Llewellyn
King
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April 7, 2008
1968: The Most
Traumatic Year
Nineteen Sixty-Eight was, as they say, a year to remember.
Many extraordinary events were crammed into 1968, including the
launching of the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese; U.S. ground
troops from Charlie Company rampaging through the South Vietnamese
hamlet of My Lai, killing more than 500 civilians; President Lyndon
Johnson's announcing of his decision not to seek re-election; the
assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; student rioting in Paris;
the assassination of Robert Kennedy; the “Prague Spring” uprising
against Communism in Czechoslovakia; and the tumultuous Democratic
Convention in Chicago.
As
an editor at The Washington Daily News, an evening newspaper, the
enormity of Martin Luther King's assassination was hard to get my mind
around. And the riots left scars on the structure of the nation's
capital that would never quite heal. Only now, two generations later, is
the Shaw neighborhood, which grew out of freed slave encampments in
northwest Washington, returning to normal urban vitality. Much of Shaw
was engulfed in flames in 1968, and it fell into the worst kind of decay
– its hollowed-out buildings housing crack-addicts, feral animals and
rats.
As
in other cities, fire did the damage, but politics and litigation
delayed the recovery. There may be something informative here for those
who think Baghdad will spring back to life, or that Zimbabwe will return
to the status quo ante. Recovery is hard and slow.
Little did we know it, but The Washington Daily News was to be a
victim of the riots. Looters and rioters destroyed the newspaper kiosks
that were a feature in Washington and essential to selling our afternoon
tabloid. The Daily News began to fail because it depended on
street sales, and the infrastructure for that was destroyed. The city's
other two newspapers, The Washington Post and The Evening Star,
fared better because they had a larger percentage of their circulation
home-delivered.
After the fires were extinguished, the smell of smoke hung over the
city, a curfew was in effect and troops were deployed on street corners.
Those of us with press credentials were able to drive around, and we
were constantly speculating how eerily similar this must have been to
events behind the Iron Curtain.
Over time, the riots of 1968 have been referred to more and more as
“race riots.” But at the time we just called them “the riots,” because
one of the consequences was a period of elaborate politeness between
whites and blacks. This was noted by two of the best chroniclers of the
time: Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard News Service and Richard
Harwood of The Washington Post. One of them beautifully
encapsulated the calm after the storm when he referred to black drivers
yielding to white drivers at street intersections. After one such
incident, Harwood said that “both thought they had done something
significant.”
The rioters' anger seemed to be directed more toward property than to
people: It seemed to be black rioters against white-owned property
rather than blacks against whites. In the worst of the rioting, on April
5, I walked up the Shaw-U Street corridor without any sense of
trepidation. Looters, their arms full of appliances, were everywhere.
When they banged into you, they apologized. One looter even suggested
that I walk along a wall for safety. “That way the brothers will see
you, and you will be safe,” he said.
It
was after the riots that fear gripped the city, and white flight to the
suburbs began and continued for many years. Washington's suburbs boomed,
and the inner-city decayed. A somewhat unconsciously integrated city
became a segregated one that pretended otherwise. Large corporations
added blacks to their boards of directors, television stations added
black anchors and the newspapers searched high and low to beef up their
core of black writers. Tokenism became an industry.
Martin Luther King's message advanced in some ways – mostly because
there was a recognition that black grievances were well-founded and
deeply seated. But some of the remedies have been as harmful as the
disease, excesses of affirmative action and reverse racism.
Of
course, civil rights was only one of the issues roiling the nation in
1968. There was also the women's liberation movement; the environmental
movement; and underlying it all, the Vietnam War. The war touched every
aspect of national life. And as people turned against it, they did so
with anger, often fueled by the drafting of a family member. Some
institutions were torn apart by the division. The Reporter
magazine, a liberal alternative to The National Review, was
destroyed by contention. Washington columnist Joe Alsop lost the
confidence of editors across the country. Paul Harvey, the conservative
radio commentator, reversed his position on the war because his son was
facing the draft.
Nineteen Sixty-Eight tested loyalties and caused many people to
re-examine their politics and to think through their predispositions. A
majority of Americans were well on their journey from right to left
because of the war.
The assassination of Martin Luther King, followed shortly after by the
assassination of Bobby Kennedy, convinced many people that the nation
had lost its way. Unfortunately, it chose Richard Nixon to lead it out
of the darkness.
© 2008 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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