Free Disintegration by Eugene Robinson

anger turned into widespread looting.
    From the
Washington Post
account:
    Youths with television sets, electrical appliances, clothing, shoes, and other items began streaming past Carmichael at 14th and U. Slipping away, he ducked into the doorway of the SCLC office, stood for a moment, and then dashed across 14th Street to get in a waiting Mustang and speed away. It was 10:40 P.M. Carmichael knew his actions were being watched closely by federal authorities. He has since said he was determined to give them no cause to arrest him. Clearly, his decision to close the stores was an important factor in collecting the crowd. But he and his aides made strenuous efforts to check the mob when it grew unruly. He took his exit at the precise point of no return—as the memorial street demonstration exploded into riot. 2
    Similar scenes were being played out in more than thirty cities nationwide and scores of smaller towns. The King assassination was too much to bear. It was not just a murder but a taking—the theft of our leader, our future, our reason for continuing to hope that America was finally ready to accept us as true Americans. The paroxysm of violence that followed was deliberately destructive: They take from us, we take from them.
    In the end, of course, we took from ourselves. The self-destructive nature of the 1968 riots was evident to all, even as the mayhem was unfolding. Everyone could see what came of such explosions—the scars were still fresh from the riots in Watts in 1965, and Detroit and Newark in 1967. For most of the century, the term “race riot” had referred to rampages by white mobs—Atlanta in 1906, Washington in 1919, Tulsa in 1921. Now it was black America’s term to explode with inchoate, insensate, indiscriminate rage.
    In Washington, the night of April 4 saw widespread looting in the blocks around Fourteenth and U. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Friday, April 5, that the fires began. Scores of buildings were set ablaze, not just in the U Street corridor but also in Columbia Heights, stretching up Fourteenth Street to the north, and along H Street Northeast, another historic black business district across town. Crowds estimated at up to twenty thousand clashed with police; firefighters had a hard time getting into the war zones and a harder time getting back out, in the end watching helplessly as the many individual columns of smoke merged into a funereal pall. The city’s black mayor-commissioner, Walter E. Washington, who exercised limited authority by leave of Congress, was helpless to end the anarchy; a curfew and a ban on the sale of firearms and alcoholhad little effect, as the rioters had already smashed their way into the gun stores and the liquor stores and taken what they wanted.
    Federal officials were alarmed. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the deployment of more than thirteen thousand federal and National Guard troops in an attempt to restore order—the biggest armed federal occupation of an American city since the aftermath of the Civil War. Marines with machine guns were sent to guard the Capitol, while soldiers from the Third Infantry ringed the White House. The military presence succeeded in containing the violence to U Street, Columbia Heights, and H Street—Washington’s white neighborhoods and commercial districts were untouched, as was the city’s core of monuments and federal offices—but rioting in the affected areas continued until April 8. It petered out, finally, as white-hot anger cooled, supplies of looted alcohol were exhausted, and new targets became scarce.
    Twelve people were killed in Washington—a remarkably small number, given the scale and duration of the riot—and 1,097 were injured. Six thousand people were arrested. Much more shocking than the human toll, however, was the physical devastation of the cityscape: More than 1,200 buildings were burned, including 900 stores. The historic African American commercial districts had been destroyed.