered the violence sparked by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Today, said Lee, now the owner of Lee’s Florist, U Street is a destination for the bar crowd, a home to singles and not much of a daytime shopping destination.
But the corridor’s newfound diversity, he said, would please Dr. King.
“You see folks of all walks of life: white, black, brown, yellow,” he said. “What you see on U Street is a cosmopolitan city.”
Four decades after King’s assassination, most marks of the destruction along 14th and Seventh streets Northwest, Eighth and H streets Northeast, have been painted or paved over. But the scars endure.
“The biggest evidence right now are empty lots,” said Sam Smith, activist and journalist who was editing the Capitol East Gazette at the time. “Any place you see an empty lot, there was probably something there before the riots.”
King was shot at 6:01 p.m. while standing on the balcony of a Memphis, Tenn., motel. At 7:15 p.m. the leader of the civil rights movement was pronounced dead. Within 45 minutes, the nation’s capital was on fire.
“I knew there was trouble in Washington,” said former D.C. Council Chairman Sterling Tucker, now 84, who was delivering a speech in New York City at the time of the assassination. “So they whisked me to the airport. Usually when I fly into Washington, the lights and the sky are beautiful. That night it was frightening because the sky was filled with flames.”
Over five days of rioting, 12 people were killed, a thousand more were injured and some 1,200 buildings were burned to the ground.
“As I looked at the smoldering carcass of Washington and observed the troops marching down the street past storefronts that no longer had any windows, I thought, so this is what war is like,” Smith wrote in “Multitudes: the Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam Smith.”
The fury brought blocks and blocks of devastation, a dearth of retail in affected communities, and an acceleration of so-called “white flight.”
Progress would come slowly over decades with the introduction of Metro’s Green Line and a growing interest from the private sector to revitalize.
There was little consensus on how to bring the neighborhoods back, observers said, nor was there incentive for residents and businesses to return. But 40 years to recover? Nobody foresaw that, Tucker said.
“I don’t think anyone would have thought it would have taken that long, even though government does work slowly,” he said. “It’s been indelibly marked on the history of the city, no doubt about that.”
The weird tale of 'Col. Rigsby'
In the first chaotic night of rioting, while police helplessly watched the city burn, a man who called himself Col. Rigsby appeared in the 13th Precinct and offered to help.He told police officers that he could obtain tear gas canisters, but needed a truck to transport the equipment, recalled then-Sgt. Ron Winters.
The man was assigned a D.C. police wagon which he drove to Fort Myer. He conned himself inside the gate, woke up a sergeant at the supply depot and ordered the truck to be filled with cases of tear gas. When the sergeant demanded written orders, Rigsby responded, "Look at Washington. It's on fire!"
Police used those baseball-like tear gas canisters to control the riots.
Several days later, FBI agents came by the police precinct to talk about the episode. It turned out "Col. Rigsby" was a patient who had slipped out of a mental ward at Walter Reed Medical Hospital. Winters told the agents, "I don't know if he was a fraud or what, but this guy saved hundreds of lives. He's a hero."
— Scott McCabe
Comments from Examiner Readers
12:37 PM MST on Fri., Apr. 4, 2008 re: "Locals recall fateful day: ‘My mom and dad were both crying’"
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Examiner Reader said:
So, let me get this straight. People loot and burn down the businesses in their own neighborhood and then wonder why, 40 years later, they have not returned yet? Perhaps that question is best answered by another one. Who, in their right mind, would risk their hard earned capital in a neighborhood where the residents reward them by looting and burning down the capital of others? What other result could they have possibly envisioned? Small wonder that 40 years later some parts of the city have yet to come back.
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