This was back in the Eisenhower-thru-Kennedy era. After a decade of block-busting, our congregation was regrettably unable to integrate; there was violence in the streets, and when MLK would be shot some years hence, riots burned a major street in NE DC and it wouldn't recover for the next twenty years. instead the elders transferred the building to a black congregation.
Our generations-deep, tight-knit congregation and neighbors who kept DC working other than in government scattered all around a 50-mile radius, and some even moved out of state to be near extended family. Members of the church's main women's circle drove hundreds of miles all over the metro area once a month in the ensuing decades to keep raising money for the missionaries, retirement home and hospital, but eventually after 60 years of continuous service, they aged out and it ended.
I was among the first generation not to be a part of these endeavors. When I was grown, I had to find a neighborhood, find a church, interview and pay babysitters, find work contacts and find people to repair my car or things in my house, because was no longer ensconced and networked with family and lifelong friends. It was "liberated," but grew wearisome, expensive and often dangerous. I couldn't take my child around and show him where all his forebearers had lived. When I would hear the lyrics of, "Anatevfka", I would tear up. The couple of times I went back to the old neighborhood to look around, black people asked me, "Can I help you?" as if I were from a foreign country. My skin color tipped them off.
About ten years ago, I dropped by and chatted with the pastor and some of the people who had been "originals" when the church changed over. The church that had held 600 worshippers every Sunday morning was down to about 20 regular attendees. The stained glass windows on the alley side of the sanctuary had been knocked out by vandals, and everything inside was in disrepair.
I later found a news article saying that the congregation had tried welcoming a group of 125 mostly white young people who were gentrifying the area and meeting in a school gym on Sundays, but that the congregants had been offended by the "new" people's white habits, like arriving on time and going straight to the kitchen to make the coffee when it was their turn instead of greeting everyone and talking before doing their chore; so they rejected a merger, and would rather fail than integrate with white oppressors. Seventy years of civil rights efforts and misfires on all sides, and this is what we've come to. Nothing will ever be enough.
For our family, being torn off our roots was like a death. My parents never got over it, and I still think about it often, like one does for a long-gone grandparent. Where's the grave, where I can mourn and lay flowers?
I've lately seen signs in the neighborhood saying, "Stop the gentrification of this historically black neighborhood."
In what neighborhood did you grow up? (I think you’ve told me this before, but I don’t recall.)
I know that you know this stuff, but for the out-of-towners who have a lot of very outdated notions: DC always had a substantial black population, typically a quarter to a third of the total. This of course grew rapidly in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, topping out at over 70 percent. The white middle class started moving out when suburbanization became the thing after WWII. Then came school desegregation, which set off an exodus in what was still a largely southern town. The ‘68 riots put some more nails in the coffin. But by the end of the 70’s, the pendulum was already swinging back. I arrived in ‘79; I was not the only white guy east of Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill but there were darn few of us. The black middle class started moving to the suburbs and gentrifiers started coming back into the city. We now have gentrification on steroids, while a lot of suburbanites are spending four or more hours a day in their cars. Cycles.
I have never seen a listing of neighborhoods that were, in fact, built originally as black neighborhoods. Historically a lot of the black population (and lower class, often immigrant, white working class families) lived in alley housing, often with either the husband or wife working as a servant. A lot of this housing was torn down by 1960’s urban renewal, but displacing people into big projects turned out to be a cure worse than the disease.
Old Town Anacostia was originally a white working class area. Frederick Douglass had to win a landmark legal case to break a restrictive racial covenant before buying Cedar Hill, his home in Anacostia. For out of towners who are still operating on old information about Anacostia, Cedar Hill is now a National Historic Site run by the NPS and is well worth visiting. The surrounding area is now gentrifying, though there are enough aging housing projects in the area to keep things lively for the time being. (Those need to be shut down, and many of them will be as they age out.) Prior to buying Cedar Hill, Douglass also owned a house on the 300 block of A Street N.E., a block from the Supreme Court.
Most of Capitol Hill was built as white working and middle class housing. Along the fringes, Kingman Terrace and Carver Langston were built as black neighborhoods. I don’t know about Rosedale, Trinidad or Ivy City, which has an honorable history as a railroad workers’ neighborhood before it crashed and burned. That happened mainly because passenger rail travel declined and most of the jobs disappeared; the young, the skilled, and the energetic folks moved out and the neighborhood collapsed. It’s being rebuilt now. Shaw grew out of the freedman’s camps established during the Civil War and was always heavily black. (It is named for William Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts, and as far as I know, the renamers haven’t gone after it yet.) Next door, Ledroit Park was built as an upscale white neighborhood but became majority black in the 1920’s, partly because of its proximity to Howard University. So, DC has always been a mix.
