Pricing the Soul Out of Washington, D.C.

By Maurice Jackson

Published by Portside
July 24, 2012

Submitted to Portside by the author, reprinted with
permission of the author. Originally published in the
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2012 edition

http://chronicle.com/article/Pricing-the-Soul-Out-of/132259/

Washington, D.C.

The marble city begun by slave labor in the 1790s, is again
in the news. As charges of campaign violations swirl
around Mayor Vincent Gray, and the chairman
of the city council and another member resign after
admitting financial misdeeds, it is often forgotten that
Washington once stood as a "city on a hill" to the nation's
African-Americans. Just as the Puritan John Winthrop held
the biblical image up as the ideal for Boston, so the
District has long served as a beacon to blacks seeking
freedom - from slavery, Jim Crow, and racism.

But for generations of blacks born and raised in D.C. and
others who migrated to the city, the hill has become steeper
to climb and easier to fall off. Corruption, crime,
unemployment, the lack of affordable housing, and similar
urban woes are just part of the problem. How we deal with
them is another matter. Will Washington lose its identity in
the process?

In 1957, Washington became the first major city in the
country with a majority-black population. At the peak of
this demographic trend, in 1970, 71 percent of
Washingtonians were black, but 2010 census figures show that
from 2000 to 2010, the non-Hispanic white population in the
District grew by more than 50,000, to 209,000, while the
black population declined by more than 39,000, to a little
more than 300,000 - below 50 percent. Washington is not
alone; during the past decade, Chicago lost more than
180,000 black residents, and other cities long known for
their black populations, like Cleveland, Oakland, and St.
Louis, suffered similar losses.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution,
is the author of the most authoritative studies of this
reverse migration. Blacks, he told a reporter last year, are
making a choice. "They are going to the Sun Belt and
particularly the South. The ones who stay in the area want
to move to the suburbs." The specifics of each city are
different, but the effect may be the same.

At the turn of the 20th century, during the first Great
Migration, more than a million and a half blacks migrated
North to flee white violence and economic privation in the
South. Blacks migrated to the District of Columbia in search
of federal jobs. Female professionals like Mary Church
Terrell, a teacher, the first black woman to be a member of
the D.C. Board of Education, and a founder of the National
Association of Colored Women, became tireless fighters for
equality.

But blacks still suffered from Jim Crow laws and segregation
in the early-20th-century Washington of President Woodrow
Wilson, a cultural Southerner, who impeded black advancement
in the federal government. Black employment in that sector
declined, and black federal employees worked in an
increasingly hostile and segregated atmosphere as they
competed with whites for positions and housing. In the Red
Summer riots of 1919, postwar ethnic and economic tensions
after demobilization erupted in Washington and other
American cities.

Yet blacks continued to migrate to the District, drawn by
Howard University and, following World War II, employment in
the newly desegregated military and in some federal jobs.
U.S. Supreme Court decisions followed, ruling that racially
restrictive housing covenants were legally unenforceable,
and striking down segregation in restaurants and public
facilities, and then in education.

In the late 1960s and 70s, after the second Great Migration
(1940-70), D.C. became a center of the Black Arts Movement,
with a new awareness of the culture, literature, and music
of peoples of African descent. That led to black bookstores
and dance and theater companies in Washington. The student
movement in support of desegregation in the South had a
strong base of support at Howard, and the university and the
city led the nation in developing a growing sense of black
pride.

Then came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on
April 4, 1968, prompting widespread rioting. Underlying
factors contributing to the seemingly spontaneous display of
frustration included job and housing discrimination and
police brutality. At least 12 people died in the District,
7,600 were arrested, 900 businesses were damaged, and $27-
million in property was destroyed. Only the Watts (1965) and
Detroit (1967) riots caused more destruction.

Despite the riots, the African-American population of
Washington retained its optimism, and its first modern
elected mayor, Walter Washington, a black man, took office
in 1975. Marion Barry followed him in 1979, by which time
black residents were affectionately calling D.C. "Chocolate
City." But Congress still had veto power over the city
budget and taxing authority, and help for blacks was not
forthcoming. As Greek, Italian, and Jewish shopkeepers fled
the city, few black businesses were able to fill the
economic void. Today we see an abundance of Korean and
Ethiopian shops, as many hard-working owners pool their
funds. Some get aid from benefactors or investors. But no
such financial backing traditionally exists for African-
Americans.

On several occasions, black residents were forced to
relocate within the city. As in most of the nation, the
displacement of blacks had two historical precedents. In the
late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, racially
restrictive housing coupled with job segregation had forced
many blacks into alley dwellings. But as whites needed
housing, the Alley Dwelling Act of 1934 was passed
condemning homes, primarily inhabited by blacks, and forcing
entire neighborhoods to relocate. In response, many blacks
moved to D.C.'s Southeast quadrant, across the Anacostia
River. Such relocation happened again when houses were torn
down in the 1960s during "urban renewal," aka "Negro
removal," as well-to-do whites moved into the Southwest
section, near the waterfront, not far from Capitol Hill. As
in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Newark, when
dilapidated homes and public housing were torn down, they
were not replaced, as promised, by affordable housing for
low- and moderate-income people. The stage was set for the
third Great Migration, revealed in the 2010 census.

