History

The stories that came before us influence what comes next.

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September 22, 2011 | 12:41 PM | By

DCentric Picks: Art All Night, Community History, Books on the Mall

Art All Night

Art All Night begins at 7 p.m., Saturday.

Our event picks this week run the gamut, so we decided to break them down by category. See something we missed? Add your pick in the comments section.

Books: The National Book Festival takes place Saturday and Sunday on the National Mall. The free event will include author talks, readings and story telling events for children, teens and adults. Check the full schedule for information.

Art: This is the weekend for art in D.C. The (e)merge art fair, running Friday through Sunday, will bring together local and international artists at the Capitol Skyline Hotel. Tickets are $15, so if you’re looking for a free and more community-oriented alternative, check out Nuit Blanche: Art All Night. It begins at 7 p.m. on Saturday. D.C.’s painters, street performers, DJs and other artists will be showcasing their talents in various Shaw and Chinatown venues.

History: Interested in learning more about your neighborhood? Check out Anacostia Community Museum‘s Researching Community History workshop at 7 p.m., Thursday. Historian Matthew Gilmore will instruct participants on using public data to uncover information about D.C.’s neighborhoods.

Music: If you missed Chuck Brown during the National Symphony Orchestra’s Labor Day Concert, here’s your chance to catch the “Godfather of Go-Go” for free. Brown will perform at 5 p.m., Friday at the Woodrow Wilson Plaza.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Culture, History, Art, Chuck Brown, DCentric Picks, National Mall
September 20, 2011 | 10:08 AM | By

As Business Closes, Owner Looks Back at Decades on H Street

George Butler is closing shop after nearly five decades. His men’s clothing store, George’s Place Ltd., is an H Street NE institution, one of the longest-running businesses on a corridor now synonymous with gentrification. But the recession, online competition and H Street streetcar construction led him to call it quits.

The 73-year-old managed clothing stores on the street in the 1950s before opening his store in 1968.

“I saw a future in H Street and my being in the neighborhood, I knew a lot of my customers,” he said while sitting in the back of his store on a recent afternoon. Hats and shoes lined the walls, along with 50 percent off signs.

Through it all, he’s had a front row seat to all the ups and downs of the corridor: from the heyday when  it was “it was like Connecticut Avenue, like downtown,” to the 1968 riots. “I’m a vet, and I saw things I never saw in the war,” he recalled of the riots. “The street was unreal. Fires were everywhere. It was just burning down.”

The riots marked the commercial decline of the street, beginning decades of empty storefronts. “People left and never came back,” Butler said.

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FILED UNDER: History, The People, Gentrification, H Street NE, Small Business
September 16, 2011 | 10:26 AM | By

The Surprising History of Anacostia

Anacostia is a predominately African American area east of the river. But it wasn’t always that way.

The two neighborhoods that make up Anacostia’s historic core are Uniontown, which was home to white Navy Yard workers, and Hillsdale, an all black neighborhood where newly freed slaves settled and eventually became quite well-to-do. Over time, white flight, urban blight and desegregation changed the face of Anacostia.

The fascinating history of Anacostia was featured on Thursday’s Kojo Nnamndi Show (listen to the entire segment here). Guests such as Dianne Dale, who authored a book on the community’s history, spoke about the importance of preserving her neighborhood’s past. Check out this video in which she talks about how it was like growing up in Anacostia:

FILED UNDER: History, Anacostia, Kojo Nnamdi Show
August 26, 2011 | 10:00 AM | By

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial’s Sculptor is Chinese: Does It Matter?

Mandel Ngan / Getty Images

The "Stone of Hope" sculpture of Martin Luther King by Chinese artist Lei Yixin is the first on the National Mall to honor a person of color.

D.C. is abuzz with activity with Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial dedication events, but there’s still plenty of debate over the memorial’s design and the nationality of the sculptor.

