17. Red-Lining #1 & #2, 1962

Red-Lining, 1962 #1 (2022)

I started this project back in 2012, when I was trying to figure out how to create a Public Art installation dedicated to the 1968 Riots in Washington, D.C. All of the places I’ve lived in DC over the past 46 years have been adjacent to the neighborhoods savaged by the 1968 Riots.

When my parents decided to return to the city in 1975, they bought a house on F St. NE, mostly because it was close to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) where my father worked. F St., of course was two (2) blocks from H St. NE, one of the three neighborhoods that were savaged by the riots that followed after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968.

If ’04-04-68′ sounds like the number for a combination lock, you’d be right – the assassination of MLK at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee brought about riots in 110 American cities, resulting in estimated at $25 million locally and hundreds of millions of dollars once you count Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

The only city spared from popular vengeance was Boston, Massachusetts and that only because James Brown was playing there and everyone was invited to a free concert once King’s death was announced.

Despite my progressive private-school education, I never heard of the riots while I was growing up in D.C. during the ’70s and ’80s. Like the insurrection at the US Capitol on January6, 2020, the bruises were too fresh and shocking for the event to become part of the national dialogue.

The partitions that divided Berlin into eastern and western sectors was repeated here in the Nation’s Capitol. Rock Creek Park was always a natural partition that separated the affluent northwest quadrant of the city from Northeast, Southeast and Southwest Washington for decades.