This Is a Riot

WHAT does a riot look like, sound like, feel like?

In Washington, D.C., on a Friday afternoon two weeks ago, it was two huge pillars of gray smoke rising above the tan brick office buildings of K Street. Absolutely silent, thousands of cars filled with white government workers were evacuating the city. Every afternoon, they head for the bridges over the Potomac River in tangled horn-honking confusion, with their blue Maryland and black Virginia plates. But today, they were locked together bumper-to-bumper, heading for Key Bridge in a massive, determined phalanx. No one blew a horn. Quietly, the shirtsleeved car-pool drivers and passengers looked over their shoulders at the two pillars of smoke.

On the ground, on 7th Street and on 14th Street, what looked like cool smoke to the office-workers was hot fire to the blacks, the cops, and the firemen. Before the weekend was out, there would be 851 fires in Washington. Damage would be estimated at 13.3 million dollars. 645 buildings would be destroved, including 212 residential units. Ten persons would be killed, more than 1000 arrested. But on Friday afternoon, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, things were just beginning.

On 11th and M, a fire broke out suddenly in a paint store. Down the block, two old Negro men were sitting on a stoop, looking up the street at the flames. "See that kid run in there with that fire bomb?" one said. The other nodded. Within seconds, two fire trucks had begun heaving water. One of them hoisted a ladder with a hose attached over the flames and water poured down on them like a waterfall. Firemen moved to the three-story tenement next door; it was in danger of going up next. They carried out three children and helped five or six adults to safety. Everyone stood on the sidewalk and watched the fire, which was bright orange and hot because it was a paint store.

There were no troops in Washington Friday afternoon, and the cops were drastically outnumbered by the rioters. They had to stand by and let the looters play Supermarket Sweeps in the Safeways. Naked manequins stood on the sidewalk, plastic wigs in the gutter. Everyone was carrying big bundles.

In the suburbs it was very quiet now. A curfew was on in the city, and blockades were being set up on the borders of the District. People with no place to go were watching television, looking for a station that would show them looting and fires. But very few did.

WALTER WASHINGTON, the short, round Negro mayor of the city, finally appeared on television at 1:25 a.m., told everyone to calm down, said that things were being taken care of. Mayor Washington was locked up all weekend with his aides. He did not walk around the city as John Lindsay did in New York, and his rides through the riot area were for the most part secret.

Washington was criticized later for this performance, but it is clearly in character for him. He is not a politician but a bureaucrat and technician. He was not elected to office but appointed. As a result he has not been forced to keep in touch with the people of the black ghetto, and he has not kept in touch with them. They have never fully trusted him, and after the King Weekend, they will trust him even less.

The rioting got worse Friday night, but it was never fierce. Both the police and the rioters were very restrained. There were few instances of attacks on whites, few knifings or shooting, only a kind of gay and systematic looting and burning. Nearly all the stores that burned belonged to whites, but the apartments above them belonged to blacks.

In the morning the white storekeepers would drive in from suburban Virginia and Maryland and cough on the tear gas and paw through the rubble looking for unbroken liquor bottles and missed jewelry. Most of them were uninsured and ruined. Few would return to the inner city, where their ancestors had made their fortunes in the small cut-rate credit furniture stores of 7th Street.

Saturday morning on Seventh Street was ugly. The sun rose coldly on blocks of burned out buildings, piles of cement-encrusted bricks, charred wood reaching silently into the air. And all over there was a horrible coat of sweat--the dew of the morning and the hosing-down of the night. Smoke hung quietly in the air; the yellow-brown tear gas was still there.

All along the street was destruction. Cars were not allowed and three or four troops stood at every intersection keeping people away. Still, fires were burning and every now and then a new one would start up. Fire hoses shot plumes of water straight across the street. And standing there on the wet asphalt, you could feel cold spray on your head and hands.

An Army general was talking to the chairman of the City Council. "Could be trouble tonight," the general said. "Lot of them have guns. We caught one up the street with three pistols and a machete. Could be sniping tonight. But we're ready now." The general shook hands with the chairman and they both drove off.