Abstract
In the spring of 2019, Howard University senior Julien Bloomfield noticed an eerie absence at Seventh and Florida Avenue in northwest Washington, D.C.: the go-go music that served for decades as the corner’s soundscape was now silent. Inquiring with the store owners who curated the loudspeaker’s syncopated beats, she learned they had been threatened with a cease and desist letter by a resident of The Shay, a luxury apartment complex recently completed across the street. Posting a series of tweets with the hashtag #DontMuteDC, Bloomfield helped to ignite a local movement, one focused initially on organizing dance party protests at this and other iconic corners of the District. 1 Since that time, #DontMuteDC has grown into an ongoing effort to preserve the city’s black cultural production and challenge the role of public policy in promoting displacement more broadly.
While the economic transformation of Washington has been widely touted in media narratives, #DontMuteDC forced a reckoning with its stark racial consequences. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the District of Columbia led the country in both the percentage of gentrified census tracts and levels of black displacement between 2000 and 2012. 2 Even as the city’s population has grown by nearly 25% since 2000, a net exodus of nearly 25,000 black residents left Washington during these same years. 3 Recognizing that the drivers of demographic change are complex, many of these former residents undoubtedly found themselves caught in the crosshairs of rising rents, low-wage work, underfunded social services, and an increasingly inhospitable cultural climate.
The dramatic recasting of the city over the past two decades has not gone uncontested; nor did it begin only in 2019. Numerous grassroots organizations and coalitions have emerged, challenging not only residential displacement and runaway private development but also police violence, poverty-level wages, and the inequitable allocation of city funds and services. While profound roadblocks to institutional transformation remain, sustained opposition has shifted the public conversation toward the advancement of racial and economic equity. In this season of renewed activist ferment, the leadership of black women, the ongoing quest for self-determination, and the coalescing power of arts and culture have each been central.
Alongside these developments, a robust academic conversation has emerged examining the history, politics, and culture of Washington, D.C. This resurgence of scholarship—including two dozen titles related to the District published over the past decade—corrects for the city’s under-representation in the urban history and policy literature. While Washington’s unique status as a federal city has in the past led scholars to bypass it as a site of research, a new generation of D.C.-based studies is responding to this need while opening up exciting new lines of inquiry.
Whether this collective formation comprises a novel “DC school” of urban studies is as yet unclear. 4 What is firmly established is that this scholarly activity shifts the focus beyond the federal enclave, turning to an examination of Washington’s historic black majority and how it has fought for racial justice, housing rights, and democratic representation. In the process, it is providing a more detailed portrait of the different lineages of protest within the city and how they inform (and further elucidate) contemporary organizing.
Contributing to this unfolding conversation, the books reviewed here offer genealogies of black activism in Washington in the early and mid-twentieth century along with an analysis of contemporary development in the city deeply attuned to its racial contours. Taken together, these works chart black women’s efforts to dismantle the degradations of Jim Crow both locally and nationally, the struggles for political self-determination that propelled the Chocolate City vision, and the contradictions of a present in which black culture is selectively appropriated to catalyze forms of urban growth that exclude its originators. In so doing, the authors draw upon and advance scholarly dialogues taking place in not only urban history but also African American studies, women’s studies, and cultural and critical geographies. They also act to corroborate claims that D.C. can no longer be treated as an outlier whose history and development are external to that of other cities.
Foregrounding the leadership of black women, Mary-Elizabeth Murphy’s Jim Crow Capital demonstrates the profound role they exercised in the political life of the city during the interwar years. Even as they were denied Congressional representation as citizens of the District of Columbia, black women in Washington were active in both national and local politics, using their proximity to federal power to press for civil rights for all African Americans and particularly those in the South. While initially focused on extending suffrage to black women nationally and efforts to pass a federal anti-lynching bill, the shifting conditions of life in the District drew African American women’s organizations more deeply into local campaigns in the interwar years.
Drawing on the organizational records of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the Young Women’s Christian Association, the papers of prominent leaders such as Nannie Helen Burroughs and Mary Church Terrell, and a trove of historic black newspapers, Murphy details the founding of formal black women’s political organizations beginning in the 1920s. Black women in Washington founded at least eight national organizations between 1920 and 1924, the majority of which focused on registering voters and building a broad base of support for the Republican Party. Organizing through churches, familial networks, and the club movement, they emerged as a powerful voice for enfranchisement, one that forced the attention of the white-dominant suffrage movement and earned the recognition of the Republican National Committee.
