“D.C. should not stand for disorder and crime”: Nixon's Law and Order Campaign in Washington, D.C.

Throughout the decades following World War II, Washington, D.C., served as an important site of symbol and struggle for a nation in the throes of racial turmoil.  As “the window in which the world looks into our house,” the city bore a special responsibility to project a progressive march toward racial justice.  But in 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon challenged this depiction with his own narrative of postwar urban decline.  That year, he called the District the crime capital of the world and demanded increased police surveillance in the city.  But as he launched his “law and order” campaign, black activists fought back against his draconian regulations.

This paper traces the ways that national actors wove the nation’s capital into a narrative about crime and decline in the U.S. and how black activists challenged that story.  Following his inauguration, President Nixon announced that he would appoint new prosecutors and reorganize the District’s courts.  He also pledged funds to increase the size of the city’s police force by 25 percent.  The most controversial component of his local law and order campaign was a crime bill for Washington which would allow the preventative detention of dangerous suspects and the use of “no knock” search warrants.  The issue drew ire from black Washingtonians and resuscitated the networks of civil rights activists that had lay dormant after the 1968 riots.  Together, the work of black community activists and the city’s municipal government serves as a counter-narrative to the racialized discourses about postwar urban cities circulating in the nation.  My paper explores the ways that the nation generally and Washingtonians specifically received Nixon’s challenge to the postwar political order and how it rekindled the relationship between residents and local government, helping to fuel the push toward Home Rule for the District.