Officers from three police stations, a provost guard and a Marine detachment finally dispersed the crowd, but according to retired Post journalist Peter Perl, who researched the riots in the 1980s, police “arrested more blacks than whites, sending a clear signal about their sympathies.”
The next night was worse. The mob grew — emboldened by the halfhearted response from the authorities — and spread throughout the city, yanking black men, women and children off streetcars for beatings. One man was assaulted in front of The Post, another in front of the White House.
Down Pennsylvania Avenue, a brand-new dean at Howard University, historian Carter G. Woodson, narrowly escaped harm by hiding in the shadows as a white mob approached.
Others weren’t so lucky. Woodson later recalled what he witnessed: “They had caught a negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him. I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself.”
The next morning, the city executive — Washington did not elect a mayor at the time — condemned the rioters and sensationalist coverage, saying “it is the duty of every citizen to express his support of law and order by refraining from any inciting conversation or the repetition of inciting rumor and tales.”
Then came an item on the front page of The Post, under the headline “Mobilization for Tonight.” “Every available service man” had been requested to meet on Pennsylvania Avenue between 7th and 8th streets, it read. “The hour of assembly is 9 o’clock and the purpose is a ‘clean-up’ that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.”
Later, the NAACP blamed this article more than any other for the mayhem that followed. In his 1977 book about the history of The Post, legendary reporter Chalmers Roberts called it “highly provocative and shamefully irresponsible.”
An estimated 500 guns were sold that day, but it turns out they were bought mainly by black residents. And when the police forced gun dealers to stop selling, black organizers arranged an “underground railway” of firearms and ammunition from Baltimore, according to Krugler. A black citizens group distributed leaflets urging “our people . . . to go home before dark and to remain quietly and to protect themselves.”
White cavalry and Marine units were deployed across the city, but it was unclear whether they would be fighting the mob or joining it; some of the servicemen who were called in had rioted the night before.