Quickly expanding beyond party politics, black women in Washington founded new groups and committees to track Congressional legislation, lobby elected officials on voting rights and federal appointees, and commemorate black history and culture. The NACW was central to the preservation and restoration of the Frederick Douglass house and mobilized to block the proposed Mammy Memorial, a symbol of subservience and a key component of Lost Cause mythology. A century later, the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the ongoing clash over public monuments to the Confederacy show how prescient their efforts were.
Black women in Washington also played a critical role in efforts to pass a federal anti-lynching bill, both through their leadership in the NAWC and their active membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Following decades of black anti-lynching activism, Congressman Leondis Dyer of Missouri introduced a bill that would make lynching a crime triable in federal courts in 1918. Passing the House in 1922, black women quickly mobilized in hopes of securing its passage through the Senate, culminating in a silent parade through the city that drew 5,000 participants. Repeatedly filibustered by Southern Democrats in the Senate, the bill was blocked in successive sessions. While in one sense a failure, the anti-lynching campaign signaled the full emergence of black women on the political stage, with both Mary Church Terrell and Marian C. Butler testifying before a Senate subcommittee in support of the bill. Howard University students picked up their mantle several years later, staging a dramatic series of Rope Protests in 1934.
The anti-lynching struggle also informed efforts to confront violence closer to home, especially a surge in police brutality against black men and women amid the onset of the Great Depression. Black Washingtonians responded to this rise in police beatings with mass meetings, protest marches, mock trials, and petition drives. They also secured a House resolution calling for an investigation into police brutality in the city, which eventually led to subcommittee hearings in 1941. Even as police violence against African Americans continued, these collective efforts helped to lessen their incidence and initiated shifts within the culture of the Metropolitan Police Department. By lifting up this little-known history, Murphy points toward the longer genealogy undergirding contemporary black women’s activism against state violence.
The pursuit of economic justice and labor protections were further central to black women’s activism in the period. In 1921, Nannie Helen Burroughs founded the National Association of Wage Earners (NAWE), an organization focused on black women employed in service sectors. Advocating for fair wages, grievance procedures, and national regulations for domestic work, Burroughs and the NAWE argued forcefully for the centrality of black women’s labor to the economy as a whole. They also were drawn into local battles, such has the fight to increase the wages of cleaners employed by federal agencies. This activism would continue to evolve during the New Deal era, with Burroughs and others challenging the exclusion of domestic laborers from both the National Recovery Act standards and Social Security protections. Murphy goes to great lengths to show how working-class black women were active participants within these formations and not simply recipients of middle-class reformers’ advocacy on their behalf. The impressive depth of archival research in this regard led me to want to hear more about the tensions involved in organizing across distinct class experiences, including how they manifest through silences and elisions. Nevertheless, the narrative successfully relays the deep roots of care labor organizing and black women’s leadership within this history.
The final chapters of Jim Crow Capital recount campaigns to secure voting rights for Washingtonians and end racial segregation in the city during the New Deal and World War II. Equal treatment, these activists contended, would only come following an end to the arbitrary rule exercised by members of Congress over the city’s affairs. The persistent efforts of Southern senators to dictate the District’s laws and customs, along with the controversy surrounding the Daughters of the American Revolution’s refusal to host celebrated opera singer Marian Anderson, only further emboldened calls for full civil rights. Drawing on decades of collective experience and taking advantage of the militant mood of the war years, young black women and men led direct actions to desegregate public transit and restaurants, foreshadowing a strategy that would soon spread across the South.
Murphy’s narrative powerfully demonstrates that black women in Washington engaged in a prefigurative practice of citizenship, expressing as right that which they remained formally denied. Furthermore, their activism conveyed a generative tension between local concerns and national priorities. Jim Crow Capital can be placed in productive dialogue with recent works from Treva Lindsey and Erik Gellman on New Negro womanhood and the National Negro Congress, respectively. 5 Doing so would help to resolve the following questions: how did the politics of racial representation, including its intimate relation to gendered and sexual regulation, shape the organizations and campaigns Murphy recounts? Furthermore, how did the civically minded strategies these reformers employed differ from other approaches to securing black freedoms? Such questions notwithstanding, Jim Crow Capital marks a striking contribution to the literature on Washington, D.C., as well as the historiography of black women’s activism.
