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Um, so I'm just wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the, the DC riots during during the time? Yeah. Let me give you a little

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background first. Um, in the earlier the the riots that were getting ready to talk about happened in April of 1968 pursuant to the assassination of of Doctor King.

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Um, historically, though, before that point there had been riots in Watts, which is in and around the greater Los Angeles area. And they had also been riots in Newark, new Jersey. Um, earlier in the 60s.

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Now Washington. And, you know, my father came up from Jim Crow, South Carolina, um, in the 40s during World War two. And he said that if he had known

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that this area was as segregated as it was, he would have kept on up to New York City. Um, so for context, what that basically means is Washington was predominantly white, but it was

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basically divided geographically by Rock Creek Park. And so everything west of Rock Creek Park, which is where American University is located, um, is predominantly white. Everything east of Rock Creek Park was predominantly black.

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Um, and there were places downtown in Washington DC, um, that you were not allowed to shop. There were, um, stores that women were not allowed to use the dressing rooms.

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Um, you know, because of segregation and racism. So, um, you know, my, my environment was, was, was pretty, um, cloistered, if that's the word. Um, because I was not really exposed to that part of

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Washington, DC. I mean, I was in northeast, um, and southeast, and I had little or no reason to come, uh, west of Rock Creek Park.

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So, um, you know, there was a there was a tension that was building that, um, I was not really aware of. Um, as a matter of fact, I didn't

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think that, um, that Washington could have the kind of riots that whites in new Jersey and Newark, new Jersey had had because, um, you know, we were not the, the the segregation was not in your face in an overt kind of a way as it was in, you know, down south.

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I mean, you're talking fire hoses and dogs and some of those kinds of things not being able to vote, you know, and I was exposed to that through grainy black and white, uh, television, um, programs and productions.

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And it seemed very, very foreign to me. We used to go to, uh, Atlantic City for the summer because my dad had two sisters there.

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So we used to go, uh, for like about two weeks every summer. And I remember going to the boardwalk and and seeing more white folks than I had ever seen in my entire life. I mean, the whole place was white.

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And, um, you know, during the Democratic National Convention that was held there probably in 64 when Lyndon Johnson got the nomination. I mean, I just remembered seeing a lot of media there.

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Some national, uh, celebrity anchormen. Huntley and Brinkley, people that a lot of people don't remember, you know. That that kind of a thing.

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So, um, in in April of 1968, I was about to graduate high school, and we were just beginning to get a sense of black identity as it related to people of color. James Brown say it loud.

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I'm black and I'm proud after I got to AU. But while I was in high school, um, that that awareness, um, was was not as prevalent as it later became. And I give you an interesting story.

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I mean, our senior year, there was a woman who wore one of my classmates wore her hair in an Afro style. Now all of the other women had been straightening their hair. This woman grew her hair into an Afro style.

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And you would have thought that, um, uh, Tina Turner or Diana Ross or somebody was in the house. Everybody was was saying like, you know, uh, Mimi has an afro.

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Mimi has an afro. And and it was so strange to everybody wanted to see it, you know, everybody wanted to look at it. So, so, so, so there was like, a Negro history club, you know,

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that, um, some people were involved with and some people weren't. Um, but but we didn't we didn't have a sense of overt racism that was right in our faces in

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Washington, D.C. proper. So the anger caught me off guard because it felt like there was so much there were so much anger and and it felt to me like the anger was because here we had a doctor,

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Martin Luther King, who was trying to, um, get different races to, to to work together and to get the United States to live up to its promise of democracy. Um, and, you know, he was he was a

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turn the other cheek kind of a guy. And, um, uh, you know, he and he was assassinated. Now, you know, there were some folks who followed people like Malcolm X, there were people who followed people like Stokely

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Carmichael. There was a schism that was beginning to, um, become apparent between the old school civil rights movement and the new school, what I would call, um,

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they were called militants and black nationalists. And their deal was, you know, we don't need anybody to give us anything. We're entitled to it, you know?

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We, um, have not forgotten, uh, 200 years of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching and all of those things. But but that was a matter of raising awareness. And it took a while for people to, to, to, for people to have their,

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uh, their, um, consciousness raised to a point where they even understood what was going on there. And so I think that when, um, I mean, you know, I was 13 when President Kennedy was assassinated and it was, you know, it was like,

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um, oh, man. It was like a death in the family. It was like a death in the family, because Kennedy had the reputation of being, um, an advocate for people of color.

