April 1968 looms large in Washington’s collective memory. Whether one calls it a “riot,” “civil disturbance” or “rebellion,” the violence following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a profound impact that reverberated long after the fires cooled. Boarded-up buildings, barricaded stores and riot-charred hulks lined much of the commercial corridors along 14th Street NW, Seventh Street NW and H Street NE for years afterward. Images of National Guardsmen patrolling the rubble-strewn streets of the nation’s capital haunt us still.
According to the popular narrative, the events of April 1968 were the hinge on which our city’s history turned. After 1968, a once-thriving D.C. slid inexorably into a coma of crime, drugs and violence until a 21st-century burst of gentrification revived it. This narrative of post-1968 decline has hardened into conventional wisdom passed on by journalists, bloggers and residents alike.
Yet the narrative of decline ignores the vitality and vibrancy of the post-1968 city.
Following the riots, D.C. experienced a clamorous, unpredictable period of citizen-driven politics, cultural and political experimentation and remarkable change. It was a tumultuous but hopeful time as the District gained a measure of local power for the first time in nearly a century. Washingtonians of all races — including a growing Hispanic community in the Adams Morgan/Mount Pleasant neighborhoods — pushed for self-determination, community control and participatory democracy.
The violence in April 1968 was terrible, but it was also cathartic and catalyzing. Washington in early 1968 was a dysfunctional, disfranchised city that suffered from entrenched problems of economic inequality, housing segregation and police brutality. An interracial local civil rights movement had largely dismantled official segregation by the mid-1950s, but its success did not lead to significant improvements in living conditions, particularly for poor and working-class black Washingtonians. Although President Lyndon Johnson had appointed a black man, Walter Washington, to serve as the mayor to lead an appointed council, the true power over the city remained in the hands of white segregationists who ran the congressional District committees.
As the national civil rights movement scored important legislative victories, Washington seemed to stagnate. Frustration mounted, particularly in low-income black areas. Local activists became increasingly assertive, and racial confrontations with the police became more confrontational and sometimes violent. What happened after King’s assassination was the most intense and sustained — but neither the first nor the last — of a series of violent confrontations as many frustrated black Washingtonians challenged the ruling authorities of the city.
Many Washingtonians, particularly in low-income black areas, saw the riots as an opportunity to seize control of their neighborhoods and rebuild the city along egalitarian lines. “Washington now has the opportunity to rebuild politically, socially, as well as physically,” argued Rev. Channing Phillips of the Black United Front.
One of the most successful social movements in the District’s history, the anti-freeway movement, scored its most important victories in the years after the riots. The Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis, led by Sammie Abbott and Reginald Booker, built an interracial, cross-class coalition that defeated plans for a vast network of freeways crisscrossing the city. Their success preserved bucolic neighborhoods, historic architecture and a walkable downtown that 21st-century residents and visitors love.
City residents also began to exercise political muscles that had atrophied during a century of commissioner rule. The Home Rule Act of 1973 ushered in a new era of self-government, and the next year D.C. voters elected a council bursting with civil rights veterans and community activists. The home-rule bill also created a remarkable space for neighborhood autonomy through Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, an institutional form of participatory democracy that would flummox political leaders for years to come.
Throughout the 1970s, a profusion of community organizations from tenant rights groups such as the Adams Morgan Organization to historic preservation groups such as Don’t Tear It Down! channeled citizen power to fight rapacious developers, abusive landlords and neglectful city agencies.
And, of course, this was the era of “Chocolate City,” a nickname immortalized by funk band Parliament in 1975. The city enjoyed a flowering of black culture expressed in go-go music, the D.C. Black Repertory Company and black-run businesses such as the Drum & Spear Bookstore. With an elected leadership that reflected the city’s 71 percent black population, Washington reasserted itself as the capital of black America.
There can be no romanticizing or belittling the very real and devastating consequences of the violence in April 1968. But the riots did not destroy D.C. They helped catalyze a remarkable era of citizen activism that remade the city.
Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove co-authored “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”