That Must Not Be True of Tomorrow

The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow. —LANGSTON HUGHES, “History,” 1934 The original Busboys and Poets sits at the corner of Fourteenth and V Streets NW, just a block north of the epicenter of the 1968 riots. A combination restaurant, bookstore, lounge, and theater, Busboys took its name from Langston Hughes, the one-time busboy at D.C.’s Wardman Hotel who gained international renown as a poet (albeit one who denounced the snobbery of D.C.’s black upper class). After it opened in 2005, it became an immediate commercial and cultural success, attracting young, hip Washingtonians who swarmed the surrounding Shaw neighborhood in the twenty-first century....

There’s Gonna Be Flames, There’s Gonna Be Fighting, There’s Gonna Be Rebellion!

The chapter charts the decade between the April 1968 riots and Marion Barry’s victory in the 1978 mayoral election. The nation’s capital witnessed a remarkable political revolution during this unpredictable period of citizen-driven politics, cultural and political experimentation, and swift change. D.C. gained a measure of local power for the first time in nearly a century, and Washingtonians of all races – including a growing Hispanic community in the Adams Morgan/Mount Pleasant neighborhoods – pushed for self-determination, community control, and participatory democracy. The transformation was tumultuous, marked by devastating riots, surging crime, and middle-class flight from the city. Politics was often uncivil and chaotic as Washingtonians struggled to be heard in a clamorous era marked by attacks on authorities – Congress, the police, city planners, developers, and others. But for city residents unused to local political power – and particularly for black Washingtonians – it was a thrilling, hopeful time.

Slavery Must Die

This chapter describes the increasingly bold efforts by local abolitionists to challenge slavery and the slave trade in Washington, as well as the attempts by local white leaders to protect slavery and discourage black migration to the city. Washington served as a central stage in the growing national drama over slavery. Despite Congress’s attempt to squelch public debate with the “gag rule,” the question of slavery in the nation’s capital would not die. Frustrated abolitionists, unable to overcome what they called the “Slave Power,” went “underground” to help Washington-area slaves escape to freedom. As more and more enslaved people “absconded” (the term often used in advertisements for fugitives), city leaders struggled to preserve the peculiar institution by capturing and punishing runaways. With the nation tilting ominously toward civil war, slavery’s opponents and its defenders placed Washington on the front lines of the struggle over human bondage in America. The chapter culminates with the emancipation of D.C.’s 3,100 enslaved people in April 1862, more than eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Our Boastings of Liberty and Equality Are Mere Mockeries

This chapter shows how, in the decades after the War of 1812, slavery and the slave trade in the city invited domestic and international criticism as the movement to abolish slavery focused its efforts on the District. As abolitionism became a national force in American politics in the 1830s, the national battle over slavery was waged in large part in and about the nation’s capital, and local abolitionists, black and white, actively challenged slavery within the city itself. Washington became the national battleground over slavery not only because it was the seat of government but also because of the city’s political impotence. Because Congress had veto power over any legislation passed by the city’s local council, national leaders could (and did) use Washington as a pawn in their political power struggles. Escalating political and racial tensions erupted in an 1835 race riot that concludes the chapter.

Of Slaving Blacks and Democratic Whites

This chapter describes the founding of Washington, D.C., as the capital of the United States. The area that became Washington was a fully functioning slave society, and the city that grew atop those fields incorporated slavery into every aspect of life. From its inception Washington embodied the contradiction endemic to America itself, the paradoxical juxtaposition of freedom and slavery that bedeviled the nation and ultimately led to the Civil War. Enslaved people worked on public construction projects, they were bought and sold within sight of the Capitol, they drove the hacks that crisscrossed the city, and they waited on the men who ran the nation. Early Washington was a Southern city that was immersed in slavery and benefited immensely from it. Another contradiction embedded into the fabric of the city was that its citizens lacked democracy’s basic unit of currency: the right to vote. The city became a political colony, a district whose fate rested not with the local people who called it home but with the national political leaders who resided there temporarily.

How Long? How Long?

