Memories of the D.C. 1968 riots

Washington, D.C. appeared at the time to be two cities. A commission that was asked to investigate the causes for riots in Detroit and Newark the year before concluded that the U.S. was moving toward two societies, one black and the other white. As the city approached the end of the turbulent 1960s, Washington, D.C. was 70 percent black. The segregation that had divided the nation for 100 years after the Civil War was finally being addressed by advocacy organizations, the courts, the White House, and Congress, but injustices were still widespread. Tensions were high. King's murder was the powder keg.

The next day, I took the H2 D.C. transit bus to Catholic University where I was studying. I went to my two morning classes and at lunch discussed the assassination with my friends Harry and Mary Anne. I remember describing how the night before I had heard over and over on the news King's voice saying, "And he's allowed me to go up the mountain. And I've looked over.  And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land." His powerful voice, heard again and again on the television, rather than becoming repetitious, grew in meaning and resonance. I said I remembered from the Bible that Moses did not get to the Promised Land but that the Lord allowed him to climb to top of Mount Nebo and to see the promised land of Israel spread out before him.

After my last class, and unaware, I got on the westbound H2 bus for home in Tenleytown. We went down Michigan Avenue until it turned into Columbia Road. As we passed the cross road of 11th street, we saw what looked like a parade of men and women with coats and dresses draped over their arms from stores that had been looted in reaction to King's death. Younger men and some women were carrying or pushing boxes labeled television sets and washing machines. Ahead, we could see that the street had been blocked by D.C. police cars and sawhorses. Our driver quickly turned left and tried to find his way around the blockade. Passengers pressed their faces against the bus windows and craned their necks to see what was happening. Someone shouted he could smell smoke from fires, but I didn't smell anything. My eyes were fixed on the road ahead. As a result of our driver's searching for unblocked roads, we were once again passing bus stops, but they were for another route. Our driver stopped for a little old lady, who got on and sweetly asked, "Do you go near the zoo?" "Lady, I don't know where the hell I'm going," he muttered. But he doggedly got us back on the H2 route, and drove up Porter Street, 34th, Connecticut Avenue to Van Ness, and Wisconsin Avenue to Tenley Circle. 

Once we were all home, our family sheltered in place for the next three days, watching for news of the riots on television. There were 13 deaths, 1,200 fires, and over 1,100 buildings damaged or destroyed. My Dad was especially shaken by images of fires burning throughout his adopted city. 

He had moved to Washington from his birthplace in Erie, Pa.  to attend Georgetown University and received his B.A, in 1922 and his law degree in 1925. He decided to stay in Washington, about which the poet Ernest Kroll asked, "How shall you act the natural man in this/Invented city, neither home nor Rome." In my Dad's lifetime, Washington acquired the Lincoln Memorial, whose construction he watched during his lunch breaks from his Georgetown classes, and the Jefferson Memorial. But few except for the African-American population were natives and the city's government was run by appointed commissioners rather than elected officials. Dad's law practice focused on the Italian American community with a base at Holy Rosary Church on 3rd Street in Northwest. Trying to support five children, he acquired properties with the plan of turning them into parking lots. I remember my brother Jim and I used to go with him on Saturdays when he drove to the Italian market ,A. Litteri, off 6th Street N.W., where he shopped for sausage and tomatoes, and then to his parking lots where he would collect the weekly returns from the African-American men who ran the lots. We'd sit in the car and wait and wait and watch him sitting on folding chairs, telling stories and laughing with the men. But he also worried about the neighborhoods, and in 1956 he moved the family from 12th and Ingraham, a neighborhood a mile or so north of where the riots were taking place in Columbia Heights and the Shaw neighborhood, to further west in Tenleytown.

As he heard the news about the riots, Dad became very quiet, both because of the destruction and loss of life and property and because he knew his properties were in the riot areas. Three were in the Shaw neighborhood, and Dad had fought the good fight for them against the D.C. government and its then governmental structure of appointed commissioners (which was later replaced by the structure of an elected mayor and city council). When he bought the sites in 1956, they were zoned as commercial. But after a poorly publicized hearing that he didn't attend, he found they had been rezoned as residential. Dad's practice didn't get a lot of publicity. But if you google his name you will find the case Aquino v. Tobringer, 298 F.2d 674 (D.C. Cir. 1962). The appeals court upheld the district court's judgment that the commissioners acted as reasonably as they needed to. When I was in law school, the case was cited as an example of how hard it is to fight city hall.

Those properties were undeveloped, caught in the riots in Shaw area, and rendered worthless. His existing lots were empty lots and were undamaged, but  the businesses around them were burnt out and no one was parking cars around there.

My Dad was ill from April on and he died in September. A year or so later, the D.C. government informed my mother that it was taking over my Dad's properties under eminent domain for the price of $1,000, which was 1/20th of what he had invested in them. She went to the attorney who had shared an office with my Dad and asked for his help. After a few months, he came back to my mother smiling and said he had gotten the price up to $2,500, of which he would take $1,000 as his fee. My Mom received $1,500.

My Dad's lost properties were just a small part of the burned and abandoned businesses that were caused by the riots and left the city with charred, empty shells over vast parts of its geography. They resembled areas bombed during a war. The city lost its peace, its dignity, and the voice of Martin Luther King, who had urged peaceful change. Protests about President Johnson's Vietnam War followed, and the idealism of the Kennedy years had morphed in to a murky metropolis filled with suspicion and distrust. A few years after the riots, I married and moved out of the city in which I was born and settled in Maryland. My mother stayed in the house in Tenleytown, and my wife and I visited her once a week. But we were tourists in a city of which I was no longer a part. Last year, after my mother died, we sold the house in Washington.

Fifty years after the riots, there has been some progress addressing the injustices that had helped spark the anger and violence that occurred in Washington and other cities. But many injustices remain. It took a long time, but the areas destroyed by the riots have finally been restored and bettered. But these traditionally black neighborhoods have been marketed to affluent young whites. The median home price in the Shaw area is $731,400, which is about the value given to our old 1,500 sq. ft. townhouse on Ingraham Street;  both are almost $200,000 more than the media home sales price in the city and $500,000 more than the U.S. median home price.  The percentage of African-Americans in the city is now just under 50 percent, compared to 70 percent soon after the riots. Many of those who fought for change and cried injustice 50 years ago have not benefited from the restored neighborhoods and stress that inequities remain.

Robert Kennedy, former U/S. attorney general and brother of the late President Kennedy,  toured the riot area on April 7, 1968, stepping over debris and shaking hands with residents.  Three days earlier on the night of the riots, when he was in Indianapolis, he spoke to those who had rioted or, in Indianapolis, were thinking of rioting. He quoted the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, who wrote in his play Agamemnon as translated by Robert Fagles, "In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the [awe-filled] grace of God." Two months later, almost to the day, he too was assassinated, dimming the immediate power of his optimism. But we can still strive and pray and hope that the wisdom will come.

Copyright 2018 by John T. Aquino