DC's different ethnic story

Sam Smith – Despite the current nationwide absorption with ethnic issues, the media, public and academia pay hardly any attention to Washington DC which for six recent decades had a black majority, five of them with a black mayor. In fact, even though white gentrification has now cost blacks their majority, they still represent 44% of the city and 59% when you include other minorities such as latinos and Asians. I have long suspected that DC’s colonial status, reflected in its limited home rule and lack of representation at the national level, has been driven in part by contempt for what is perceived as the headquarters of the country’s most powerful when it actually is a town of high diversity. As a native Washingtonian who lived two thirds of his life there I have come to view DC quite differently. Here are a few things I found:

Diversity in DC includes ethnicity, class and occupation. The longer you lived in DC the more you realized that nothing about its black community was simple. For example, when I lived there, some 15% were Catholic matched only by New Orleans. Blacks included some of the wealthiest and some of the poorest residents,  including folks whose great great grandparents had lived there as free blacks and some who had only recently arrived from further South.

There were  also numerous variations in the white community. Those who hated blacks had mostly peacefully moved to the suburbs in large numbers. During the decade of the 1950s the percentage of whites declined by a third.  By 1980 in the nation’s capital just 28% were non-latino whites. During this same period the number of blacks had doubled.

A 2011 study reported by the Washington Post found that blacks and whites both understood how class could surpass ethnicity. There was, for example, the story of a white guy driving past a black Post reporter mowing his lawn on upper 16^th Street. “What do you get for a lawn?” the white guy yelled out of his car. Replied the black journalist, “I get to sleep with the lady of the house.”

Blacks and whites, even during segregation, were not geographically far apart. This is something that is generally ignored in talking about ethnic relations. The proximity of cultures makes a large difference because even though a community may be divided in spirit, its people are not strangers.

Another advantage of cultural proximity is that it damages clichés. It may even break formal cultural rules. Washington’s black madam, Odessa Madre, was a classic example.

At her peak in the 1940s, Madre was earning about $100,000 a year, and had at least six bawdy houses, bookmaking operations, and a headquarters known as the Club Madre. Among its performers were Moms Mabley, Count Basie and Nat King Cole. By 1980, Madre had been picked up 30 times on 57 charges over a 48 year span, seven of them spent in a federal prison.

Madre grew up in a mixed neighborhood of blacks and Irish, the latter heavily populating the DC police force and, in the end, often looking out for their childhood friend. "Negroes and Irishmen got along real well," Madre told the Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy. "They would fight amongst themselves, but we wouldn't fight each other. If somebody outside Cowtown came to fight the Irish, the Negroes would chunk bricks at them. We were like a big happy family." Writes Milloy: "Thus began a long and prosperous relationship with members of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

DC civil rights leaders led both blacks and whites. Once, while in the offices of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where I was handling the media for director Marion Barry, the national SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael came from out of town and announced that we whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. But only a couple of years later I found myself working with blacks and whites to form a third party on behalf of DC statehood just as some years earlier a similar coalition – even including black and white middle class homeowners -  had joined in a successful fight against freeways. Both the self government and anti-freeway movements benefited both white and blacks and the latter assumed the leadership of these causes.

For example,  I got involved with Marion Barry after he staged a boycott of DC Transit because of a fare increase. I00,000 riders stayed off  the buses and street cars that day. I drove 75 of them, black and white, to their destinations. Marion read the article I subsequentially wrote about it and asked me to be his media guy.

Although we later parted ways politically due to some of his policies and drug problems, I could still talk with him. Like the time, after being on a radio show together, I reminded him of how therapists thought the addicted should make amends to those they have harmed. He didn’t take my advice but he didn’t argue with me. And three months before his death I was on another show with Barry and told him that I thought he had more in common with mayors like Curley, Daley and LeGuardia than with the more modern bunch. He cheerfully took up the issue and noted where he agreed and didn’t.  In short, we didn’t agree on a lot but knew we still shared things.

Black intellectuals in DC - Another thing most don’t know about Barry is that he was all but thesis short of a doctorate in chemistry. The other major civil rights leader in DC, Julius Hobson, had an engineering degree from Tuskegee Institute and a masters in economics from Howard University. This is noteworthy in part because little credit is given to black intellectualism in DC. Not only did Howard start over a century earlier as a black university, but its graduates sometimes couldn’t get jobs at white universities and so taught in the DC public school system. Among the black minds of Washington were Sterling Brown, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Nora Zeal Hurston and Jean Toomer.

Riots and crime: Yes, Washington had riots in 1968, but they were less destructive than in some cities. One reason: our black mayor then, Walter Washington. During the riots, he was called to the office of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, where he was told to start shooting looters. Washington refused, saying that "you can replace material goods, but you can't replace human beings." Hoover then said, "Well, this conversation is over." Replied Washington, "That's all right, I was leaving anyway."

Like other cities, DC has had a lot of crime, but not as much as some outsiders think. For example, DC currently ranks 19^th in urban murder rate. It has one quarter the murders per capita of St Louis, and less than three quarters the rate in Chicgo.

A different history - In 1949 – five years before Brown v. Board of Education Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle integrated the city’s Catholic schools. One of my friends with Irish roots remembers that while he was there, his basketball team could  only play Catholic schools or black public schools.

That’s just one more example of how Washington’s history doesn’t favor ethnic cliches. Consider for example, the fact that 30% of the city’s blacks were free back in the early 19^th  century. Their descendants are now sharing a town with those whose ancestors were slaves or who came to the city from the South in the 1950s and 1960s. As early as the 1960s, working with SNCC, I became aware of the hostility of some successful black residents towards young black activists who were threatening the quid pro quo they had established with the white government and establishment.

My own experience -  Back in 1991, I described in The Great Political Repair Manual how I felt about living with blacks in DC:

I’m a native Washingtonian and have lived in DC most of my life. DC is two-thirds black. When someone asks me where I live and I tell them, they sometimes look at my fifty-something white face and say, "You mean in the city?" What they mean is: with all those blacks?

I don't live in DC out of any moral imperative. I'm not doing anybody except myself a favor. I live here because I enjoy it. Beside, I'd rather be in the minority in DC than in the majority in a lot of places. Here are a few reasons why:

• I've found black Washingtonians exceptionally friendly, decent, hospitable, and morally rooted. They're nice folks to be around.
• Black Washingtonians will talk to strangers without knowing "who are you with?" White Washingtonians, especially in the political city, are often far more formal and distant. -- and more likely to treat you based on your utility to themselves. Not knowing anyone at an all-white event in DC can be pretty lonely; not knowing anyone at an all-black event in DC means you soon will.
• Black Washingtonians understand loss, pain, suffering and disappointment. They have helped me become better at handling these things.
• Black Washingtonians value humor while many white Washingtonians try (as Russell Baker once noted) to be somber under the illusion that it makes them serious. I like to laugh.
• Black Washingtonians value achievement as well as power. Teachers, artists, writers and poets are respected in the black community. As a writer, I like that.
• Living in close proximity with another culture provides a useful gauge by which to judge one's own.
• The imagery, rhythm and style of black speech appeals to me far more than the jargon-ridden circumlocution of the white city.
• Many black Washingtonians are actively concerned about social and political change; much of white Washington is seeking to maintain the status quo.
• White Washington always seems to want me to conform to it; black Washington has always accepted me for who I am.