Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, D.C. Riots of 1968 by J. Samuel Walker (review)

In March 1968, the director of public safety in Washington was optimistic that the nation's capital would not suffer a major outbreak of urban violence, unlike Newark and Detroit the previous summer. "I am completely confident we will be able to prevent any disorder, or shall we say serious disorder, in this city," declared Patrick V. Murphy (p. 47). Then, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis on April 4. In the days that followed, more than one hundred American cities endured large-scale unrest. But Washington was the hardest hit, with 13 deaths (none due to actions by the National Guard or U.S. Army) and $27 million in property damage (p. 98).

In this clear and concise account, J. Samuel Walker, former historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ably contextualizes the tragic events of a horrific week in a traumatic year. The first two chapters set the stage by describing how the "other Washington," which few tourists ever saw, came into existence and why the threat of civil unrest loomed large by 1968. The middle two chapters offer a vivid narrative of the rioting and looting that followed news of King's assassination. The final two chapters carefully address the consequences, both in the immediate aftermath and during the long road to economic recovery.

Throughout this well-researched book, the author provides evenhanded and sober-minded assessments of controversial matters. Rejecting ideologically-loaded terms like "rebellion" or "uprising" to describe what happened, he correctly notes that the vast majority of residents never participated and "the great majority of participants neither burned and looted to make a political statement nor acted with a political objective in mind" (p. 102). At the same time, he properly emphasizes the underlying conditions—poor housing, high unemployment, and substandard housing—that fed the fires of frustration. And Walker aptly labels as "vastly exaggerated" the claims by government officials and conservative politicians that SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael triggered the violence when he waved a pistol at a Howard University student rally and warned that "there's going to be some shooting" (pp. 62, 100).

Some scholars may wish that the author had explored certain topics in greater depth. For example, although the D.C. National Guard was almost 25 percent African American—a disproportionately large share compared to the much-criticized National Guard in Michigan and New Jersey—Walker devotes only a single page to the "verbal abuse" black soldiers faced (p. 87). The difficult experiences of African American policemen and reporters similarly receive little attention. The author notes that whites owned 86 percent of the burned or looted businesses, but he also does not discuss in detail whether long-standing tensions between Jewish storeowners and black residents may have contributed to this outcome (pp. 70, 98). Perhaps a paucity of sources or the brevity of the book—only 135 pages of text—precluded deeper analysis of these issues.

Most of 14th Street Is Gone nevertheless provides a compact introduction to the complicated history of the nation's capital and a balanced examination of a painful episode. The broadest and most readable account of the urban upheaval of April 1968 is still A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (2009) by Clay Risen, which the author briefly acknowledges at the very end. But fifty years after Washington erupted in violence, Walker has produced a valuable study which appropriately concludes by reminding us that similar explosions remain a potential threat to America's cities.