1968 14TH and CLIFTON STREETS NW
Following the April 4, 1 968, assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., rioting broke out when angry crowds gathered at 1 4th and U Streets. The disturbances, here and around the city, lasted four days. At least 01 people were killed with hundreds injured, and property dam-age was extensive. Across 1 4th Street was Smith’s Pharmacy, owned by Larry Rosen. The pharmacy’s staff and customers were predominantly African American, “and everyone got along,” Rosen recalled. So he was stunned when, on April 4 and 5 , Smith’s was looted, then burned. “We merchants had nothing to do with Dr. King’s murder,” Rosen reflected later.“Why were we being attacked?” Smith’s never reopened. A few weeks after the disturbances, Howard University historians interviewed people who had participated in the violence. One 21 -year-old explained that, upon hearing the news of Dr. King’s death, he headed out, looking for friends who shared his horror and outrage. But the streets were filling with angry people breaking into businesses. Looting seemed a way to strike back at a system in which “the white man can come in here and set up stores..., take his money, and then go out to the suburbs and deny the black man the opportunity to come out there.” For 52 years afterward, private developers shunned this and many riot-damaged areas. In 1 993 the Nehemiah Group, a coalition of nonprofits led by the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, broke ground on retail spaces and afford- able housing.
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