After the King Shooting
In the days that followed the Martin Luther King shooting, I drove around to the four main corridors in D.C. that had been devastated by the ensuing riots. I was totally familiar with all of what had been those hustling, bustling thoroughfares.
The nearest was H Street in N.E., just a few blocks from my house. The others were all in N.W., on U, 7th, and 14th Streets. Lots of National Guardsmen were standing around. People were wandering about, picking in the trash and the piles of rubble. The smell of water-soaked ashes was heavy in the air. I took a few photos, but mainly I was in such a numbed state that no words ran through my mind, while I stared at all the still smoldering wreckage.
Yet it wasn't as if I hadn't expected this. Till then D.C., despite its large rainbow population, had been spared the ravages that had already been wrought in so many other large cities. Every time I had looked at the blocks of modest businesses on H Street, I had wondered - with dread -- why it hadn't come to some minds to put the torch and the looting urge to those blocks as well? H Street looked ripe for the same disaster. I didn't think people in D.C. were materially different from those in Newark or Watts or Detroit or Harlem, and with the death of King it turned out that they weren't.
It was reported later that Stokeley Carmichael, the late, well-known rainbow militant leader, happened to be in D.C. that day, and as the looters and burners went to work on 14th Street he circulated among them and yelled, "Brothers, this is not the way!" But few listened. They may not have known who he was.
And they clearly had no idea of who Rev. King had been, either.
This reaction to the shooting was so completely opposite to my nature that I was sickened by it, and I still am, as if it happened just yesterday.
I associate those riots with bathtubs.
One of the pictures I took was of a bathtub that was hanging two or three stories up in the air, still sitting perfectly level but with no floor under it and supported only by pipes that attached it to the wall of an adjoining and still-standing building. The rest of that tub's bathroom and of its building had all fallen away, collapsed into a pile of debris far below.
And my main simile for those riots is of people crapping in their own bathtubs ...and then having to sit in it ...while likewise suspended from almost nothing, high and dry.
The nearest was H Street in N.E., just a few blocks from my house. The others were all in N.W., on U, 7th, and 14th Streets. Lots of National Guardsmen were standing around. People were wandering about, picking in the trash and the piles of rubble. The smell of water-soaked ashes was heavy in the air. I took a few photos, but mainly I was in such a numbed state that no words ran through my mind, while I stared at all the still smoldering wreckage.
Yet it wasn't as if I hadn't expected this. Till then D.C., despite its large rainbow population, had been spared the ravages that had already been wrought in so many other large cities. Every time I had looked at the blocks of modest businesses on H Street, I had wondered - with dread -- why it hadn't come to some minds to put the torch and the looting urge to those blocks as well? H Street looked ripe for the same disaster. I didn't think people in D.C. were materially different from those in Newark or Watts or Detroit or Harlem, and with the death of King it turned out that they weren't.
It was reported later that Stokeley Carmichael, the late, well-known rainbow militant leader, happened to be in D.C. that day, and as the looters and burners went to work on 14th Street he circulated among them and yelled, "Brothers, this is not the way!" But few listened. They may not have known who he was.
And they clearly had no idea of who Rev. King had been, either.
This reaction to the shooting was so completely opposite to my nature that I was sickened by it, and I still am, as if it happened just yesterday.
I associate those riots with bathtubs.
One of the pictures I took was of a bathtub that was hanging two or three stories up in the air, still sitting perfectly level but with no floor under it and supported only by pipes that attached it to the wall of an adjoining and still-standing building. The rest of that tub's bathroom and of its building had all fallen away, collapsed into a pile of debris far below.
And my main simile for those riots is of people crapping in their own bathtubs ...and then having to sit in it ...while likewise suspended from almost nothing, high and dry.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 8:23 AM
1 Comments:
Since I celebrated my 1st birthday about 3 weeks after Dr. King was shot, I obviously have no memories of it. I did write a couple of papers on him and his "I have a dream" speech in college english and I have often wondered how different our country would be if he hadn't been murdered. The same with JFK and RFK, of course, the three murders seem intertwined, at least in my history classes.
It is sometimes amazing to me how we, as human beings, seem to think that punishing ourselves punishes others. The ones we really want to punish. There is something to be said for the phrase "Cut off your nose to spite your face" although your bathtub analogy is more fitting.
It has been 40 years, what are the chances we have learned anything?
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