From Ruin to Rebirth in D.C.

Although most proprietors closed immediately, their gesture did little to calm the roiling anger.

At 9:25 p.m., protesters shattered the windows of a Peoples Drug Store at 14th and U streets, triggering spasms of mayhem through the night and over the next three days in neighborhoods in three of the city's four quadrants, from Anacostia to Capitol Hill, from Shaw to Columbia Heights. The most severe damage occurred along 14th, H and Seventh streets, where hundreds of businesses, nearly all of them white-owned, were damaged or destroyed.

At one point on the second day, about 200 fires burned simultaneously, creating a blanket of smoke that shrouded the city.

Bob King, then 21, was riding a bus to Columbia Heights when the rioting began. He was stunned to see, at 14th and Harvard streets, a crowd ripping the iron grates off the face of a shuttered liquor store.

Four decades later, the images remain fresh in his memory: men in the street sifting through heaps of stolen suits; looters breaking into Hines Funeral Home and walking away with caskets; families at a Safeway stuffing carts with steaks and chickens, rolling past cashless cash registers where strangers shrieked with laughter, pretending to ring them up.

"It was like a festival right where I was born," King said. "I felt so sad that my community was being destroyed."

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As soon as the embers were out, talk of rebuilding began.

The following January, 11 days after taking office, President Richard M. Nixon traveled two miles by limousine from the White House to inspect Seventh Street. Standing alongside Mayor Walter E. Washington, Nixon watched a wrecking ball smash into the Waxie Maxie record store, the crumbling vestiges of which remained nine months after the shop burned in the riots.

"These rotting, boarded-up structures are a rebuke to us all, and an oppressive, demoralizing environment for those who live in their shadow," Nixon said. "They remind us again and again of the basic fact that the principal victims of violence are those in whose neighborhood it occurs."

The president pledged that rebuilding on Seventh Street would begin within months. In the meantime, community organizations such as Pride Inc., co-founded by Barry, and fledgling black entrepreneurs saw opportunity in the rubble. African Americans, they said, should run their own ventures. They were the city's majority, after all.

Warren Williams Sr. decided to start a business. Dropping out of dental school, he bought a storefront at Seventh and Q streets, one that had housed a white-owned clothing shop destroyed in the riots. Williams fixed up the place, hung a sign that read "W & W Liquors" and launched a 40-year career in business.