Anyhow, you are absolutely correct. In most of today’s overheated debates about the evils of gentrification, the “historically black neighborhoods” being claimed by activists were actually historically white areas that flipped in the 50’s-70’s, and in a few cases earlier. The lefties operate on the Brezhnev Doctrine of racial entitlement. But it does leave me curious: what neighborhoods were in fact built originally for black homeowners, back when DC was still a segregated southern city? I’ve never seen a good list.
A 200 year old local white Baptist congregation bought the small dairy farm next to us back around 1960, and built a huge church. All through the sixties, they were adding parking lots and more wings. They had a full time school, all kinds of gigantic meals and fairs. By the mid eighties, they were renting prime times to a “non denominational church”, a Korean church, and any other group they could find. A few years later, they sold out and did not buy another church. Not a black in sight. Only thing I can think of is that they had been given a huge lump sum by a dying congregant or two back in the fifties, spent it, attracted freeloaders, went in to debt, and that was that.
Thanks for sharing that.
Further clarification for me that without Jesus we would be powder-kegs of anger.
A very interesting and poignant story. I notice you did not mention the Interstate as causing the destruction, as liberals would have it.
I remember hearing about red lining, but I was very young so the subject didn’t interest me at the time. I didn’t pay any attention to it. It wasn’t until I was older and had seen a different sort of red lining thet I understood it as it directly effected me.
During the Clinton years, commercial fishermen in the Pacific North West were being forced out of their generations and life long profession because they were the wrong race. Many were forced to sell their homes because there was no longer any work, the communities revolving round commercial fishing since the early part of the 20th century.
In stepped the realtors offering them low ball prices in the 10s of thousands of dollars, but more money than most had ever seen in one pile. So they sold out, moved to the city, or entered the Clinton retraining programs which, when they were finished, discovered they had been trained for jobs that did not exist or had been phased out.
The realtors? Since the homes of many commercial fishermen were built on the coast or on the Columbia River near the ocean or other locations with views of the ocean and mountains, they resold the homes to uber-rich Californians and Texans for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash (big money for a home then), realtors laughing all the way to the bank.
The fishermen? Homeless, penniless, unskilled and jobless, wife divorced. Having to remake themselves and their lives from scratch at all ages.
I thought of going back to the beautiful town overlooking a large bay with a view of the Cascades and Olympic mountains I once called home for 30 years, but was forced to leave, too many memories would come flooding back, I’d get sick to my stomach. I can never go home again.
But according to the article, we all should really blame the interstate system for enabling literal hoards of wealthy people to come into our area, our homes, our lives and push us out so they can enjoy the views while playing on pretend country farms overlooking the Pacific Ocean with views of the green and snow capped mountains in the distance. We get to enjoy the view of our neighbors yard ...
A moving story.
I think of some things in my family’s past - particularly a small midwestern town six of us siblings spent the WWII years mostly with our mom while our dad was assigned and reassigned hither and yon by the Air Force. We have so many fond memories from there and have often wondered if only our family could have remained there, instead of all of us moving four more times before finally settling in California, but with only 2 years before my oldest brother graduated high school, which would be followed every one or two years, for 14 years, as all eight of my parents children would “grow up” and leave home, with many of us off to different parts of the country.
Then I am reminded of the story of Lot, and particularly Lot’s wife. Her story is more than what it seems directly - the decadence of Sodom. Her story is her refusal to accept a change that just had to be(she could not help “looking back”, even knowing G-d commanded her not to). That is the meaning of her being turned into a pillar of salt - salt does not change, it is always salt.
I have a sister who when growing up I imagined was the least one of us that would accept being uprooted and moved around as an adult. Ha. She moved away shortly after she married, and her husband would move his family four more times before their kids were grown, and moved my sister and him again after he retired. That last move was the hardest on my sister, as that was moving from where they had spent the most time, their kids finished school & married local guys, and they had lots of church, family and friend connections. But they moved anyway, and she has made new friends and become part of new (to her) congregation and now feels very much at home where she is.
Change is hard, sometimes very hard, very hard to accept - no matter the cause or reason, right or wrong.
But life is about moving forward more than looking back.