William Frey - and most of the news media that have written
about his findings - tends to see the bright side of all
this. The trend "reflects the South's economic growth and
modernization, its improved race relations, and the
longstanding cultural and kinship ties it holds for black
families," Frey has argued. He also believes that, since
blacks are fleeing areas that have recent gains in Hispanic
and Asian immigrants, they may be reacting to immigration
trends. It should be noted that many of the blacks who grew
up in the District are going not to the South, but to Prince
George's County, Md., often called Ward Nine (D.C. has eight
wards).

Nationally, blacks migrating from the North are
disproportionately young, with 40 percent between the ages
of 21 and 40. Additionally, one in four migrants have a
college degree, resulting in an overall "brain gain" for
several popular destinations in the South, like Atlanta and
Charlotte. The continuing economic downturn and
deindustrialization of the North have also strengthened the
attractiveness of the South. In addition, some observers
have suggested that integration has lessened the connection
to traditionally black neighborhoods in the North, making
migration easier. So too have changing race relations in the
South, they maintain.

Small wonder the dominant narrative is one of black people
opting for a better life in an increasingly postracial
society. "It's a new age for African-Americans. It's long
overdue," Frey told The New York Times last year. The
Manhattan Institute, drawing policy implications from its
own analysis, recently declared, "The freedom to choose
one's location has helped reduce segregation. Segregation
has declined in part because African-Americans left older,
more segregated, cities and moved to less segregated Sun
Belt cities and suburbs. This process occurred despite some
public attempts to keep people in these older areas."

But consider. First, a "brain gain" for the South is a
"brain drain" for traditionally black cities. Reverse
migration widens the income gap in Northern cities,
increasing economic - and often racial - segregation in
urban neighborhoods, even while it may lessen segregation in
suburban areas.

And one key piece is missing in the narrative: the mounting
cost of living in cities. By another name, it's known as
gentrification, and it has little to do with black people
making a choice to leave their homes. The average white
family's income in D.C. is $101,000; the average black
family's is $39,000. A report by the D.C. Fiscal Policy
Institute in March reveals that the income gap continues to
widen. The top 5 percent of D.C.'s households earn an
average of $473,000 a year, highest among the largest 50
cities in the United States. The bottom 20 percent earn
$9,100, near the national average. The gap between rich and
poor is the third-highest among the nation's largest cities,
behind only Boston and Atlanta. The poverty rate in the
Washington suburbs is 7.1 percent, while in the District it
is nearly three times as high, at 19.2 percent.

Many blacks can no longer afford the rising costs of renting
or owning a home in the District. Too often, the closest
public schools are not good, and many blacks cannot afford
the District's private schools. In Ward 8, or Anacostia,
long predominantly black and poor, the unemployment rate is
more than 25 percent, highest in the nation. Recently
residents took to the streets to protest the lack of jobs in
unionized bridge projects in the area.

Increasingly, many blacks feel a sense of betrayal.

While the Federal Reserve just announced that the economic
downturn has caused a huge across-the-board loss of wealth,
due to the decline of housing prices, it notes that the
slump has hit middle-income and poor families especially
hard. It may be too early to tell how all this will
influence relocation and housing choices of those families
who have choices, but it is likely to make life all the
harder for those who do not.

What is missing in today's discussion is a determined debate
about how to provide educational and housing opportunities
for blacks, so we can stem the tide of reverse migration.
For starters, with a high-school-graduation rate under 50
percent among black youth in the District, business and
labor need to work with the schools to develop a better GED
program and to provide training and apprenticeship
opportunities. The University of the District of Columbia
and its community college need to work with D.C. businesses
and the city government to provide young people who are not
college bound with skills for high-tech jobs. With a waiting
list of almost 60,000 for public housing, the city needs to
work with developers to provide low- and moderate-income
housing.

But first we need to admit that we are losing something.
Washington is the city that Benjamin Banneker, the self-
taught African-American scientist and mathematician, helped
to survey. It is the birthplace of Duke Ellington. It is the
city where Thurgood Marshall went to law school, at Howard
University, after the University of Maryland turned him down
on racial grounds. This is the city where Frederick Douglass
paid personal visits to Abraham Lincoln to prod the Great
Emancipator to give America a "new birth of freedom," as the
president put it. Here, 150 years ago, in April 1862,
enslaved African-Americans were emancipated nine months
before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

Although perhaps not a place of complete equality, the
District of Columbia became in the African-American
imagination a destination that was at least halfway to
freedom. We should not celebrate that it risks losing its
soul.

[Maurice Jackson is an associate professor of history and
African-American studies at Georgetown University and a
fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International
Scholars. He is working on a book about African-Americans
and Washington, D.C.]

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