Georges Pelecanos

Pre-'68, Washington was still a Southern town in a lot of ways. But everything changed, man. Like, it changed immediately, because white people got scared, basically. The irony of the whole King assassination was that he was all about nonviolence, but his assassination speeded up the Civil Rights movement in one weekend by 10 years. I saw it. Black people were no longer just going to sit around and wait for it to happen, and white people were no longer going to put up such resistance after they saw the city burn down in one weekend.

The fact that my parents made me do this was the greatest thing that ever happened. I remember them saying, "Look, you're 11 years old now, you're going to work. You get on the bus every day, you go downtown, you transfer to the F Street line, you'll find it. You could do that in '68, just put your 11-year-old son on the bus and tell him, "Go to work."

And thank God they did. That's why I'm sitting here. There's no doubt in my mind that that summer is why there are all these questions in my mind. George Pelecanos (born 1957 in Washington, D.C.) is an American author of detective fiction set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He has worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire.