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Authors: Eugene Robinson
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them to public schools where expectations were high, discipline was strict, and going on to college was considered inevitable, not impossible.
Thurlow Tibbs, a prominent African American art dealer who died in 1997, once recalled of the old days on U Street: “We are forced to deal with one another on every economic level. In my block we had school teachers, a mail man, a retired garbage man, and a registrar of Howard University.” 1 But by the late 1960s, many if not most of the educated professionals had moved away. A community that once had been racially segregated but economically and socially integrated was well on its way to becoming segregated in all three senses—black, poor, isolated.
A vacuum was developing on U Street, and into it came a rush of undesirable pathology—poverty, teen pregnancy, single motherhood, drugs, crime, growing isolation from the mainstream. Which is not to say that those things did not previously exist. There is a sense in which the hollowing out of the middle class on U Street simply allowed everyone to see dysfunction that had been there all along. There were always poor people on U Street; there were always single mothers; there were always “ladies of the night” and “dope fiends” and drunks. It’s true that more of this pathology arrived, but it’s also true that out-migration of affluent, intact families and the demise of the neighborhood’s economic underpinnings made it easier to see the pathology that was already present. And the phrase “growing isolation from the mainstream” can be misunderstood.U Street was always isolated from mainstream white society—that was the whole reason for U Street’s existence. What happened was that some black Washingtonians were allowed to join the white mainstream. Those who failed to make the shift—those left behind—became increasingly isolated from mainstream values, mores, and aspirations.
That was the situation on the morning of April 4, 1968. By that evening, the U Street neighborhood—and the rest of black America—had changed forever.
* * *
Crowds began gathering spontaneously up and down U Street when the shocking, tragic, unbelievable yet all-too-believable news from Memphis began to circulate. Black America was never monolithic, but at certain rare moments it had recognized a single leader and made him the repository of our hopes and dreams, the symbol of our perseverance and pride, the avatar of our relentless, righteous aspiration for the justice that America had promised but cruelly withheld. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had become such a leader, and now he was dead, assassinated by a sniper as he stepped onto a balcony at the Lorraine Motel. Even the first news reports included the detail that the suspect, who was still at large, was a white man.
Among those who came to the intersection of Fourteenth and U streets—the heart of what was left of the U Street business district, and the place where King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had its local headquarters—was a young activist named Stokely Carmichael. Born in Trinidad, Carmichael had attended nearbyHoward University and was a former national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. According to an account written later by editors and reporters of
The Washington Post
, Carmichael led a group of his student followers into Peoples Drug Store, an outlet of a local chain, and demanded that the white manager close the store immediately out of respect for King’s death. The manager, G. N. Simirtzakis, immediately complied, and the students moved on to tell the rest of the U Street area’s stores to close down.
Carmichael spent the rest of the evening shuttering all the area’s stores and trying to keep a lid on the crowd’s rising emotions—at one point noticing a young man who was brandishing a gun and wresting the weapon away from him. He was only partly successful, however. Grief and
Thurlow Tibbs, a prominent African American art dealer who died in 1997, once recalled of the old days on U Street: “We are forced to deal with one another on every economic level. In my block we had school teachers, a mail man, a retired garbage man, and a registrar of Howard University.” 1 But by the late 1960s, many if not most of the educated professionals had moved away. A community that once had been racially segregated but economically and socially integrated was well on its way to becoming segregated in all three senses—black, poor, isolated.
A vacuum was developing on U Street, and into it came a rush of undesirable pathology—poverty, teen pregnancy, single motherhood, drugs, crime, growing isolation from the mainstream. Which is not to say that those things did not previously exist. There is a sense in which the hollowing out of the middle class on U Street simply allowed everyone to see dysfunction that had been there all along. There were always poor people on U Street; there were always single mothers; there were always “ladies of the night” and “dope fiends” and drunks. It’s true that more of this pathology arrived, but it’s also true that out-migration of affluent, intact families and the demise of the neighborhood’s economic underpinnings made it easier to see the pathology that was already present. And the phrase “growing isolation from the mainstream” can be misunderstood.U Street was always isolated from mainstream white society—that was the whole reason for U Street’s existence. What happened was that some black Washingtonians were allowed to join the white mainstream. Those who failed to make the shift—those left behind—became increasingly isolated from mainstream values, mores, and aspirations.
That was the situation on the morning of April 4, 1968. By that evening, the U Street neighborhood—and the rest of black America—had changed forever.
* * *
Crowds began gathering spontaneously up and down U Street when the shocking, tragic, unbelievable yet all-too-believable news from Memphis began to circulate. Black America was never monolithic, but at certain rare moments it had recognized a single leader and made him the repository of our hopes and dreams, the symbol of our perseverance and pride, the avatar of our relentless, righteous aspiration for the justice that America had promised but cruelly withheld. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had become such a leader, and now he was dead, assassinated by a sniper as he stepped onto a balcony at the Lorraine Motel. Even the first news reports included the detail that the suspect, who was still at large, was a white man.
Among those who came to the intersection of Fourteenth and U streets—the heart of what was left of the U Street business district, and the place where King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had its local headquarters—was a young activist named Stokely Carmichael. Born in Trinidad, Carmichael had attended nearbyHoward University and was a former national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. According to an account written later by editors and reporters of
The Washington Post
, Carmichael led a group of his student followers into Peoples Drug Store, an outlet of a local chain, and demanded that the white manager close the store immediately out of respect for King’s death. The manager, G. N. Simirtzakis, immediately complied, and the students moved on to tell the rest of the U Street area’s stores to close down.
Carmichael spent the rest of the evening shuttering all the area’s stores and trying to keep a lid on the crowd’s rising emotions—at one point noticing a young man who was brandishing a gun and wresting the weapon away from him. He was only partly successful, however. Grief and
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