Lincoln Theatre

About this audio guide

This guide to the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. centers on one night in April 1968, when riots swept U Street hours after Martin Luther King's assassination, and follows two neighbors on the block through it: a chili counter that never closed its doors and the jazz-era theatre that once hosted Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. You'll hear about the Lincoln Colonnade ballroom downstairs, where crowds danced through a segregated city, and about the plea soaped onto a restaurant window nearby. Listen from the sidewalk between the two survivors of that spring.