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The aftermath of the Washington, D.C., riots (Photo courtesy Darrell C. Crain Jr. Special Collections, DC Public Library, Washingtoniana Division)
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The aftermath of the Washington, D.C. riots, 1968 (Photo by John Moeser)
Contrary to the headline, what you’re about to read is not a firebrand sermon, but rather a bit of personal history written by one who listened to such sermons when growing up in the capital city of the Bible Belt — Lubbock, Texas. The headline, however, is an accurate description of what my wife, Sharon, and I experienced in the late ’60s while living just outside the capital city of the United States.
On April 4, 1968, I was driving east on Constitution Avenue to Capitol Hill with plans to attend congressional hearings on proposed civil rights legislation. I was listening to the radio in my Volkswagen Beetle when, suddenly, there was a break in the regular programming with a report that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
A major riot had broken out near 14th and U streets, and everything in Washington closed down. A few days later, announcements over the radio and television noted that volunteers were needed in the riot zone to assist relief organizations. I volunteered with a Catholic relief agency to distribute clothes, food and other essentials. I brought my camera so that I could record what was happening on the streets. Fires had been put out, but there was smoke everywhere. Most memorable were the armed National Guard troops patrolling the streets in sight of the Capitol and the Supreme Court building.
Before the riots, Sharon and I had volunteered to work in the Poor People’s Campaign by assisting the thousands of low-income people who left their homes in the South and elsewhere to ride in horse- and mule-drawn covered wagons to Washington. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had initiated the campaign in November 1967 to focus attention on poverty, irrespective of race. A large camp of tents called “Resurrection City” was erected on the National Mall.
Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 (U.S. News & World Report magazine photograph collection, courtesy Library of Congress)
We had gone to training meetings and planned to assist the effort. But after a few sessions, the leaders of the training announced that from that point onward, only African Americans were to be involved; whites had to leave immediately. These were the years of the Black Power movement, and King himself was criticized for being too accommodating to white interests. Still, that didn’t deter Sharon and me from visiting Resurrection City and talking with residents.
It was my experience with King’s Poor People’s Campaign that decades later contributed to my studies on 20th-century Richmond and how racial segregation grew worse with the passage of time. My work focused particularly on how urban redevelopment, done in the name of “progress,” took place at the expense of black neighborhoods.
Increasingly, I delved into poverty, its concentration in the city and its expansion into the suburbs. This work involved residents and public officials who persuaded the mayor to create an Anti-poverty Commission in 2011. After more than a year of study, the commission issued a lengthy report whose centerpiece was the creation of an Office of Community Wealth Building that would harness the procurement power of private enterprise, universities, and state and local government to create black-owned businesses located in high-poverty neighborhoods. But while the office has provided employment training and support since opening in 2015, social enterprise has not materialized.
King’s death led to the collapse of the Poor People’s Campaign and, with it, the loss of the nation’s first concentrated effort to address poverty. If he were alive today, not only would he be aghast at the spread of poverty, he would be shocked at the enormous increase of school segregation.
What gives me hope is the work of another African American pastor and social justice advocate. A year ago last June, the Rev. William J. Barber II organized what he called a new “Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.”
Aerial view of Resurrection City, Washington, D.C., May 21, 1968 (Photo courtesy Library of Congress)
For Sharon and me, those days in Washington were transformative. What led us to move to Richmond in 1970, however, was employment. I accepted a teaching position at the new Virginia Commonwealth University (previously known as Richmond Professional Institute). Sharon got a job as a public high school English teacher in Richmond, where she taught for over 30 years.
Guiding me through every period of life have been the great saints of my life, beginning with my mother and father. And then there were dear friends who stood beside me during the darkest of times and rejoiced with me during the best of times. One of the saints who touched my life in profound ways was someone I never met, but one whose life and work guided my life and whose life we celebrate this month.
John V. Moeser is a professor emeritus of urban studies and planning at VCU and retired senior fellow at the University of Richmond’s Bonner Center for Civic Engagement.
