Answer Man: Kindness Turned Brutality

The crowd was huge, an estimated 125,000 people stretching from the Washington Monument west to 17th Street NW. There were sporadic assaults early in the day, but the real violence didn't start until after Stevie Wonder's performance.

A 22-year-old man from Vienna was standing near the base of the monument when a group of men grabbed his wallet. He gave chase and was struck in the mouth with a club. An 18-year-old from Annapolis was jumped by a group of 20 teenagers who beat him and threw bottles at him until he was able to run to an ambulance. The worst injury was to Steven Laine , who was stabbed in his right eye while cutting across the Mall on his way home from work at the Department of Agriculture.

"I said, 'Help me,' and there was no response," Laine told a Post reporter from his hospital bed.

By the time it was over, there had been about 500 robberies and 600 injuries, and 150 people were treated at hospitals.

Kenneth Donovan was a 26-year-old U.S. Park Police officer who had recently joined the department's mounted unit. Seated atop a black thoroughbred horse called War Courier, he had a good view of Human Kindness Day's descent into chaos.

"People were blindly grabbing handbags," he remembered in an interview last week. "It got to be a thing to grab open a woman's blouse and rip it and run."

Police officers watched from the top of the Washington Monument as roving bands of youths attacked spectators and, according to The Post, "broke up and formed to attack again, often stampeding the crowd before them like tightly packed sheep."

Park Police considered laying down a tear gas barrage to clear the Washington Monument grounds but decided against it, fearing the rioters would spill into downtown.

Donovan said the reason law enforcement officers spent so much time watching the mayhem as opposed to stopping it was because of a deal that had been struck with the event's organizers: Security was to be provided by 800 armband-wearing volunteer marshals. The police had agreed not to interfere.

He said that back then, a police presence was seen by many as a provocation. "When they were trying to have rallies to celebrate anything, the presence of police was looked at as being a negative factor," he said.

A later investigation revealed not only that 800 volunteer marshals would not have been enough but also that a mere 262 had showed up.

"You can't really take a large crowd that size and more or less advertise that there is just no police protection," Officer Donovan said.

The city was bruised by the racial aspect to the violence: Most of the victims were white; most of the assailants black. D.C. officials worried about the upcoming Bicentennial and announced a moratorium on big pop concerts on the Mall.

Kenneth Donovan is still a mounted officer with the Park Police, and he still remembers Human Kindness Day. "I had been trained for years to protect the public," he said. To be told not to protect them stuck in his craw.

If only it hadn't been called Human Kindness Day. As a reader wrote in to Post columnist Bill Gold : "So much for kindness. I don't want to be around on Human Cruelty Day."

Julia Feldmeier helped research this column. Send your questions toanswerman@washpost.com.