Jonetta Rose Barras, The Examiner
2008-04-04 08:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

The depth of the pain caused by Martin Luther King Jr.’s death can be vividly recalled by many who lived in the District 40 years ago.

“I made it home from school and my mom and dad were both crying. That was compelling for me because my dad wasn’t someone who showed his emotions,” recalled Eugene DeWitt Kinlow, who was 6 years old the day King was killed.

“We knew Dr. King was very important to my parents; they were activists involved in the Young Democrats and tied to things that King was doing,” said Kinlow, now the outreach director for D.C. Vote.

H.R. Crawford, a property manager and local political activist, was tapped by Mayor Walter Washington to try to bring peace to a slice of Southeast after disturbances erupted.

“People had shopping carts filled [with] groceries, television sets, shoes — everything. It was totally chaotic,” remembered Crawford, who would later serve on the D.C. Council and as an official with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He jumped in his Jeep, getting a priest from St. Thomas Moore church to join him, then rode through the streets with a bullhorn, telling people to return to their homes.

“A lot of us were angry. There was a love affair between the people and Dr. King,” Crawford said.

The riots that followed King’s assassination produced scars in the city that, in some cases, have not healed in four decades.

Bruce Shulman’s relatives owned several businesses on H Street Northeast. His grandmother Anna’s place at 1237 burned to the ground.

“The fact that some businesses were perpetuating injustices on those in the black community [did not] excuse indiscriminate burning of virtually all businesses, including many that had willingly employed blacks and had tried to integrate them into society,” says Shulman, a lawyer whose family lived then on South Dakota Avenue.

“Morton’s [clothing store] on H Street Northeast. was torched; the wall in the back collapsed and seven people were killed,” recalled Tony de Pass, then a D.C. police officer assigned to Precinct 9 in Northeast.

Local police were paired with military personnel who packed M-16s, says de Pass, now an adjunct professor at the University of the District of Columbia. Some people accused them of not doing enough,

however.

“A picture [is] emblazoned in my mind of an 8- or 10-year-old boy carrying a case of soda out of Binder’s Liquor Store at Florida and West Virginia Avenue Northeast in front of a bunch of soldiers, without any of them doing anything,” Shulman said. Now, four decades later, residents differ on whether there has been progress.

De Pass acknowledged some improvements. “But I don’t see the dramatic changes some had anticipated the riots would bring,” he added.

Shulman says change has been slow to come. “H Street is still not the shopping area it was in the 1950s and ’60s: There were two Safeway supermarkets, four Peoples’ Drugstores, a Sears and Hechinger [super hardware store],” says Shulman. “But it’s coming back.”