Following the landmark 1948 Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer declaring racial covenants unenforceable, African Americans began to stream out from the central and southeast neighborhoods to which they had been previously confined. White households responded with waves of suburban flight, and in 1957, Washington became the first majority black major city in the nation. As the city’s population changed dramatically, so too did the goals and methods of its grassroots organizers. Reading Murphy’s Jim Crow Capital alongside Lauren Pearlman’s Democracy’s Capital helps make sense of the strategic shift from desegregation to self-determination, along with the ways that segregation’s spatial recalibration created inroads for black leadership.
Pearlman’s study picks up as civil rights activists prominent in the Southern movement began to set their sights on D.C., which continued to lack democratic representation and offered a promising site for developing new strategies and tactics. Illuminating the period through close examinations of pivotal events such as the 1968 riots, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the 1976 Bicentennial, she shows how contests between local activists and federal officials set the stage for self-governance as well as its limited implementation. In the process, she traces the transition from black protest to black political power in the city as well as the ways that law and order politics issuing from the federal level acted to curtail more expansive visions of black Power.
Pearlman’s first chapter chronicles the emergence of the movement for self-determination in the District and the rise of its most prominent advocates. Confronting an intractable Congress and the quasi-governmental Board of Trade, activists such as Julius Hobson, Marion Barry, and Stokely Carmichael each sought to mobilize the city’s black working class as a mass force for change. One-time CORE chapter head Hobson attacked the persistence of segregated schools and poor housing conditions. He also soon became one of the leading champions for statehood. Coming off a successful boycott that blocked bus fare hikes, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer Barry launched the Free D.C. campaign in 1966 to rally support for home rule. Controversial due to its strong-arm tactics targeting white merchants for donations, the campaign illustrated the escalation of both movement methods and Barry’s profile. Former SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael returned to Washington (where he had previously attended Howard) in 1967 and called for the formation of a Black United Front. Intended to unify the many activist groups in the city while prodding them in a more militant direction, the citywide coalition received a cold shoulder from moderate civil rights leadership and alarmed white businessowners and residents.
The quest for home rule—and perhaps more critically the wave of urban rebellions across the nation—convinced President Lyndon Johnson to push a D.C. government reorganization plan through Congress ending the three-member Board of Commissioners system in place since the demise of Reconstruction. Overcoming the objections of Southern segregationists in the House and the white Board of Trade, Johnson appointed a mayor-commissioner and nine-member city council in late 1967. While Mayor Walter Washington and a majority of the council were black, Congress maintained final authority over the local government and city residents remained unable to elect their leaders. For leaders such as Hobson, Barry, and Carmichael, this new system made a mockery of both democracy and the self-determination movement’s demands.
Whether this half-measure could help prevent Washington from becoming the next Detroit or Newark was resoundingly answered on April 4, 1968, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The uprising in the wake of King’ murder lasted four days and led to thirteen deaths, widespread property loss, and the occupation of the city by the National Guard. Opponents of home rule seized on the events, citing them as evidence of the inability of African Americans to effectively govern. Federal authorities zeroed in on Carmichael, launching a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation based on their assumption that his speeches had further enflamed angry crowds. More broadly, media coverage of the riots helped to cement Washington as a space of chaos and disorder within the national imagination, a reservoir which politicians would repeatedly draw on in shifting the focus of domestic policy toward combatting crime.
Pearlman shows how this growing narrative shaped and constrained public perception of the Poor People’s Campaign, which the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) carried forth in the wake of King’s assassination. With the Resurrection City encampment on the National Mall going up just four weeks after the riots, both the federal government and local residents remained on edge. Drawing on the records of the Johnson Administration, she details the delicate dance between the DOJ and the SCLC, a relationship characterized by accommodation as well as surveillance. While the Poor People’s Campaign was impressive in its multiracial breadth and national scope, she contends that it had adverse effects on local movements for racial and economic justice, including straining already tight resources and increasing tensions with the Metropolitan Police Department.
Furthermore, then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon seized on both the April riots and violent incidents that occurred at Resurrection City in his racially coded calls to restore law and order in America’s cities. Upon winning the presidency, Nixon sharply ramped up the anticrime initiatives begun under the previous administration. The 1970 D.C. Crime Bill, which municipal appointees objected to but were powerless to prevent, dramatically expanded police powers, increased sentence lengths, and diminished the discretionary power of local courts. A concurrent experiment in community policing, initially authorized by Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity and preferred by many District residents, experienced a brief and embattled existence. While initially opposing the Pilot District Project as a federal imposition, Marion Barry eventually chaired its Citizens’ Board, his first elected position in the city.
