Out of the Ashes

By JACK E. WHITE WASHINGTON

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.

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."

For once, Katherine seemed defeated, but Nancy vowed to fight. "I was determined that whatever it took we were going to stay here," says Nancy. She found an ally at Washington Innercity Self Help, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income people buy their own homes. With advice from WISH, they set up the Malcolm X Court Cooperative Association to take over two adjoining row houses containing six apartments, assuming they could come up with the money. Nancy became its president.

While WISH searched for major sources of funding, the women scrambled to raise $1,000 each to use as downpayments before the Dec. 31, 1991, deadline for buying the buildings expired. They badgered neighbors and friends for donations, sold Christmas cards and organized an excursion to Atlantic City.

Meanwhile, WISH put together a complex finance scheme to buy and refurbish the buildings using funds from a local government agency, Washington's New Columbia Community Land Trust and the Massachusetts-based Institute for Community Economics. The total cost: $500,000. The deal was closed two days after Christmas in 1991. Said Katherine: "Thank you, Jesus."

The Federal Government's Section 8 housing program will subsidize the mortgage payments so that Nancy, Katherine and Teresa will only have to pay 30% of their monthly income -- whatever that may be -- toward paying back the loans. Work at the building is now nearly complete, and the families will move into their new homes in May. "The best thing about them is that they're brand new and they're ours," says Teresa.

Many others have not fared so well. Despite numerous promises from the district's government, the section around 14th and U remains a disaster area. A city office complex has been built on the corner where the uprising started, and there is a new subway station just a block away. Nevertheless, few of the businesses that were burned out have been replaced, and many residents have given up hope they ever will be. Almost everyone with the means to escape has fled, leaving behind mostly those too poor or broken in spirit to make a difference in the neighborhood's fortunes. Says lawyer Stanley Mayes, one of the few middle-class blacks who still live there: "In some ways the riot was the demise of this community. People who had lived here for generations suddenly saw themselves as 'residents of the ghetto,' words they had never used about themselves. They began to feel that the neighborhood was expendable. They got about the business of moving up and moving out."

Yet if all goes well for Katherine, she plans to live on nearby Euclid Street for the rest of her life. While it is perilous to draw broad conclusions from a single example, some lessons from her story seem unassailable. One is that with enough grit and the aid of private and government organizations that are willing to invest in them, the poor can rise above the most adverse circumstances. The other is that in Washington and elsewhere, there is not enough of either commodity to fulfill the need. If there were, the aftermath of the city's riots would not be such an epic tale of suffering.