Some criticize that King’s face is too stern or militant. Others take issue with the selection of Lei Yixin of China, rather than an African American, as the sculptor. The project’s leaders have said there were no qualified black sculptors who could work with stones of this size or type. The Washington Post‘s Courtland Milloy writes, “Who gets the job? A Chinese national with an apparent preference for the heroic and authoritarian.” He continues:

Surely, having a black sculptor of a black civil rights icon — working on ground once toiled by black slaves, on the National Mall, designed and surveyed with the help of a black mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker — would have added to the King memorial’s symbolic power.

So, yes, it stings when, centuries later, creators of the King memorial say they couldn’t find a qualified black sculptor.

We asked DCentric readers on Facebook and Twitter to post their thoughts and comments on the memorial’s design and sculptor. A few responded on Twitter by recalling King’s message of unity among races:

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FILED UNDER: History, Martin Luther King Memorial
August 25, 2011 | 12:14 PM | By

DCentric Picks: King Memorial Dedication Week Events

Elvert Barnes / Flickr

The public began visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on Monday.

What: A number of events are being held through Sunday in honor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial dedication. The main dedication ceremony takes place at 11 a.m., Sunday has been postponed to a later date in September or October.

When: Thursday through Sunday.

Cost: Most of the musical events are free, but check the official memorial website to see ticket price information for specific events.

Why you should go: The King memorial is the first on the National Mall honoring an African American, and this week’s events pay tribute to the historic occasion.

“Partners in the Dream,” a public expo with information booths and musical performances, is being held at the Washington Convention Center through Sunday.  Also, the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center will host an hour-long musical tribute by gospel performers Maggie Ingram and the Ingramettes, R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn and jazz harmonicist Frédéric Yonnet. The free show takes place at 6 p.m., Friday.

UPDATE: Event organizers have canceled Sunday’s event due to the coming Hurricane Irene. The memorial will be open until noon, Saturday, for public view.

Concerts will also be held on the National Mall before and after Sunday’s dedication, where President Barack Obama will speak. As of now, Sunday’s events will proceed rain or shine, but Hurricane Irene could force organizers to push the schedule back.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Culture, History, DCentric Picks, Martin Luther King Memorial
August 17, 2011 | 1:18 PM | By

Brad Pitt Producing Film About Black Man Kidnapped in D.C. and Sold into Slavery

Brad Pitt is producing an adaption of “Twelve Years a Slave.” The memoirs were written by Solomon Northup, who as a free black man in 1841, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in D.C.

Mladen Antonov / AFP/Getty Images

Solomon Northup was kidnapped in 1840s D.C. and held in a slave pen in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.

The book chronicles how Northup was tricked by two men in New York who said they wanted to hire him to play violin for a circus stationed in D.C. The three traveled to the District, where funeral observances for President William Harrison were taking place. According to his account, Northup was drugged and resting in the back room of a hotel when he was taken to a slave pen close to the National Mall:

 

It was like a farmer’s barnyard in most respects, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there.

The building to which the yard was attached, was two stories high, fronting on one of the public streets of Washington. Its outside presented only the appearance of a quiet private residence. A stranger looking at it, would never have dreamed of its execrable uses. Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!

Northup was taken to Louisiana as a slave and wasn’t able to escape for another 12 years. A film about his journey is being welcomed by those panning the recent film “The Help” as another “Noble White Ladies Meet the Civil Rights Movement” movie, as Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress writes:

It would be so useful and powerful to tell a story… that explains that the direction from slavery to freedom wasn’t always a one-way journey, that demonstrates the reaches of the vast jaws of the market for slaves, that situates bondage not just in a vanished, Spanish moss-draped Deep South, but on Mall in Washington, DC where we inaugurated the first black president.