This chapter begins with urban renewal, which destroyed the entire quadrant of Southwest Washington in the late 1950s. The catastrophic impact of urban renewal helped catalyze an era of grassroots citizen activism throughout Washington in the decade after the legal barriers to racial segregation had tumbled. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, black and white activists fought back against the business interests and unelected officials who ran Washington, challenging embedded economic inequalities in the black-majority city. Mobilizing citizen power, they struggled to stem white flight, open economic opportunities, build affordable housing, end police brutality, and win home rule. It was a time of extraordinary social ferment, escalating tensions, and explosive confrontation as Washingtonians questioned the basic relationship between the city and the nation. Progress, however, did not keep up with expectations. Despite years of protests, negotiations, hearings, and reports about racial inequality, Washington remained separate and unequal, the divide between black and white only seemed to grow wider, and frustration within the low-income black community intensified.

Washington Is a Giant Awakened

As the city boomed during the New Deal and World War II, a new generation of black activists and their allies arose to challenge Jim Crow, find decent housing, and fight for economic survival. They used new forms of protest, including boycotts, union organizing, and sit-ins, and they formed interracial alliances with a growing number of white people, in Washington and around the country, who saw racial inequality in the nation’s capital as a stain on America’s reputation. This experimentation produced mixed results at the time, but the community activism and interracial organizing of the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the postwar civil rights movement. Nonetheless, determined white resistance at the local and federal levels largely preserved segregation in the nation’s capital during the war years. In fights against employment discrimination, segregated public spaces, and inadequate housing, racial egalitarians often achieved symbolic or small-scale victories but ultimately failed to defeat Jim Crow. Despite the sweeping rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and the “American Way” that accompanied the U.S. war effort, World War II stalled racial progress in D.C.

National Show Town

This chapter examines the massive demographic and spatial changes that reordered Washington’s racial geography in the decades between disfranchisement in 1878 and the election of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1912. As the federal government expanded and real estate boomed, the city burst its bounds and extended far beyond the central core. Driven by real estate developers, urban planners, and congressional leaders who could act without local democratic accountability, the city became a “national show town” featuring a monumental core of federal buildings and monuments. Its residents spread out into surrounding neighborhoods that were increasingly segregated by race and class, as exclusive suburban enclaves put physical and psychological distance between wealthy white Washingtonians and the masses of poor residents, black and white. Without the pull of integrated politics to promote interracial interaction, life in Washington became more segregated than ever before.

Segregation Does Not Die Gradually of Itself

This chapter describes the post-World War II civil rights movement in Washington. The years between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Bolling v. Sharpe were the most decisive period in the city’s history since the 1860s. Suddenly, it seemed, segregation in the nation’s capital collapsed, half a decade or more before similar changes happened elsewhere in the South. But segregation in the city had not died gradually of itself – it was killed by the concerted efforts of an interracial group of activists, parents, lawyers, writers, federal workers, and others committed to an egalitarian capital. These civil rights advocates seized upon Washington’s changing political, economic, and demographic context to push federal authorities to support racial change. By the end of the 1950s, the institutions of public life in Washington – schools, hotels, restaurants, theaters, recreation facilities, government agencies, unions, professional associations – were no longer racially segregated.

There Is a New Negro to Be Reckoned With

This chapter describe the pervasive system of segregation that relegated black Washingtonians to second-class citizenship in the 1910s and 1920s. Though never as rigid as many white Washingtonians might have hoped, segregation proved remarkably effective at undermining black progress and stifling black ambition in the early decades of the twentieth century. Democrat Woodrow Wilson institutionalized racial subordination within the federal government, a policy solidified during a decade of Republican control of Congress and the White House in the 1920s. Racial violence targeting D.C.’s black community, highly visible demonstrations of white power at the Lincoln Memorial and in Klan parades along Pennsylvania Avenue, and the spread of racial restrictive covenants all revealed the strength and resilience of white supremacy in the nation’s capital. And yet, despite the suffocating climate of segregation, black Washingtonians built self-sustaining neighborhoods and community institutions that affirmed black self-worth, cultivated black pride, and challenged the culture of white supremacy. Black self-assertion defended black dignity in a city that black residents claimed as their own.