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Um, and, and so then, you know, fast forward five years and, and Doctor King is trying to promote the same kind of unity and breaking down doors and barriers and that kind of thing. And when he was assassinated, it's like the city snapped.

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I mean, it was like they just snapped. I lived one block over from one of the dominant riot corridors. It's called the Atlas District now because that's where the Atlas Theater is.

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But it's between Union Station and, um, and RFK Stadium. You know, where the trolleys are running up and down now.

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But it was a commercial strip. It was a black commercial strip. So a lot of people didn't go downtown to shop because they could just go right there to shop.

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And so, um, I'm riding home, uh, on the bus, and I see these police officers in riot gear, and I'd never seen that. And there was and there was four of them in one squad car, and they all had this riot gear going on and I said, you know, something is

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something is is is real, real different here. And by the time I got home, um, they had they had set that whole, uh, uh, commercial district. I mean, they had set it on fire,

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you know, and there were some there were some white shop owners there. There were some black shop owners, you know, um, it was an integrated kind of a situation.

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But right before Easter, they, they they just set it on fire, man. And, um, you know, the news, um, as it was coming in that night from, from around the city, I

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mean, I was I was numb because I didn't really understand, um, why people were reacting, uh, the way that that they did. It was not something that that I had anticipated. My my wife, Pam calls it, uh, internalized oppression.

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Where you have had so much oppression and discrimination heaped upon you that you know when it comes out, it comes out in a way that is really kind of self destructive. And I didn't hear anything about, um, any neighborhoods in the white

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section of town, um, that had been subjected to, uh, that kind of arson and looting in some of those kinds of things. Um, but in but the commercial districts, in the black neighborhoods, they were just they were just obliterated.

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Um, and and so then, you know, you had to sit through the, you know, the, the funeral and some of those kinds of things. Um, and it was just it was it was very, very, very depressing. Um, and it was also very, very angering at the same time.

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It was kind of like, okay, so where do we go from here? You know, we tried to develop a dynamic around integration with races and cultures working together. And you've rejected the person you know who wanted to do that in a

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very peaceful manner. And basically all you've left are a bunch of really, really angry people. And most of them are very, very young.

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And, um, they, they think that the, the methods and the methodologies of the civil rights movement, um, are, are dated and and out of step with where young black America is going. When I say young black Americans, I mean a lot in a lot of ways, the

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kids who were on college campuses, snick was the, uh, what was it? I can't remember. SNCC it was the student, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Nonviolent

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Coordinating Committee, which had grown out of the civil rights movement in the South. Um, NAACP, uh, and there was another organization that that Doctor King, um, um, was the head

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of, and I can't remember the name of it now, but the one that was involved in the, um, the, uh, the bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama. Um, the ones who, you know, the

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people who had the Freedom Riders, who had gotten on, uh, Trailways buses and rode down into the south to desegregate bus stations and who had been assaulted, um, beyond recognition. I mean, they had to be so brave to be able to do that.

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So, so young black people were seeing that and they were basically saying, you know, I'm not into turning the other cheek. You know what I mean? Um, you know, um, and and and Malcolm X, who at the time was involved with, with what was then

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the Nation of, of Islam. Um, and they were called Black Muslims. I mean, they and then you had the,

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you know, Black Panthers, they were talking basically about self-defense. They were saying, listen, if you come for us, you know, you better pack your lunch because we're not

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going out like that. Okay. Um, you know, this this, uh, this passiveness has not gotten us anywhere.

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Um, it's it's a new day, and and we need to talk about, uh, more aggressive kinds of strategies in order to, to, to to progress to the point where we think we should be, um, and, um, you know, the, the, the It's, um, the city just

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boiled over, um, because of all of that pent up anger and frustration and understanding that we were not getting a fair shake. There were some things that were, um, available to other races that were not available to us.

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My first, um, really, um, awareness of racism. I was like 5 or 6 years old and there was something called the Glen Echo Amusement Park, which is

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actually not that far from American University. And they ran these commercials, you know, black and white, these clowns and and roller coasters and people just having a great time. I mean, you know, it was it was a smaller version of of Disneyland,

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right? A small amusement park, but an amusement park just the same. I saw it, I was like five, six, seven years old.

