A look at Washington DC: Facts & People in Black History

Dear Mr. President and Mrs. Obama,

Welcome to my hometown. You move to Washington, D.C., as the city undergoes its third historic population change in 50 years.

My city was white when I was a child and black when I was young adult. Now it's becoming white again in my middle years. We black folks know we dominated this city for 50 years, and it's about over.

White people now live on blocks they were afraid to walk down 10 or 15 years ago. They are even organizing block clubs, a sure sign they plan to stay a while. Some white people enjoy summer evenings sitting outside a Starbucks on 14th Street and Park Road.

In 1968, rioters burned stores at the same intersection. This once thriving commercial area stood scarred and scary until the turn of the 21st century. Corner stores on lower 14th Street that a decade ago sold 40's (40-ounce bottles of beer) now sell chardonnay.

I grew up on C Street N.E., about a mile and half from the Capitol. Mine was the third black family on the block when we moved there in the early 1950s. Our white neighbors quickly sold their homes to new black arrivals, and that's how the block’s racial composition remained until about eight years ago.

Now as pioneering older black residents like my parents leave or die, young white couples or families have been replacing them. A young white family down the block has installed a hot tub in their front yard.  Slowly, my old block is coming full circle.

When my family moved there, the schools had just been integrated. In 1948, the Supreme Court had declared restrictive covenants prohibiting home sales to Negroes and Jews unconstitutional, and white folks were fleeing to the suburbs — primarily those in Maryland.

Almost every afternoon, members of my family would see a fight on our corner at 17th and C St NE between white kids at Eastern High School and some of the incoming black kids.

The nation's first urban renewal project, in Southwest Washington, uprooted the largely poor and black population there. To house those displaced residents, large public housing complexes sprung up across the Anacostia River in far Southeast and Northeast, sections of the city that were then still rural. Sis Anne, a distant cousin who worked as a maid and lived on Canal Street at the foot the Capitol, came to live with us. Canal Street now lives only in memory.

The aim of that urban renewal project in the early 1950s was to move black folks out of close-in Washington and keep white folks in. It didn't work. By 1960, the District of Columbia was predominately black.

It was as if almost overnight white residents had disappeared from not just our block but also, for the most part, the entire city east of 16th St. NW. The overall population had peaked in 1950 at slightly over 800,000. From 1950 to 1960, the population fell by a net of 40,000, but nearly 200,000 whites left. White friends from elementary school had vanished by the time my black classmates and I entered junior high school.

The April 1968 riots following Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination destroyed the city's three major neighborhood shopping areas — along 14th Street, 7th Street and H Street. In the 1970s, racial polarization and animosity had grown so deep that a white man was killed after he was involved in a small traffic accident on U Street.

Rock Creek Park became the boundary between white and black Washington. In 1974, the District of Columbia elected its first mayor, Marion Barry, who was also its first black mayor. Black Washingtonians started extolling “Chocolate City.” (Previously, three presidentially-appointed white commissioners had governed the District.)

But on the blocks just south of the Capitol, along New Jersey Avenue and 1st Streets S.E., three years after the riots white people were moving in. Each year it seemed that white people quietly and inexorably moved another block farther east.

Members of my church, Israel Baptist, then on Capitol Hill, started talking about becoming one of the last black families on their block. Most black people in Washington are renters, so it is easy for landlords to move them out when housing values rise.

As a Washington Post housing reporter in the mid-1970s, I wrote stories about whites moving into the Shaw neighborhood just north of downtown, Mount Pleasant just west of 14th Street, and Capitol Hill. It was called gentrification.

When I left Washington in 1994 to work in upstate New York, the only white people on U Street were either young prostitutes or white johns. When I returned in 1999, white people were eating in sidewalk cafes there.

Mid-rise condominiums springing up around a new subway station have finally transformed the old 14th Street riot corridor. People can actually shop on 14th Street again. Target and Starbucks stores anchor the neighborhood renaissance.

Today, whites comprise a third of the city’s population and are growing in number. Blacks hold a scant majority on the District Council. Some people wonder if Adrian Fenty will be last black mayor.

Here it’s not a red America or a blue America. It’s white Washington or black Washington. Mr. President, we who live in and around the District will see if your new hometown can embrace your message and make it one Washington.

Last word: Washington, the nation's capital, has an avenue named for every state. The most famous, of course, is Pennsylvania Avenue.