The final chapter considers how the period leading up the 1976 Bicentennial celebration presented new opportunities for major urban development as well as the movement for political self-determination. With $500 million initially earmarked in urban renewal funding, local officials, business leaders, and activists were deeply split over how to best “showcase” the city and its rebound from the events of 1968. Ultimately, white boosters and black politicians would come together to steer funding toward the redevelopment of the downtown core rather than public housing and other local needs. In the process, some activists-turned-elected-officials would moderate their positions while others were thoroughly marginalized.
Amid the planning for the Bicentennial, Congress approved the District of Columbia Home Rule Act. The 1973 bill provided for the local election of the mayor and city council and established parameters for the creation of advisory neighborhood councils. While a significant step forward, the Home Rule Charter retained Congress’ power over the municipal budget and local courts and gave it the authority to block any bills passed by the D.C. Council. In 1974, District held its first direct mayoral and council election; incumbent Washington was elected to mayor while Barry and Hobson were elected to the city council as at-large members. By this time, Carmichael was living abroad in Guinea and working to build the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, all under CIA surveillance. Both the federal government’s racialized obsession with crime under Nixon and its delimiting of the District government’s authority, Pearlman argues, would restrict the ability of local officials to enact reform agendas championed by the city’s black working-class majority. Closing with the election of Barry as mayor in 1978, she notes how he—like other black elected officials in major cities—would feel compelled to court private development in ways often at odds with robust visions of black self-determination.
Democracy’s Capital offers an intricate portrait of a compact yet critical period in the history of both Washington, D.C., and black activism and politics. Its tight focus on 1966-1976 allows for a close reading of different political actors and the multiple layers of governance shaping local outcomes. Particularly intriguing are the divergent paths of the activists and officials Pearlman discusses, which led me to ask how they were shaped by and contributed to distinct ideological traditions and trajectories of the black freedom struggle. How, for instance, did figures such as Hobson, Barry, and Carmichael fit within and further elaborate forms of socialist, grassroots democratic, and black nationalist politics, respectively? How did their perceptions of the wider conjuncture evolve in relationship to their organizing campaigns and personal aspirations? Attending to these questions in deeper dialogue with African American studies would enrich the text’s discussion of the kind of city these leaders sought to build and how they interpreted both local and federal impediments to its realization.
Pearlman’s study also makes a significant contribution to the growing carceral studies subfield, helping to further clarify a scholarly picture that has consolidated over the past decade. Specifically, Democracy’s Capital shows how the punitive turn in federal policy (1) emerged coeval with black municipal leadership and (2) was rolled out and tested in a jurisdiction lacking mechanisms for democratic accountability. These realities can and should further inform our wider understanding of the carceral state and its extensive yet highly disproportionate reach.
In the four decades since Barry and other black mayors were sworn in, a number of forces have coalesced to shift the fate of cities. Formerly redlined neighborhoods have become desirable sites for real estate capital and upwardly mobile professionals, producing profound shifts in the racial and class composition of cities and often alienating their long-time, lower-income residents. While the organizers and elected officials discussed in Democracy’s Capital struggled with the hollowing-out effects of disinvestment, among the chief urban predicaments today is displacement. Gentrification, critics charge, is a form of white cultural erasure that blots out all that came before—including and especially black urban life. The incident that opened this essay, for example, largely conforms with this narrative. Yet less discussed, and heretofore little understood, are the ways that black history and culture are not simply erased but at times subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) repositioned in line with capital accumulation.
These contradictions move to center stage in Brandi Thompson Summers’ Black in Place, an extended analysis of the deployment of black aesthetic regimes in service to urban displacement. Summers centers her study on H Street NE, a historically black commercial and cultural corridor targeted by city planners and real estate interests in the mid-2000s as ripe for “revitalization.” In a series of interlinked chapters, she brings a critical-theoretical lens to bear on contests for H Street, including the role of arts and cultural agencies, bars and restaurants, historical commemoration, and economic development policies in shaping who can presently lay claim to this previously black space. A highly interdisciplinary study, her method incorporates archival research, participant observation, interviews, and discursive analysis. Throughout, she develops and deploys the concept of “black aesthetic emplacement,” which she defines as “a mode of representing blackness in urban capitalist simulacra, which exposes how blackness accrues a value that is not necessarily extended to Black bodies” (p. 3). This analytical framework, Summers contends, can help make sense of how creative placemaking practices widely encouraged by planners at times collude with processes of exclusion and extraction.
