The Chocolate City era in Washington began almost exactly 50 years ago, when, in April 1968, the city’s segregated enclaves of blackness became ground zero in the Holy Week Uprising that swept over a hundred cities across the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As was the case in many other cities, the sheer sense of possibility embodied in him and the rolling civil-rights movement kept desperation in the ghettos from boiling over, even as school, housing, and police systems conspired to restrict and control black citizens. Then, that possibility was gone . Stokely Carmichael was here, trying and failing to marshal the rage and sorrow of a downtrodden urban class into organized protest. The ghettos and business district went up in flames—and the city soon felt a backdraft as the white citizens who’d once dominated it left at accelerating rates .

The ensuing era became a study in contrasts. Granted home rule in the 1970s, a city that had become a thoroughly black polity elected an unbroken string of black mayors. Chuck Brown and the progenitors of go-go music built the sound from funk and gospel in music halls and dance clubs across the city. Black power brokers and titans from the civil-rights movement built new organizing structures and accumulated real capital and a national visibility that reached its zenith with the 1995 Million Man March.

But at the same time, the seeds of instability were sown. The other government in town, the national one, helped promote a developing urban paradigm of mass incarceration and an ongoing, disastrous War on Drugs, allegedly inspired by the very conditions outside the doorstep of an American president. The crack epidemic and its purported carceral policy cures—encouraged by both the federal government and several prominent members of black communities—depleted urban centers that had already been hollowed out by the riots decades before. And decades of disinvestment and population loss, along with the influence of white enclaves within the city and in its satellite municipalities, made it clear that Chocolate City was an unsteady state, one at the whim of developers and gentrification.