Emancipation Day 2012: More Meaningful Than Ever

by Maurice Jackson

The Washington Post
The Root DC Blog
April 13, 2012

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/emancipation-day-2012-more-meaningful-than-ever/2012/04/13/gIQA7XB7ET_blog.html

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the
District of Columbia Emancipation Act, which freed the
city's 3,128 slaves. This came nine months before the
Emancipation Proclamation, which granted freedom to slaves
in only parts of the Confederacy still in rebellion.

"I trust I am not dreaming, but the events taking place seem
like a dream," the great orator Frederick Douglass wrote of
the act. "Not only a staggering blow to slavery throughout
the country, but a killing blow to the rebellion - and the
beginning of the end for both."

Perhaps this is why the marble federal city built with slave
labor in the 1790s has often stood as the political "city on
a hill" to the nation's African Americans. Just as Puritan
governor John Winthrop's biblical image of Boston served as
a symbol of "freedom" to many whites in the New World,
Washington has served as a beacon to blacks seeking freedom
from slavery, Jim Crow and racism.

Clearly, the original Puritan city on a hill proved easier
to climb and conquer for white Americans of WASP and Irish-
Catholic backgrounds. For generations of blacks born and
raised here, and others who migrated, the hill has been
steeper to climb and easier to fall off.

So today if African Americans in the District seem overly
concerned about their status with the recent drop in
population, they have good reason. At their peak in 1970,
blacks represented 71 percent of the District's 756,500
residents, but new census estimates show that the city's
black population has recently fallen to below 50 percent of
its 617,996 residents. Increasingly, many blacks feel a
sense of betrayal as even those who grew up here cannot
afford to live in this city.

Gentrification, the continued stream of blacks to the
suburbs, and the debate over political power has created new
strains in the District's body politic that, along with the
struggle for congressional representation, stand at the
center of political and social discourse. Losing majority
black status is no small thing for black Washingtonians.

This is, after all, the city that Benjamin Banneker, the
self-taught African American scientist and mathematician,
helped to survey, swamp by swamp. He learned the art, as a
youth, from neighboring mill owner Andrew Ellicott, who,
although a Quaker, became a major in revolutionary Army and
as the lead surveyor marked the boundaries and laid out the
streets.

This is the city where Douglass and other leaders of the
Black Convention Movement paid personal visits to President
Abraham Lincoln to prod him forward on enlisting and
mobilizing black soldiers in the Civil War.

This is the city where Elizabeth Keckley, the former slave,
seamstress and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, wrote after
President Lincoln had signed the act to free slaves in the
District that "in the summer of 1862, freedmen began to
flock into Washington from Maryland and Virginia .?.?. with
great hope in their hearts and with all their world goods on
their backs."

She added that "they came to the Capital looking for
liberty." And thus, the city from which the Great
Emancipator sought to give America a "new birth of
freedom,"although perhaps not a place of complete liberty,
became in the African American imagination a unique
destination that was at least halfway to freedom.

This city is the birthplace of the great Duke Ellington,
perhaps the world's most prolific composer. This is the city
where Thurgood Marshall, the first African American member
of the Supreme Court, went to law school at Howard
University when the University of Maryland turned him down
on racial grounds.

This is the city where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
preached about his dream of racial equality. This is the
city where the renowned Howard Theatre, first opened in 1910
and reopened April 9, the birth date of the immortal Paul
Robeson, will once again serve as a cultural beacon.

This is the city that has sent the brilliant Yale-educated
constitutional lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton to Congress for
20 years, though she has still has no vote as a lawmaker on
the House floor.

And this is the city where for over two centuries a rich
African American culture has developed at institutions such
as Howard University and the Nineteenth Street Baptist
Church, where President Obama and his family have worshiped.
This city has evolved as a center of black advancement,
education, social discourse and, most significantly,
political empowerment.

As in most of the nation, the displacement of blacks has
historical precedents. Racially restrictive housing coupled
with job segregation had forced many blacks into alley
dwellings. But as whites needed housing, the Alley Dwelling
Act of 1918 was passed, condemning homes primarily inhabited
by blacks and forcing entire neighborhoods to relocate.

In response, many blacks moved to Southeast Washington,
across the Anacostia River, to meet their housing needs.
Such relocation again happened when houses were torn down in
the 1960s during "urban renewal," a.k.a. "Negro removal," as
wealthy whites moved to the waterfront.

Indeed, the District has always keenly mirrored the
struggles of black America. As in Chicago, Baltimore and
Newark, dilapidated homes and public housing were torn down
but not replaced, as promised. As the Greek, Italian and
Jewish shopkeepers left the city, few blacks were able to
fill the vacuum. One simple reason is, as Washington Post
reporter Ben Gilbert wrote at the time, "Money and credit
continued to be a problem for Negroes."

When then-Mayor Marion Barry proclaimed in the 1980s that
"we are in charge," it was an exaggeration. D.C. may have
been called "Chocolate City," but Congress still had and has
veto power over the city budget and taxing authority, and
the Federal City Council still wields broad economic power.

