Washington was in a state of emergency. Its schools were closed, the cherished Cherry Blossom Festival was canceled and baseball’s Opening Day was postponed. Hospitals were chaotic and ambulance paramedics overwhelmed. Panicked shoppers flooded grocery stores to stock up on food while thousands lost their jobs and wondered where they would get their next meal. As night fell, the mayor ordered Washingtonians to stay home. “An eerie atmosphere dominated the well-lit broad streets of downtown Washington, with its modern office buildings, in a silence broken only by the frequent wails of police, fire, and ambulance sirens,” reported Howard University’s The Hilltop.
More than 50 years later, this description is eerily applicable to the District and many places across the world. This weekend marks the 52nd anniversary of the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nationwide civil disturbances that followed. King’s assassination ignited centuries of grief and anger at racial inequality, and some expressed these emotions by looting and burning businesses. Compared to simultaneous uprisings in over 100 American cities, the District’s disorder resulted in the most property damage, arrests and federal troop involvement.
To quell the chaos in the District, Mayor Walter E. Washington declared a state of emergency and imposed a citywide curfew. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered over 15,000 federal troops into the District to restore order. The disorder harmed 1,352 businesses, displaced nearly 5,000 people from their jobs and left 2,000 people homeless.
Despite the major differences between a global pandemic and civil disorder sparked by assassination, then and now the city’s residents faced terrible uncertainty about how they could obtain food to eat and reliable information to help them understand what was going on. To serve these needs during the 1968 crisis, many Washingtonians united and an ad hoc organization of community groups and citizens provided vital services to the city’s people. They later envisioned the city’s rebuilding and pushed for structural reform. Remembering the ways Washingtonians cooperatively tackled these problems can provide hope and inspiration today as we face the daunting challenges of the novel coronavirus.
After the assassination of King, civil disturbances erupted around the United States. As cities like Washington locked down to quell the disorder, many living in the District faced real difficulties accessing food during and after the disturbances. The D.C. health department found that 348 out of the 527 food and drugstores surveyed closed immediately following the riots. Destruction, damaged stock and fear left stores nonoperational for days, weeks, months and sometimes even years.
Even if stores remained open, grocers struggled to adequately stock their shops, with delivery drivers hesitant to drive into riot-torn areas and police barricades making some stores unreachable. The result: greatly limited food access. In the Anacostia neighborhood, for example, some residents had to walk over 1.5 miles to purchase a gallon of milk. At the time, D.C. was nearly 70 percent African American and the heaviest damage was concentrated in neighborhoods that were over 90 percent black due to decades of racial segregation. In a strange outcome, the uprisings expressed frustrations with the discrimination and exploitation of African Americans and made access to basic needs more difficult for the black residents of the damaged neighborhoods.
But the ad hoc assembly of volunteers, community groups, private businesses and government departments rose up to anticipate and meet the community’s need, organizing to feed thousands of hungry Washingtonians. On April 6, 1968, over 50 churches opened their doors to provide food, shelter and medical treatment. Many churches were able to launch such a rapid response because they had provided essential services to vulnerable communities for decades. In the crisis, churches requested donations of the supplies most needed: bread, milk and baby food.
Donations came pouring in from people in the District and its surrounding suburbs. The U.S. Agriculture Department donated 264,000 pounds of food and distributed 70,000 pounds of it by April 8. Giant and Safeway grocery stores contributed loaves of bread and half gallons of milk. The Department of Public Welfare worked with the Urban Coalition to set up 35 distribution locations to deliver the food to residents.
And black-led organizations stepped up to serve. Pride Inc., the youth jobs program established by future mayor Marion Barry, served food at its headquarters. Howard University students, led by the UJAMMA campus group, operated a 24-hour emergency relief center open from April 5 through April 17 that provided food, clothing and shelter to D.C. residents. “It shows that black people could organize for the benefit of their brothers and sisters of the community,” said Howard volunteer Pearl Stewart. Many Washingtonians said they felt Congress ruled Washington like a colony and, correctly, believed the District was denied home rule — the right to elect their own leaders to govern the city — in part because many did not want it governed by African Americans. Stewart’s pride that black people were capable of responding to the crisis reflected the larger demands of the District for self-determination.
City officials and volunteers also operated hotlines to provide citizens with vital information about where to donate goods and receive assistance. In the first two hours of the weekend, the hotlines received 650 calls; 90 percent rang to offer “personal services, food, clothing, shelter, medical and legal service.” As the day progressed, however, thousands of calls flooded in and 90 percent of callers requested food, shelter and better information.
Crucially, the hotlines served to calm panic and dispel rumors — earning the nickname “the rumor clinic.” “Every Tom, Dick, and Harvey was calling up and wanting to know information about how many fires are we having, what is causing this,” noted Fire Chief Henry Galotta.
D.C. Safety Commissioner Patrick Murphy felt such rumors were “one of the worst parts of this. We’ve heard them all, from knocking down the [Washington] Monument to diverting the Potomac [River].”
The volunteers did crucial work, and after the emergency ended in mid-April, many of these same people advocated for the structural changes they said would prevent another such crisis. Many Washingtonians urged Congress to grant the district home rule, and the community led rebuilding projects and other civil rights reforms.
As then activist Marion Barry declared at a D.C. Council hearing in May 1968, the civil disorders “created a vacuum and an opportunity.” Something would have to be done to reconstruct the damaged sections, but it remained to be determined “what and how and by whom. More importantly, will what is done correct the basic situation that created the need for … the rebellions?”
Citizens embraced the task of rebuilding with hope and seized the opportunity to create a more just society with a politically empowered populace. Residents of the affected neighborhoods insisted they should have a deciding role in the planning and physical reconstruction of the city. “Business as usual” was near-universally denounced by D.C. officials and citizens alike. The mayor, D.C. Council, community organizations and citizens loosely agreed on a process that prioritized community participation and black economic development and would alleviate the economic and racial inequalities they considered the root causes of unrest.
For example, plans to rebuild in the Shaw neighborhood were developed with extensive community input. The redevelopment efforts would rebuild using the government and nonprofit community groups, especially churches, rather than private developers. While the election of President Richard M. Nixon in November 1968 and his subsequent budget cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies greatly limited these plans, church-owned housing built in the aftermath of 1968 still provides much-needed low-income housing to thousands of Washingtonians today.
Today, the District is once again facing a crisis that will leave many people vulnerable to hunger, job losses and uncertainty caused by lack of information. Although the circumstances and causes of the 1968 and covid-19 emergencies are vastly different, we can still learn from Washingtonians’ actions and strength 52 years ago. Despite the immense disruptions to “normal” life, we can find ways to support each other, including those more negatively impacted than us. Look for the helpers. And the supportive response in the wake of the 1968 disturbances shows us how our individual acts can reinforce and build support for the structural reforms and policies needed to avoid another disaster.