WHEN MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr. was killed 25 years ago this week, black Washington exploded. Angry mobs surged through the streets exacting a terrible revenge for the slain civil rights leader. Before federal troops quelled the violence, 11 people died, hundreds of businesses were destroyed and countless thousands of lives were torn apart.
Among those caught up in the storm was Katherine Washington. Though she was only an innocent and terrified bystander during the upheaval, 25 years later it still affects her life and the lives of her children. What sets Katherine apart from most low-income blacks is that a long odyssey she began amid the smoke and flames of the riot will soon reach a triumphant conclusion. She owes her good fortune to a combination of factors that are in short supply in the inner city: strong family ties; steady work, although for low wages; and help from both the government and innovative community organizations. Without any one of those, the result would probably have been tragedy, as it has been for so many others.
Before the riot, the poor could at least gain a toehold in neighborhoods like the one at 14th and U streets in Northwest Washington, where the violence began. Though the district had faded badly from its heyday in the 1940s, when it ranked among the most vibrant black communities in the nation, it still had movie theaters, nightclubs and scores of thriving businesses. True, schools were slipping, crime was getting worse and some of the more affluent residents had moved away. But most of the area's hardworking families had no intention of abandoning one of the few relatively decent places in racially divided Washington that blacks could call their own.
For Katherine, moving into the 14th and U area would have been a step up. A 10th-grade dropout with four children and no husband, she lived in a nearby but more crime-ridden neighborhood. She was waiting tables at a restaurant on Seventh Street, in a busy black commercial section, when she heard about the trouble at 14th and U. A glance at the street confirmed that the violence had already spread. People were breaking windows, and flames leaped from a building not far away. Shaking with fear, Katherine raced to her apartment, where she was horrified to discover that the tavern right next door had been set on fire. As sirens wailed and wisps of tear gas tainted the air, she bundled up the children and made her way through the gathering chaos to the home of relatives in a safer neighborhood.
When she returned to her apartment the next day, the tavern had been reduced to a smoldering relic. She resolved then and there to find a safer abode. She could afford little on her meager wages, but found an apartment on Euclid Street. Though it was only blocks away from the place she had fled, the quiet block, mostly occupied by working-class black families, seemed like a different world. She has been there ever since.