After the Civil War, mayors in Washington D.C. were appointed by the president. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Washington as the District’s mayor-commissioner. Months later, after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, Washington took to the streets of the city to calm down potential rioters.
“I walked by myself through the city and urged them to go home and help the recovery of people who had been burned out,” he remembered years later. Washington was credited with avoiding major riots. “Few men can boast that they received a burning city and left it on its way to recovery,” said D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge H. Carl Moultrie in 1979.
President Richard Nixon reappointed Washington twice, and when Congress allowed mayors to be elected directly in the district, Washington, the great-grandson of a slave, became the first elected Black mayor of a major U.S. city. When he left office the city had a $40-million budget surplus. He died October 27 at age 88.