Congress constantly experiments with policies it wants to
test, including school vouchers and repealing gun control.
And in 2012, with a population of more than 600,000, which
is larger than Wyoming's and slightly less than Rhode
Island's, residents still lack "full" voting representation
in Congress, the only capital in the industrialized world
without such a right.

Recent figures show that in Ward 8, centered around
Anacostia, the official unemployment rate is 28 percent.
Black youths want to work, and recently residents took to
the streets to protest the lack of jobs on the bridge
projects that go to the area.

The average white family income in the District is $101,000;
for blacks, it stands at $39,000. Whites in the United
States have a huge advantage in inherited wealth, which
allows many to help pay the down payment on houses for their
children, something that many black residents in D.C. would
like to but simply cannot do.

With the highest educational level in the nation, young
college-educated whites moving here find it easier to secure
jobs, especially in the high-tech industries. In many cases,
the public schools are lacking and most blacks cannot afford
the District's expensive private schools and the high cost
to rent or own a home, so they leave. In short, many young
whites come to the city because they can find jobs and
housing that they can afford; many blacks leave because they
can find neither.

A new study by the Sage Foundation and Brown University
shows that rising income inequality has led to the shrinking
of the middle class, and those families living either in
poverty or affluence account for one-third of all families,
up from 15 percent in 1970. In the District, the rise in
poverty has been concentrated among blacks and Latinos, and
the rise of affluence among whites and some blacks.

A census report shows that D.C.'s poverty rate for school-
age children jumped from 24.8 percent in 2007 to 30.9
percent in 2010, becoming one of only 73 jurisdictions in
the nation to surpass 30 percent.

In the end, the task is to guarantee that in our
increasingly international city, the hopes and aspirations
of African Americans over the 220-some years since the
District was established to live in freedom and equality,
socially and economically, are not forgotten.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Douglass hailed the
emancipation of slaves in Washington but said that "the
negro is not abolished as a degraded caste," urging the
continued fight for social and economic equality and
justice. African Americans want to stay in Washington. They
have worked hard and struggled to achieve Douglass's dream,
ever elusive, of climbing to the top of the city's shining
hill.

[Maurice Jackson teaches history at Georgetown University.
He is the author of " Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony
Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism." A Woodrow Wilson
Center for International Scholars fellow, he is at work on
"Halfway to Freedom: African-Americans and the Struggle for
Social Progress in Washington, D.C."]

==========

Emancipation Day 2012: More meaningful than ever
By Maurice Jackson

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/emancipation-day-2012-more-meaningful-than-ever/2012/04/13/gIQA7XB7ET_blog.html

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act, which freed the city's 3,128 slaves. This came nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation, which granted freedom to slaves in only parts of the Confederacy still in rebellion.

Clearly, the original Puritan city on a hill proved easier to climb and conquer for white Americans of WASP and Irish-Catholic backgrounds. For generations of blacks born and raised here, and others who migrated, the hill has been steeper to climb and easier to fall off.

So today if African Americans in the District seem overly concerned about their status with the recent drop in population, they have good reason. At their peak in 1970, blacks represented 71 percent of the District's 756,500 residents, but new census estimates show that the city's black population has recently fallen to below 50 percent of its 617,996 residents. Increasingly, many blacks feel a sense of betrayal as even those who grew up here cannot afford to live in this city.

Gentrification, the continued stream of blacks to the suburbs, and the debate over political power has created new strains in the District's body politic that, along with the struggle for congressional representation, stand at the center of political and social discourse. Losing majority black status is no small thing for black Washingtonians.

===

[Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and
African-American Studies and Affiliated Professor of
Performing Arts (Jazz) at Georgetown University. He is also
a Fellow at the GU Center for Social Justice. He teaches
Atlantic, African-American, Washington, D.C., and Jazz
history. His book, "Let This Voice be Heard: Anthony
Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism," was published in
2009 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is co-
editor with Jackie Bacon of, "African-Americans and the
Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical
Documents," Routledge Press, published in January
2010..."James and Esther Jackson: A Personal Introspective,"
appears in African-American Communists and the Origins of
the Modern Civil Rights Movement, Routledge Press, 2009. His
`Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, The path is open to the
sea:' "Remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History,
Music and Culture of the African American People," is in
Early American Studies, April 2008 and "The Rise of
Abolition" in The Atlantic World, 1450-2000, Indiana
University Press, 2008. He wrote the liner notes to the
Grammy Nominated Jazz CD by Charlie Haden and Hank Jones,
"Steal Away: Spirituals, Folks Songs and Hymns," Verve
Records, 1995. Jackson has also wrote the liner notes to
their new work "Come Sunday," Hank Jones' last recording
(Fall 2011). "CROWN ME," the story of an African-American
men's Checkers Club in D.C., was published in 2010 with
Jackson's introduction. The story is the subject of an in
progress special on Public Television. He is currently at
work on a social, political and cultural history of African-
Americans in Washington (1700's until the present), where he
has lived his entire adult life.
http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/jacksonz/ ]

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