RIOT AFTERMATH: GETTING BACK TO BUSINESS : Anger Resonates Over Continent : King protests: Reaction to the verdict erupts in the nation’s capital. Demonstrations spread to New York, Atlanta and Toronto.

Demonstrators blocked traffic on one of the main bridges into Washington, D.C., for about two hours Monday as protests belatedly sprouted over the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case.

Several hundred people also demonstrated outside the White House and Justice Department, and thousands of District of Columbia employees stayed home from work.

Police said about 200 people sat down across the Washington approach to the 14th Street bridge over the Potomac River. The bridge carries thousands of cars daily between Washington and the Virginia suburbs, and the demonstration prolonged the trip home for many Virginia-bound drivers.

It ended after participants met with Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, who wore a black arm band to protest the verdicts.

Kelly, who came to the protest site to talk with the group, was booed at first when she tried to emphasize that the verdicts did not occur in Washington.

Kelly had proclaimed Monday a day of orderly demonstration, and an estimated 14,000 district employees took advantage of a “liberal leave policy” to take a day’s paid vacation and show displeasure with the outcome of the police beating case.

The protests at the Justice Department and White House also ended peacefully after speakers decried the outcome of the Los Angeles case and expressed sympathy with the anger evident in the rioting that followed the announcement last week that none of the four Los Angeles police defendants had been convicted.

In New York, police and student demonstrators protesting the verdicts clashed on a Manhattan campus. At least 11 people were arrested and eight officers were injured in the disturbance, police said.

About 50 police officers in riot gear moved in to disperse about 200 black demonstrators during the rally at Manhattan Community College.

Police said the crowd was blocking the entrance to the college in lower Manhattan. Scuffles and fistfights broke out as police moved in, and at least eight officers suffered minor injuries. An unknown number of students were also believed to have been hurt, a police spokesman said.

College students in Atlanta began taking exams Monday, despite calls for a boycott that followed violent demonstrations in that city over the King verdicts.

Police said their presence near the six-college Atlanta University Center was being returned to the usual level.

Petitions circulated around the center’s campuses called for a boycott of final exams to protest “unending oppression that we have and continue to experience at the hands of this government.”

But officials at Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College and Spelman College, three of the center’s colleges, said there were no reports of absent students.

Meanwhile, Mayor Maynard Jackson called for an apology and restitution to Korean business owners whose shops were looted during the violence in Atlanta.

The aftermath of the King verdicts was also felt in Canada. Black demonstrators in Toronto clashed Monday with a small group of white supremacists. They later blocked a major city intersection and stoned City Hall.

Several windows were broken by stones and eggs thrown by demonstrators, as mounted police guarded municipal offices on Toronto’s main square. There were no immediate reports of injuries or arrests.

A crowd of about 300 demonstrators, most of them black, gathered first in front of the U.S. Consulate to protest the King verdicts and the police shooting of a black youth in Toronto over the weekend.

Halfway through the rally, they converged on a small group of white supremacists who carried placards that read: “We denounce the racist murder of whites” and “L.A. burns. T.O. (Toronto) next?”

Police ushered the counterdemonstrators into a nearby office building.

The demonstrators later marched to a major intersection, where they sat down and blocked traffic for a short time.