When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968

Chapter 5. Fourteenth Street

[113] CHAPTER 5 Fourteenth Street A week after Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, on a cold January morning, I drove up Fourteenth Street, which runs due north through Washington, D.C., passing a few blocks to the east of the White House and bisecting the Mall, at its southern end, alongside the Washington Monument. It was not a street I knew well, despite having spent the middle of my work week for almost twenty years in an apartment in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood not far to the west. For me, Fourteenth Street was where my son Luke had worked at Sparky’s Espresso after moving to the District in 2001, and where he later played gigs with his girlfriend in their duo, Big Gold Belt, at a venue called the Black Cat. I did know that Fourteenth Street had been the heart of black Washington and that after the riots of April 1968 it had taken the neighborhood over three decades to begin to recover. Now, the signs of urban uplift were everywhere. At P Street, I came to the Studio Theatre, founded in 1978 by Joy Zinoman, where I had seen Ricky Jay impale a watermelon with playing cards thrown from a distance of twenty feet. A little way down P there was a Whole Foods supermarket. A block further north, the Central Street Mission still offered its services to the poor. Across Fourteenth, Cork, a wine bar, had replaced [114] CHAPTER 5 Sparky’s Espresso. I drove by the Black Cat, and then saw that Source, the recently relocated performing arts center, was doing The Marriage of Figaro. At Fourteenth and U Streets I parked my car and explored the sidewalk around the ten-story Frank D. Reeves Center of Municipal Affairs, which had gone up in 1986 as the first token of the will to renew. A historical marker out front carried the title “Riots to Renaissance.” The renaissance included, to the south, a McDonalds, a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Foot Locker. Across the street, a dry-cleaning shop had replaced the People’s Drug Store, which had been badly damaged in 1968. The riot had in fact begun at this very spot. In 1968, the twenty blocks on Fourteenth above U were home to some three hundred businesses, many of them black-owned. Both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had their offices within steps of Fourteenth and U. The third-busiest drug store in the area stood on the northwest corner of the intersection, catty-corner from National Liquors. The London Custom Shop occupied another corner, up the street from a Safeway, Rhodes Five and Ten, and Sam’s Pawnbroker. The Zanzibar Restaurant and the Jumbo Nut Shop were nearby. According to Ben Gilbert, in his Ten Blocks from the White House (1968), “police considered this intersection the most volatile in the city’s crowded Negro sections.” April 4 was a Thursday, a work night. At 7:16 p.m., transistor radios picked up the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. By this time in the evening, black Washingtonians on their way home were changing buses at Fourteenth and U, stopping to buy liquor or supplies at the drug store, or simply enjoying a warm spring night. At 8:19, the radios reported that King had died of his wounds. At 9:25, the first windows were broken, in the People’s Drug Store. Meanwhile, former SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael had hit the pavement , telling the crowd to “go home” and asking businesses to close their doors. He moved up and down Fourteenth, shouting “Get off the streets. This is not the time, brothers.” Five blocks north of U Street, he watched a woman lean against the window of Belmont TV and Appliance and begin “bumping it with her broad backside.” When the window broke, Carmichael grabbed a teenage looter, brandished a revolver, and told him, “You’re not ready for the ‘thing.’ Go home. Go home.” A few minutes later, looters began pouring out of Sam’s Pawnbroker and Rhodes Five and Ten, carrying jewelry, radios, watches, TVs. By midnight, Fourteenth and U had been sealed off by the police. Fires were started further north in two food markets, and police began wielding nightsticks FOURTEENTH STREET [115] and deploying tear gas. The last major confrontation occurred at...