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I went outside and I said, man, I want to go to Glen echo and my peers. You know, the kids on my block looked at me like I had two heads. They said, you can't go to Glen echo.

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I said, why not? They don't. They don't let colored people into Glen echo. They don't let Negroes in the Glen echo. Okay.

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Um, and I was, I, you know, it made no sense to me. Um, and I'm still, you know, in my, uh, naive, underdeveloped, uh, consciousness.

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I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Um, so, you know, when I got to American University and the leadership was, was more aggressive and more forward thinking and more into the mode of self determination versus, um, you

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need to do something for us. It was we can do whatever it is we need to do for ourselves because we have that ability. Um, and it it's it's it's just time.

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Um, so they assassinate Doctor King, and then they assassinate Bobby Kennedy, and, you know, and again, it's like, um, they are taking out the people who are advocating for us. I mean, they had assassinated John Kennedy in 63, and this is five

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years later, in 1968, and within the span of two months, they assassinated Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. And, you know, it was just things just went completely sideways after that And on top of that, they were promoting Richard Nixon

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because there were, you know, we're in the middle of the Vietnam War. And students were saying, look, you know, we don't have a beef with the Vietnamese.

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Uh, Muhammad Ali was saying, I'm not going to step forward, um, to be drafted. Um, uh, because of, uh, of my religious tenets.

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And so you got all of those things going on at the same time, and it felt like, you know, things were coming apart at the seams. So when you had the riots and the

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assassinations, um, it was like moving forward. There was a sense of unpredictability that I had I had not felt in my lifetime. I mean, nobody thought that a

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president could be assassinated. I mean, that just put us into complete and total shock. But once that happened, that put

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us on notice that, um, there was no predicting what might happen next. And so the elect, uh, Richard Nixon and things really go from bad to worse.

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Um, and it was almost like a period that we just had to, to suffer through. Um, and in our, in our end on this note, because, um, we talk about history repeating itself, we talk

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about Barack Obama being elected president. And then the next thing we know, we've got Donald Trump in the presidency. And, you know, he is probably and

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it is a result of the the backlash from President Obama's presidency. It's like, okay, you swung things to an extreme that we really weren't ready for. And in order to balance things

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out, we got to swing it back to the opposite extreme. And Donald Trump has emboldened, um, a level of racism that had been below the surface, the the white supremacy stuff. We hadn't heard that since the Ku Klux Klan.

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Um, you know, the skinheads, um, um, and the Nazis, all of those things began to manifest themselves again because they were emboldened by Donald Trump. Um, you know, and as a backlash

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for the election of a, of an African American president. And so now, you know, we're at we're at a point where, you know, how do we get that genie back in the bottle because it's out. You look at Florida and the crazy stuff that's going on down there.

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You know, they talk about critical race theory and black history. Well, you know, I really wasn't exposed to black history when I was coming through the DC public school system up through the 12th grade.

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My real exposure to it for the first time was on American University's campus. It was like, you know, Bill Cosby at one point did a show that he called Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed.

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It just it was not happening. And so now they're trying to tell us that we are distorting the reality of this country's history. And but what I'm really finding is that they have dumbed down the

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populace. There are fewer people going to college, and these people don't really know how to participate in what I would call criminal.

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I mean, not criminal critical analysis. You know, they fed this stuff off of off of Fox News and they, they can't think outside of the box,

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whatever they're fed, you know. They believe because it fits their narrative. And the oldest, the oldest, um,

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um, uh, strategy in the book is, well, say that the reason, the reason that you don't have a job is because people of color are or who are unqualified for the jobs are being placed in the jobs, you know, they're dragging on the economy, yada, yada, yada, yada.

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So and the reality is that the people who really have the money, um, have a vested interest in keeping us separated and at each other's throats so that people don't turn around and and put the focus on them.

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Um, you know, it's like the pandemic people were going crazy about, you know, things were getting shut down and the joke in our community was, okay, so you've only been black for five minutes and, you know, and you're

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overreacting to things. I know I have kind of gone off on, on a tangent, but I think that to come back around the riots are a physical manifestation of the pent up things that we have been

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subjected to forever in a day. And, you know, um, from slavery, through reconstruction, through lynching, through Jim Crow, all of those things have gone on.

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And and we basically have not been we had not been able to react to it at a level that was consonant to what our frustration and our anxiety level was. And when Doctor King was assassinated, it all boiled over.

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And and that was what we got.