Legacies of the Riot

On the night of April 4, 1968, someone tossed a brick through the plate-glass window of the Peoples Drug Store at 14th and U streets in Northwest. Within minutes, looters had picked the store clean; within an hour, stores up and down the street had met the same fate. The ensuing three-day riot, touched off by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., left 12 dead, caused $354 million in damages and ultimately drove hundreds of thousands of people out of the city.

Today, that corner is home to the enormous Frank D. Reeves Municipal Center -- notable for being initiated by a black mayor, designed by a black architectural firm and built by black contractors in the mid 80s. The brick plaza out front plays host to a yuppie farmers market on weekends, and the surrounding neighborhood has recently become one of the trendiest hubs in the region.

Though most traces of the riot have been erased from 14th and U, the government building and the gentrification movement are products of the riot's twin legacies -- legacies that shape the city's social and political dynamics still.

The first, and most obvious, legacy of the riot was how profoundly it altered the physical landscape. It almost completely destroyed the commercial strips along 14th and 7th Streets in Northwest and H Street in Northeast. The U Street area, previously a vibrant cultural district with so many theaters and clubs it was called the "Black Broadway," became a ghost town. Entire blocks were reduced to rubble overnight.

Even after the most intense violence subsided, crime and arson continued. A beloved neighborhood convenience store owner was murdered in late April, and the slogan "Ben Brown Is Dead" became the rallying cry for business owners fleeing the city. Many white suburbanites would come in only when they had to -- say, for a government job -- and then got out as quickly as possible. And though the decision to leave was particularly hard for many members of the city's black population, a significant portion of them -- mostly middle class families -- escaped over the next decades. By 1990, the city had lost over 40 percent of its pre-riot population.

That flight left behind a desperately poor population disconnected from job and life opportunities. The District was, to put it mildly, a problem city beforehand. But by destroying so much of its social and physical infrastructure, the riot took a bad situation and made it far, far worse.

The riot also revolutionized Washington politics. On the eve of King's death, the city was only marginally independent. It had an appointed mayor, Walter Washington, and an appointed city council. But the real power rested with Congress, a white business establishment and an accomodationist black business and religious elite.

The establishment, however, was unprepared to respond to the riot. And a new generation of community leaders stepped into the breach: Marion Barry, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Julius Hobson Sr. and Mary Treadwell, along with more moderate voices like Channing Phillips and Walter Fauntroy.

These young leaders -- call them the "Dashiki Generation" -- had come of age on the radical wings of the civil rights movement. They inspired a sense of purpose in the city's black community. Many of them also resorted to race-baiting and separatist rhetoric: Barry, for one, threatened another riot unless local white-owned businesses sell majority stakes to black owners.

They quickly put their ideas about community self-determination into action, providing vital energy to the home rule campaign and winning the right to directly elect the mayor. They rose through the ranks of the local government -- culminating in Barry's mayoral victory over Walter Washington in 1979. And they rebuilt the city's institutions in their own image. By 1986, when the Reeves Center opened at 14th and U streets, the city power structure had essentially flipped.

Today, the twin legacies of April 1968 have come to a head.

Paradoxically, the physical scars of the riot proved fertile ground for the recent grassfire gentrification. After all, who was going to complain when Target and Best Buy moved in at 14th and Park, a block left fallow since it burned down 40 years ago? The city is now wealthier and safer than it has been for half a century. The question is how to manage the newfound opportunities so that everyone, not just the young and the rich, can benefit.

Yet many of the leaders born in the fires of 1968 appear stuck in a 1968 mindset. They see gentrification as a challenge to the urban power structure they have established. And they tend to resent the new faces in the city leadership -- Asians, women -- as betraying the achievements of the post-riot revolution.

At a Historical Society conference last November, Walter Fauntroy warned that gentrification risked turning back the advances of the last 40 years. "Those who do not know where they come from won't know it when they're being pushed back," he said, borrowing from Harriet Tubman to a round of applause.

He's got a point: Remember your history. But it's also possible to remember history too well. The city has changed a lot over the decades. There are still a lot of poor blacks and rich whites, but there are also middle-class blacks and working-class Hispanics. Young white families live beside young black families. The District is hardly an integrationist Eden, but it's a lot closer than it used to be.

The new Washington requires a new kind of thinking. Marion Barry may have used the District government to help build a new black middle class -- but the result is a bloated and underperforming bureaucracy. Now the city's leaders can't be afraid of tough reforms, particularly in the schools, that serve the District's future, rather than maintain its past.

The leaders of the Dashiki Generation managed to guide Washington through the worst of times. But they may not be prepared to meet the challenges facing the city today.

The writer is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. His book, A Nation in Flames: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, will be published in April 2009.