Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968
New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968. Presumed first edition/first printing. Hardcover. xix, 245 pages. illus., maps. 21 cm. Index. Signed by the author. Ben W. Gilbert (born February 10, 1918, died February 28, 2007) was a journalist, editor, activist, and author. Gilbert completed a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1939. Gilbert was a city hall reporter in St. Louis, Missouri, before finding work as a reporter with the Washington Post in 1941. where he rose through the ranks to city editor in 1945 and deputy managing editor in 1964. Gilbert was deeply concerned about issues such as racism, corruption, and poverty, focusing his editorial work on exposing these problems. His work on investigating corruption in the Washington, DC, police department led to a U.S. Senate investigation in the early 1950s, and in 1968 he urged greater coverage of the civil rights movement and race riots. Regarding the latter, Gilbert edited and helped to write Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968 (1968). He left the Washington Post as associate editor in 1970. For the next year, he was editor of the television news program Newsroom, the forerunner of Newshour with Jim Lehrer. He then worked in the Washington, DC, mayor's office as director of planning and management. This was a key role as control of the nation's capital transitioned from federal to local government for the first time. This increasingly scarce book, especially if signed, endeavors to put together events, to seek patterns of action, and to reconstruct the background of the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr's. to aid in an eventual assessment. The principal record it uses is the extensive reporting and photography by the staff of The Washington Post during the riot period and the weeks following.
Derived from a Kirkus review: It was a "hometown riot" of classical conformations. Some 20,000 black Washingtonians, two-thirds of them under thirty, burned, looted, scavenged their white-owned neighborhoods in "disorders" sparked by the murder of Martin Luther King but stoked by long-term hatreds. The Washington Post, which had some 36 reporters and photographers on the scene, presents here a highly readable collation of day-to-day and post-riot coverage, the results of a computerized study, and an analysis of this riot in terms of the factors named in the Report of the President's Commission on Civil Disorders. Gilbert, a deputy managing editor, headed the Post team, and in this report seems to have missed nothing. First on the scene (the riot started at 14th and U Streets, a busy intersection) was SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, initially a peaceful "pied piper" who ordered merchants to shut down their shops "to show respect." who repeatedly told the crowd he was gathering to "go home," and who departed when the looting finally began. Then, the police, particularly the special riot units who behaved with commendable "restraint," and later federal troops who guarded already looted storefronts with bayonets. The rioters, of course, were there throughout, and Post reporters interviewed them on the scene, in the jails and later in their living rooms. Washington's black mayor was on hand too, but without much effect, for the "polarization of black Washington and white Washington" could not be straddled by one man. In effect, this divisiveness was the guilty party, and certainly The Post blames no other major factor, but ably presents the data. Dynamic reporting--a case study of contemporary significance. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Racism, African-Americans, Robert Byrd, Stokely Carmichael, Civil Disturbance, John Layton, Ralph Haines, Martin Luther King, Fauntroy, Harold Greene, Walter Washington, Patrick Murphy, Civil Disorders, Student Nonviolent, SNCC, Cyrus Vance, Poor Peo
[Book #64166]
Price: $250.00