Telling It Like It Wasn't

Philip Geyelin was editorial page editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to 1979. This anecdotal account of the riot -- and its coverage -- was first published on April 11, 1968.

In a riot, as in other things, McCluhan may be right: the medium can become the message. And the President's Riot Commission may be right, too. While the message may be pure truth, it can also get badly garbled when the Almighty Eye tries to focus on the phantasmagoria of urban rioting.

"We have found a significant imbalance between what actually happened... and what the newspaper, radio and television coverage of the riots told us happened," the Commission said in its report on the news coverage of the hot summer of 1967. "We found that the disorders, as serious as they were, were less destructive, less widespread, and less a black-white confrontation than most people believed."

Whether the same will be said of what has gone on here in recent days, only an exhaustive investigation would reveal. Even eyewitnesses can't be sure how much they are seeing. Still less does a single isolated incident tell it all. But you could see a part of the problem, at least, in one short hour while the American Ice Co. plant was going up in flames like a giant furnace at 16th and F Street ne. a few days ago.

The fire had been started, apparently, in an adjacent grocery and now the roof had fallen in and within the four jagged, red brick walls an inferno was sending up sheets of orange flame and pouring out a column of thick black smoke. It was something to see and there must have been a hundred people gathered around, ducking the wind-blown water from the firehoses and brushing away the clouds of ashes in the air. They were women and children, old men and young, and if there was racial hostility seething within them it did not show to the handful of white newspapermen, overdressed in business suits and neckties, who slipped on the soggy, muddy patches of grass as they threaded their way through the crowd.

It was not a racial thing. It was more like an event, or a curiosity, and the tension was in wondering whether the cascades of water could shield the nearby houses, whether the walls would crack and crumble, whether the flames would reach a storehouse full of ammonium and set loose noxious fumes which would make it necessary to evacuate the area.

It wasn't even a very big audience, considering the spectacle. A block or so away, people were sitting on front stoops, or clustering on street corners, talking, laughing, arguing, bored.

Then it happened. Abruptly, from a group of fire-watchers perched on an embankment there was a flurry of fist-shaking and a cacophony of angry cries -- "Honky" and "You killed our Soul Brother" and "You killed Martin Luther King." And every bit of it was aimed at the funnel-shaped snout of a television camera; the medium had moved in. As the cameraman panned across the crowd, it was if some unseen director was calling out cues. It was Instant Showbiz. The men on the embankment grabbed a grinning Negro fireman and held his arms aloft, demanding that this Soul Brother who was a fireman be made Fire Chief. The fireman laughed self-consciously and shook them off and went about his work. But the camera kept grinding and the young men played to it and finally an Army jeep drove up and somebody put in a radio call. In a matter of minutes, the police were there, swooping in with sirens going, leaping out of squad cars before they had rolled to a stop, brandishing billy-clubs and advancing with swift efficiency toward the crowd.

The fire-watchers were just as quick, and as they broke and began to run it became a game. "We're going, Sir, we're going Boss," they chimed in taunting voices moving with exaggerated strides in a show of mock defiance. The police had their instructions; the drill called for tear gas and the round canisters rolled and tumbled after the people, bouncing around their feet, exploding with a little popping sound. One woman couldn't help laughing as she hitched up her skirts and skipped a little faster before the gas had a chance to spread its invisible bite to throat and lungs and eyes.

It was over as quickly as it had begun, and the police joked as they coughed and rubbed their eyes and climbed back into their squad cars while the fire roared on and the hoses played back and forth across the brick.

Depending on which pieces you used, and how you put it together, you could tell it any way you liked; the headlines could have said: POLICE ROUT ANGRY MOB AT SITE OF BLAZE. Or you could have told it like it was -- a piece of theater, inspired, produced and directed by the Almighty Eye. The point is that to get it right, you had to get there early, and see it all. If somewhere, in somebody's living room that evening, a few feet of film showed a small group of angry Negroes, shouting racist epithets in defiance of Whitey and in deference to Dr. King, then the Medium was indeed the message. And the message was not the way it was.