The 1968 Riots: When U Street Burned
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
The news reached Washington on the evening of April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight. Martin Luther King Junior had been shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was pronounced dead at seven oh five in the evening. By nine o'clock, crowds had begun gathering on Fourteenth Street Northwest.
The fires started within hours. By the morning of April fifth they were moving along the corridor, block by block. Fourteenth Street, U Street, H Street Northeast, Seventh Street Northwest. The heart of Black Washington, the neighborhoods that had survived legal segregation and built institutions, the theaters and clubs and barbershops and pharmacies that Jim Crow had forced into self-sufficiency, they burned.
By the time it was over, on April eighth, twelve hundred buildings had been destroyed across twenty blocks. Thirteen people were dead. Twelve thousand federal troops and seventeen hundred and fifty National Guard members occupied the city. It was the largest deployment of military forces in an American city since the Civil War.
The District of Columbia already had a complicated relationship with the neighborhoods that burned. Urban renewal programs through the nineteen fifties and sixties had been demolishing Black DC neighborhoods for the Southwest Freeway and new federal buildings, displacing an estimated twenty-three thousand mostly Black residents before a single fire was set in nineteen sixty-eight. The riots accelerated and deepened what urban renewal had already begun.
Some blocks of U Street remained vacant for a decade. H Street Northeast stayed largely empty for thirty years. The economic geography of the District was reshaped by those four days in a way that outlasted any single building.
The Green Line Metro arrived at U Street in nineteen ninety-one, and the neighborhood began to recover. Howard University, nine blocks north, had stayed open throughout. The African American Civil War Museum opened on Vermont Avenue in two thousand four, three blocks from where some of the worst fires had burned.
What does not appear in the standard account is what the community that rebuilt that neighborhood had already survived.