FILED UNDER: History, Media, Brad Pitt, Slavery, Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave
August 12, 2011 | 9:00 AM | By

How Foggy Bottom Changed

By Mary-Alice Farina

Before the transformation of the Anacostia Waterfront and the Navy Yard began, there was Foggy Bottom. The fashionable Northwest neighborhood, now home to luxury condominiums, pristine river views and affluent seniors, was characterized by tenement dwellings, smoke stacks and slums 60 years ago.

At the end of the 18th century, the riverbanks now dominated by the Kennedy Center were D.C.’s gang-ridden and malaria-infested industrial hub. Breweries, lime kilns, shipyards and the Washington Gas Light Company facility brought an influx of European immigrants to Foggy Bottom. Foggy Bottom residents, mostly unskilled manual laborers, often spoke no English.

The area around Washington Circle, named “Round Tops” after the notorious gang that controlled it, was considered one of the most dangerous parts of town. During the population boom after the Civil War, Foggy Bottom’s “ethnic” and working class inhabitants were primarily Irish and German. A Washington Post article quoted a then-resident: “If you picked a fight with an Irishman at 17th Street, you’d have to fight every other Irishman down to the river at 27th Street before you could escape.”

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, History, Foggy Bottom
July 29, 2011 | 10:23 AM | By

Metro Sells Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Passes

 

Courtesy of Metro

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, the first to honor an African American man on the National Mall,  will be dedicated Aug. 28. So why not remember the historic occasion with a commemorative Metro fare card?

The one-day pass, which includes an image of the statue, costs $9 and can be purchased online or at a Metro sales facility.

This isn’t the first time Metro has issued a commemorative pass to mark an historic occasion; the system sold permanent, $10 SmarTrip cards in the lead up to the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

 

 

FILED UNDER: History, Public Transportation, Martin Luther King Jr., Metro
July 11, 2011 | 2:49 PM | By

Five Factors Causing the ‘Decimation’ of the Black Middle Class

Alex Wong / Getty Images

The Rev. Jesse Jackson (L) hold the hands of Angela Walker (R) in Suitland, Md. after a rally against foreclosures in the hard-hit, majority-black county. Walker is recently unemployed and facing foreclosure.

The recession from 2007 to 2009 has hit nearly all sectors and communities in the American economy, but minorities, and particularly African Americans, may have been affected the most. Jesse Washington’s recent Associated Press story about how the recession reversed many of the economic gains that took the black community many years to attain contains some grim statistics: in 2009, the average black household had only 2 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the average white household, and in April 2010, black male unemployment hit its highest point since the government began tracking it in 1972.

“History is going to say that the black middle class was decimated,” Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion, tells Washington. “But we’re not done writing history.”

What has led to such extreme losses? Here are five factors contributing to the “decimation” of the black middle class:
FILED UNDER: History, The People, Black Middle Class, Economy, Housing, Recession, Unemployment
July 6, 2011 | 1:12 PM | By

Black and Jewish Youth Embark On Civil Rights Pilgrimage

Courtesy of Operation Understanding DC

Black and Jewish D.C. youth have gone on summer civil rights pilgrimages for years. Here, Susan Barnett and Elia Emerson, pose on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1997.

The relationship between the African American and Jewish communities is long and complicated, with periods of collaboration and discord. But one group of black and Jewish D.C. youth is looking to bridge the gap that has grown in recent years.

The teenagers, members of non-profit Operation Understanding DC, boarded a bus Wednesday morning and will spend 23 days retracing the path of the Freedom Riders as part of a civil rights pilgrimage.

Highlights include crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala., meeting community organizers and visiting various churches, synagogues and mosques.

There is a history of black and Jewish Americans working together, particularly during the civil rights movement. For instance, Jews were involved in the establishment of the NAACP and participated in non-violent protests. Locally, Jews joined Howard University students in 1960 to push Glen Echo Park, then an amusement park, to desegregate. But the positive relationship between the two communities has declined in recent decades as legal civil rights victories were won but class and racial disparities grew.

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FILED UNDER: History, The People, Civil Rights Movement, Operation Understanding DC, Youth