artist: Udofia
WASHINGTON, D.C.
a historically chocolate city
In 1963, racial segregation formally ended in the District of Columbia public schools , however, the communities in Ward 3 had very few residents of color. Thus, the schools remained predominately white. That changed In 1968, when the school boundaries were redrawn to provide for desegregation. Below is a panel discussion of six alumni who attended Wilson High School during that transition and their memories. (Note: This discussion was part of a greater historical project developed and curated by the Wilson HS Library and its Archives Committee. It was funded by the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, the Wilson PTSO, and in-kind donations of the committee members' time/expertise.)
CJ
Washington’s Lost Black Aristocracy
(CITATION: Carlson, Tucker. “Washington’s Lost Black Aristocracy”. City Journal. Manhattan Institute, August 1996.)
The notion that blacks have ever succeeded on a large scale in business is a “social myth,” declared Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier almost 40 years ago. In Black Bourgeoisie, the classic study of the black middle class, Frazier argues that at no time have American blacks ever created a thriving business community. Claims to the contrary, writes Frazier, constitute a call to racial separatism spread by unscrupulous black businessmen in the hope “that they will have the monopoly of the Negro market.”
Frazier’s analysis, controversial when it first appeared, has come to be accepted by many historians as at least approximately true. As a consequence, the history of black success in America often is presented as the success of isolated individuals, of specially gifted men and women who rose to achievement alone despite tremendous obstacles. But such a history is incomplete. For nearly a century, a community of successful black businessmen, clergy, and educators flourished in America. This black aristocracy built a nearly self-contained society outside the white world and with limited white assistance. And this group existed in the center of E. Franklin Frazier’s hometown, Washington, D.C.
This summer the New York Times ran a devastating three-part series on the city of Washington that confirmed what those who live there already know: the District, particularly in its predominantly black areas, “is falling apart.” Dramatic though it is, this decline is a relatively recent phenomenon. From the turn of the century until the race riots of 1968, Washington contained the largest black professional community in the United States. By 1920 a 40-block portion of the city, an area now known as the Shaw neighborhood, boasted more than 300 black-owned businesses, including the Ford, Howard, and Dabney movie theaters, a large hotel, three black-owned banks (one, the Industrial Savings Bank, with nearly $500,000 on deposit), black newspapers and pharmacies, a number of successful undertaking businesses, cabarets, billiard clubs, and Ware’s, a black-owned and -managed department store. The Murray Palace Casino, located on U Street, was one of the city’s first concrete-reinforced buildings and could accommodate 1,800 people. The neighborhood rivaled Harlem as a center of American black enterprise and culture. “You had to wear a tie to walk down U Street,” recalls one elderly resident.
Black Washingtonians were proud of what they had created. In 1921 the Washington Bee, the city’s largest black paper, editorialized that the growth of black business in Washington, “more than anything else, marks real and prominent racial progress.” The thriving business district was a symbol of what blacks could achieve. As one longtime resident of the area put it in 1988, “If you were on U Street, you didn’t need to go anywhere else. It was all right there for you. Blacks had a society put together on this street.”
Today, Shaw resembles much of the rest of black Washington: a crumbling inner-city neighborhood of boarded-up buildings, pitted streets, and vagrants. Nearly all its black-owned businesses have gone. The last of Shaw’s major black enterprises—McGuire’s Funeral Home, founded in 1912 and among the most famous black mortuaries in the country—relocated near the Maryland border almost 20 years ago.
Today, the city’s black aristocracy, like the thriving communities it created, exists mostly in memories. In its place are Washington’s new black leaders: the civil rights class that took power in the District nearly 30 years ago. As it turned out, the two groups could not coexist in Washington. In the process of gaining political power, Washington’s black politicians, intentionally or not, drove from the city the very group they needed to govern effectively. The trend is not unique to Washington; in the past 30 years, middle-class black families have fled cities all over America. But nowhere has a black elite fallen so fast from such heights—and with such terrible consequences—as in the District of Columbia.
Booker T. Washington, speaking to a gathering of the National Negro Business League in 1900, claimed that wherever he had seen “a black man who was succeeding in business, who was a taxpayer, and who possessed intelligence and high character, that individual was treated with the highest respect by the members of the white race.” Washington’s statement betrays a strong, almost touching, faith in the ability of business to better the lives of black Americans. In the District of Columbia such faith was not misplaced. It was economic success, more than anything else, that earned the city’s black aristocracy its power and respect from whites.
At the time Booker Washington spoke, the District contained the largest black middle class in the country.
"At the dawn of the 20th century, African Americans had created a cultural and intellectual capital. Washington had relatively few "Jim Crow" laws. However, segregation and racism were endemic. The few existing laws mandated segregation in the public schools and recreation facilities but not in the streetcars and public libraries. African Americans, therefore, reacted strongly to President Wilson's (1913-1921) institution of segregation in all of the federal government agencies. Clashes between African Americans and European Americans reached a fever pitch during the July 1919 race riot, when women and men fought back against violent whites, giving another meaning to the term "New Negro," a term usually associated with the cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. During the Great Depression (1929-1939) and World War II (1939-1945), the early civil rights movement gained ground."
- Excerpt from African Americans in Washington, DC: 1800-1975 by Marya Annette McQuirter, Ph.D.
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