L
EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • March 28, 2018
‘
INSIDE A woman’s quest to feed homeless - 2 Va. rallies with nation on gun control - 5 A church campaign to ‘reclaim Jesus’ - 10 P’Burg schools seek books for students - 13
Richmond & Hampton Roads
LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE
50 years ago, ‘the colored man’s paradise’ erupted
On June 17, 1963, the body of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers was borne through the streets of Washington, D.C. bound for a historic black church on 14th Street. People bared their heads and wept as the hearse passed, followed by hundreds of mourners. Evers had been assassinated in Mississippi five days earlier and was to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Twenty-five thousand people would turn out to view his body at the John Wesley AME Zion Church. “There’ll be no trouble,” an NAACP leader said. “Only . . . troubled consciences.” Washington was, after all, “the colored man’s paradise,” as some whites called it. Despite decades of slavery, segregation and discrimination, the District was said to be special. There was, of course, the huge Ku Klux Klan march in 1925, and the real estate covenants that barred blacks, and the swaths of poverty and want. But it wasn’t Mississippi. There was a solid black middle class. And there were vibrant selfcontained business districts like the glittering “Black Broadway” of U Street. To some, it was a pleasant village — a “secret city,” as a noted historian called it, sheltered and walled off from the white world outside. But to others, it was a prison from which there was no escape, and within which there was misery, anger and frustration that had smoldered for more than 100 years. On April 4, 1968, the paradise erupted, and on 14th Street outside the church where Evers had rested five years before, the village was burning. Gas, ruins and rage Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the paroxysm of rioting, destruction and arson that engulfed broad sections of Washington after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. In three days of upheaval, 13 people were killed. Two of them were never identified. The skeleton of a third was found in the rubble and identified three years later, according to news accounts. Hundreds of blazes left vast avenues of burning wreckage and nightmare scenes of desolation. The air was filled with smoke and the smell of tear gas, and the streets were littered with broken glass and tumbled-down bricks, as if in the aftermath of an air raid. Stretches of 14th Street NW, Seventh Street NW and H Street NE, among others, resembled combat zones, and 13,000 members of the Army, Marines and National Guard were brought in to regain control. Local businesses were devastated. Display windows were smashed and merchandise was carried off in waves of looting. More than 200 liquor stores and taverns were looted, burned or
The scene at 14th and U streets a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. PHOTO: Washington Star destroyed, according to a post-riot report by the Alcohol Beverage Control Board. Drugstores, markets, shoe stores, clothing, furniture and appliance stores were hit. Looters seized everything from cough drops to a grand piano. “It was anger,” said Tony Gittens, then a student activist at Howard University who took to the streets. “Real anger.” “It was justified,” he said. “That’s what I thought. It was absolutely justified. It was almost like ‘what they asked for.’ ” “It had to blow,” he said. Charlene Drew Jarvis, a fourth-generation Washingtonian and former member of the D.C. Council, recalled: “There was a confluence of anger and hurt about the death of Martin Luther King.” “But there was also a way of breaking out of a cage in which African Americans felt they had been contained,” she said. “A lot of it had to do with, ‘We’ve been contained here. We're angry about this. We owe nothing to people who have confined us.’ ” In the end, 7,600 people were arrested and hundreds were injured. What had happened to paradise? Had it ever existed? If so, could it ever return? Washington has been transformed in the decades since the riot. The ravaged corridors now sparkle with new prosperity and new residents, many of them white. Much of the boom has bypassed blacks, edging some out of old neighborhoods, while others remain stuck in impoverished communities plagued by violence, bleak housing and beleaguered schools. Recently, a black cashier at a trendy market on 14th Street remarked to a black customer marveling at the well-heeled clientele: “I grew up here. It’s not my city anymore.”
The remnants of darker times In 1910, a judge in the District of Columbia ruled that a 7-year-old mixed-race child named Isabel I. Wall was “Negro,” and therefore barred from attending a white school in the segregated city. Isabel looked white, according to news accounts of the time, and her mother was white. But her grandfather, O.S.B. Wall, had been a freed slave, a noted abolitionist and a pioneering black officer in the Union army. He was the District’s first black justice of the peace, appointed in 1869 by President Ulysses S. Grant. He was an official with the Freedmen’s Bureau — the agency set up to help freed slaves — and a member of the District’s legislature, according to historian Daniel J. Sharfstein. A lawyer and a champion of Washington’s black community, he became a member of the city’s black elite. But 19 years after he died in 1891, amid mounting racial oppression, his son, Stephen — Isabel’s father — began what Sharfstein called his “escape from blackness.” Stephen Wall built a house in the white enclave of Brookland and enrolled his daughter in the local white school. “My child is as white as any,” he said. But after the school heard about Isabel’s ancestry, she was expelled. Her family sued. The court ruled, however, that the existence of black ancestors, no matter how distant, was enough. “The child is of Negro blood,” the judge concluded. “Her racial status is that of the Negro.” Washington was then in the midst of some of the darkest years of racial segregation and discrimination. As enslaved people on local farms, black people had been in Washington before it was Washington and were present as the city and institution of slavery evolved. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, slaves hired out by their masters helped build the U.S. Capitol and the White House, and sometimes were allowed to keep a little of the money they earned for their owners. But the horrors of slavery were there for all to see. The local jail served as a kind of holding pen for slaves and kidnapped free blacks headed elsewhere, according to historian Constance McLaughlin Green in her 1967 book, “The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital.” One observer wrote of watching from a door of the Capitol as a slave coffle passed, “men, women and children . . . bound together in pairs, some with ropes, and some with iron chains.” In 1849, a little-known congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln introduced a bill calling for the abolition of slavery in the District. The bill
(continued on page 10)