Summers’ first chapter provides a history of the corridor, including how constructions of blackness evolved alongside the streetscape. A key outlet for access to (overpriced) retail goods under segregation, H Street NE was one of three areas alongside Fourteenth and Seventh Streets NW damaged during the 1968 uprising. Public and private plans to redevelop H Street stalled in the 1970s; a large overpass bridge constructed in 1977 further physically isolated the neighborhood from downtown. While black entrepreneurs and residents worked persistently to revive the corridor, its symbolic representation as a “ghetto” was secured throughout the 1980-1990s.
In 2004, a Strategic Development Plan for H Street was approved under Barry’s successor Mayor Anthony Williams, who saw commercial revitalization as key to his vision of attracting 100,000 new residents to the District. Announcing a round of grants to retail establishment, the city’s Planning and Economic Development agency targeted for exclusion numerous types of businesses that catered to a majority black clientele, including barbershops, salons, and phone stores. This preferential treatment showed up in other policies as well, such as those which prioritized “entrepreneurial” and “innovative” businesses as worthy recipients of state support.
To justify these choices, city officials employed the language of diversity, suggesting that the street’s rebranding as a multicultural rather than black space would be key to its economic success. In subsequent chapters, Summers considers this discursive reframing of the area, including how visual and rhetorical tropes of diversity, authenticity, and black nostalgia came together in complex ways to produce the new H Street. Certain spaces, such as the new bars and restaurants that dotted the strip, relied upon and reproduced an edgy and hip notion of blackness that was at the same time safe and sanitized for predominantly white patrons. Others, such as the Atlas Theater or Swampoodle Park, re-presented an abstracted picture of the early twentieth century while purposefully neglecting H Street’s more recent past. In dialogue with current discussions in urban sociology, Summers outlines the centrality of cultural production to postindustrial urban development while detailing its particularly sharp ironies in the post-Chocolate city—including that the Atlas Theater was a whites-only establishment into the 1940s.
Summers’ final chapter examines everyday black life at the corner of Eighth and H St NE, at the intersection of several bus lines and a regular hangout spot. Her micro-geography of “the corner” meditates on the evolution of policing and surveillance in public space along with the more informal ways that black movement is contained. Working-class black subjects, she argues, are “hypervisible” in that their actions are heavily surveilled by law enforcement and sensationalized on local news reports and neighborhood blogs. At the same time, the needs and desires of these longtime residents are “unseen” and their personal narratives of H Street are purged from that of the neighborhood’s rebirth. Their blackness, Summers contends, provides an image of authenticity that anchors the area’s transition to a diverse space even as the structural inequalities that continue to produce disparate experiences of the city are ignored.
Black in Place critically advances discussions in the subfields of urban sociology, cultural landscape studies, and critical geography. It is further exemplary of conversations in black Geographies and the ongoing theorization of black space and place. Summers’s discussion of the delinking of blackness as urban aesthetic from black urban life enables a more complex and capacious reading of the contemporary processes of displacement. She also enlivens new questions about how those who seek to resist these processes might intervene on a rapidly evolving terrain.
Summers’s discussion of retail improvement grants and brief mention of tax increment financing invite further consideration of the mechanisms through which municipal agencies affirm (or deny) worth, and the wider ways that urban economic development is racialized and gendered. A more extensive analysis of state incentives could contribute to our understanding of what is and is not valued, as well as the ways blackness is deployed within these calculations. I would also be interested to hear how Summers situates black resistance in the city beyond its contemporary commodification. How do the organizing traditions recounted by Murphy, Pearlman, and others persist in the “post-Chocolate City”? What ways are activists recognizing and challenging the processes of “black aesthetic emplacement” that obscure ongoing displacement? As should be clear from these comments, the salience of Summers’ findings and the further inquiries they generate extend far beyond a single street or city.
Read together, these works by Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, Lauren Pearlman, and Brandi Thompson Summers offer an examination of the entwined histories of Washington, D.C., and the black freedom struggle over the past century. In so doing, they provide a critical contextualization of the deep roots of racial and economic justice organizing in the city and the challenges of the current conjuncture. Their shared emphasis on black worldmaking, both in terms of particular histories and places and as spatial analytic, enhance an interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue on the District that promises to expand in the years ahead. Given the outsized role that black activism, federal policy experimentation, and urban development in the District have had on the nation at large, the narratives and analyses presented here will also be of great interest to scholars and organizers far beyond Washington.