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Katherine's flight to Euclid Street was part of a larger exodus of both people and businesses as a cloud of almost palpable gloom settled over the city. Katherine was one of those suffering from the psychological aftershock. Walking past the eerie hulks of burnt-out buildings to get to her job made her nervous. Even worse, she had come to fear the drug addicts and petty criminals who frequented the restaurant; many of them had taken part in the destruction and seemed to have become less law-abiding as a result. One night, after a customer was shot to death by a police officer while Katherine looked on in horror, she quit her job and went on welfare.
Businessmen brave or foolhardy enough to try rebuilding in the riot corridors met with one failure after another. Even before the rubble was cleared away, John Snipes opened a custom-shirt shop on U Street to cater to snappy dressers in the neighborhood. It quickly faded in the area's dreary economic climate. "You couldn't get insurance. You couldn't get credit. You just couldn't get anything," says Snipes. "You'd look around and see all these empty buildings, all this devastation and that put a damper on us." Since then, Snipes has tried two other enterprises, a blue-jeans shop and a convenience store. Both have gone out of business.
Katherine's experience on welfare threatened to push her down into a spiral of dependency and hopelessness. But she did not surrender. "I refused to give in because I had children who were dependent on me and I couldn't let them down," she says. "It was really a struggle, but I always believed in God and I knew that whatever means it took for me to survive, beyond violence, I would survive. As long as you had a job, you could make it." Eventually, she got one at a Woolworth variety store, where she still works as a clerk.
Katherine had two things going for her besides pride: a long-term relationship with Leroy Bennett, the father of most of her children; and the support of her strong-willed cousin Nancy Bryant, who lived next door with her own large family. That meant that an adult was usually available to supervise the kids, an increasingly urgent task during the 1980s, when drug sellers began working Euclid Street.
Fortunately, the dealers were mostly neighborhood youths Katherine and Nancy had known since they were children. When the peddlers set up an open-air drug market on the street corner, Katherine and Nancy shooed them away. The women's efforts to keep their children out of trouble, however, were not entirely successful. Just three weeks ago, Nancy's 16-year-old son was wounded in the leg when shooting broke out at a dance. Katherine's daughter Teresa gave birth to a daughter Janai out of wedlock five years ago. But showing the determination she got from her mother, Teresa works full-time in a food- service job while studying to be an accountant.
In 1990 a crisis threatened to undo everything Nancy, Teresa and Katherine had done to keep their families together. Their landlord had decided to sell the cluster of row houses they lived in, and any new owner was likely to evict them so that the properties could be renovated and rented at a higher rate. City law requires that tenants be granted a first shot at buying their apartments. But to Katherine the sum required -- $190,000 -- was daunting. "For people like us, there was no way we could come up with that."