National Post (National Edition)
Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King was killed and the capital went up in flames.
FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY, MARTIN LUTHER KING WAS KILLED. AND BEFORE MY EYES, THE AMERICAN CAPITAL WENT UP IN FLAMES
Fifty years ago today, on Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. As Washington correspondent for the Montreal Star and London Observer, I hurriedly booked flights to Memphis to cover the aftermath. Just before I was to leave by taxi for National Airport however, I got a call from a contact, an African-American named Charles Hightower, director of the progressive anti-apartheid lobby, The American Committee on Africa.
“Do not go to Memphis!” Charles said. “Stay here! This city is going to blow!”
I took Hightower’s advice and stayed in my office in Washington, in the National Press Building on 14th Street, while most other White House correspondents flew to Memphis. When they returned from Memphis, they saw pillars of smoke and fire billowing over the city as they landed. Washington had blown.
During those three days, I witnessed unprecedented looting, rioting and arson that destroyed about 1,000 buildings, including a major department store. For nearly two weeks, the capital of the United States was occupied, under the orders of lame-duck president Lyndon Johnson, by 13,600 federal and National Guard troops who put up pillboxes at the gates of the White House.
Friday the 5th began slowly. Tens of thousands of mainly white civil servants drove in from outer Washington suburbs and the Virginia and Maryland suburbs to work downtown unaware of the fact, which the media had wilfully downplayed, that some arson and rioting had occurred overnight. By 10 a.m. the alarms of fire engines and police cars, and smoke rising from burning buildings in the mainly black inner city, alerted the denizens of the government buildings to the fact that they were in danger. They responded by running to their cars and in a mass panic, driving out of the downtown area even if it meant using the wrong side of major roads and the interstate highways to reach safety in suburbia.
This panicked exodus actually became a major contributor to the spread of the violence. Due to the epic traffic jams caused by the fleeing civil servants, U.S. Army units stationed in Virginia and even North Carolina were unable to enter Washington until late that afternoon.
Until the troops arrived, I witnessed what I later quipped was an equal-opportunity riot. Many young whites mingled with blacks in, among other things, burning to the ground a department store two blocks from the White House by pouring gasoline over the furniture and torching it with cigarette lighters.
At the centre of the black inner city, 14th Street and U Street, we witnessed the black power leader, Stokely Carmichael, addressing a swelling crowd with these words: “Do not act like a bunch of (idiots) by burning down your own houses. Torch Whitey’s property over there in Georgetown!” He was obeyed.
Around 1 p.m., I went to the top of the National Press Building and counted 90 fires burning, many of them adjacent to the Capitol Buildings. I said to a colleague, “What we are seeing here is The Fire Next Time,” a reference to the prescient 1963 book by African-American activist James Baldwin. The title referenced an African-American spiritual song, where God warns Noah that He would not punish man with a flood again. “The fire next time,” God said.
Nobody seemed to be afraid of getting killed or hurt, so I proceeded up 14th Street again to U Street to hear more speeches. Some of these extolled the virtues of Robert Kennedy, “our blueeyed soul-brother.” His assassination would follow three months later in America’s year of living dangerously, a year of unmet expectations that ended with the triumph of Richard Nixon, a decidedly less charismatic politician.
It was around 4:30 p.m. when federal troops managed to get to the inner city. President Johnson, to his everlasting credit, had instructed the troops not to shoot to kill, but to use tear gas and mass arrests to quell racial violence. A military officer, using a bullhorn, told the crowd to disperse and warned that tear gas would be used if he was disobeyed. The crowd, perhaps 10,000 strong, ignored him. So the troops opened fire with gas canisters. One canister, which I have kept, burst beneath my legs, inflicting a small flesh wound on my thigh. The crowd dispersed, pursued by troops and police officers.
I ran south down 14th Street, buildings blazing around us. Making it back to the Press Building seemed unlikely given the chaos, so I gave a friendly old black woman $20 to let me stay in her basement until things quieted down. From her basement, I phoned updates to Montreal radio and TV stations.
I finally made it home to Reston, Va., exhausted, late on Sunday, after days in the burning city. My daughter, Josephine, asked “Who teargassed you today, Dad?” She recalled that I had come home from the 1967 Detroit and Newark race riots in a similar condition.
But Washington itself had gotten off comparatively lightly. During the long, hot summer of ’67, in the Detroit and Newark disturbances, the body counts were 43 and 26, respectively. Thirteen people died in the Washington riots, eight of them in fires. It was heartbreaking, but I had expected it to be much worse. President Johnson deployed welltrained troops and police officers, many themselves African-Americans, to use tear gas, instead of bullets. Most people got home alive. One hates to think what the death toll would have been if Nixon had been in command in the spring of 1968.