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No one I knew had gone over to the National Cathedral the Sunday before, March 31, 1968 to hear King give one of his most memorable anti-war speeches, but many of us watched closely on our little black-and-white dorm room TVs that same night  when LBJ, damaged by the war in Vietnam, pulled out of the presidential race.

He was the guy sending our brothers and cousins and boyfriends to Vietnam; King we associated with the nonviolent philosophy of fading relevance to our generation. My Wheatley Hall room walls that year bore the angry, life-sized portraits of a menacing, two-gunned Huey P. Newton on his rattan throne, Malcolm X in his famous finger-pointing pose, and my literary hero, the magnificently indignant James Baldwin.

Something happened that night to set the city apart from most other American cities. D.C. became a black city that night, for better and for worse. No one wants to say that black people had to destroy D.C. to claim it, but that is what happened.

Black people had always been an indispensable fact of life in the city, from Benjamin Banneker's 18^th century surveying of the future capital, to the Negro maids and mistresses who provided domestic comfort for congressmen, tucked away in alleys and courtyards behind the stately rowhouses of Capitol Hill.

But in the hours and days after King was killed, the seeds were planted (violently) for black political ascendancy far beyond the conciliatory administration of Mayor Walter Washington. A decent and quietly effective leader appointed the year before by Lyndon Johnson, he tried valiantly that April 4^th to keep D.C. peaceful, but to us, in our brashness, he represented the past, the old, too-patient, subservient Negro past.

Decades would pass. The city would endure growing pains of corruption, mismanagement and failed governments, before gentrification began to erase the last marks of that Thursday night and the days that followed. Only in the new century would power and prestige and money come back to claim the city. But for a while D.C. seemed to become, with a vengeance, what a character in Gore Vidal's novel 1876, called it: "Africa," an acknowlegement of the presence and influence of black people had in the life of the city even as a largely servant class.

Springtime in Washington has always struck me as about as close to rapture as we are likely ever to experience here below. But Nature seemed to be trying to fix the wounded city that April, putting on a show of such aching beauty that it seemed a deliberate antidote to the hurt that hung in the air.

Soon Bobby Kennedy, the next best hope for many, would be felled, too. He, who had so eloquently linked the loss of King to that of his slain brother, showed up that spring, campaigning on the back of a pickup truck amid the blackened buildings at 14th Street and Park Road.

A few weeks later, waiting out his death watch became unbearable in the first heat wave of that D.C. summer.  I sought relief in the longest movie playing that day, taking three D.C. Transit buses across town to see the newly released Gone With the Wind in a McArthur Boulevard theater. When I came out at dusk the news inevitable--and familiar: RFK, too, was gone.

Already late, I finally had to get on home and start my summer job. That summer I worked patrolling the grounds in a place that seemed pretty sane that summer, our local mental hospital.

Alice Bonner teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. A native of Dinwiddie, Va., she was a staff writer at the Washington Post in the 1970s and 1980s.

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