In what neighborhood did you grow up? (I think you’ve told me this before, but I don’t recall.)
I know that you know this stuff, but for the out-of-towners who have a lot of very outdated notions: DC always had a substantial black population, typically a quarter to a third of the total. This of course grew rapidly in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, topping out at over 70 percent. The white middle class started moving out when suburbanization became the thing after WWII. Then came school desegregation, which set off an exodus in what was still a largely southern town. The ‘68 riots put some more nails in the coffin. But by the end of the 70’s, the pendulum was already swinging back. I arrived in ‘79; I was not the only white guy east of Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill but there were darn few of us. The black middle class started moving to the suburbs and gentrifiers started coming back into the city. We now have gentrification on steroids, while a lot of suburbanites are spending four or more hours a day in their cars. Cycles.
I have never seen a listing of neighborhoods that were, in fact, built originally as black neighborhoods. Historically a lot of the black population (and lower class, often immigrant, white working class families) lived in alley housing, often with either the husband or wife working as a servant. A lot of this housing was torn down by 1960’s urban renewal, but displacing people into big projects turned out to be a cure worse than the disease.
Old Town Anacostia was originally a white working class area. Frederick Douglass had to win a landmark legal case to break a restrictive racial covenant before buying Cedar Hill, his home in Anacostia. For out of towners who are still operating on old information about Anacostia, Cedar Hill is now a National Historic Site run by the NPS and is well worth visiting. The surrounding area is now gentrifying, though there are enough aging housing projects in the area to keep things lively for the time being. (Those need to be shut down, and many of them will be as they age out.) Prior to buying Cedar Hill, Douglass also owned a house on the 300 block of A Street N.E., a block from the Supreme Court.
Most of Capitol Hill was built as white working and middle class housing. Along the fringes, Kingman Terrace and Carver Langston were built as black neighborhoods. I don’t know about Rosedale, Trinidad or Ivy City, which has an honorable history as a railroad workers’ neighborhood before it crashed and burned. That happened mainly because passenger rail travel declined and most of the jobs disappeared; the young, the skilled, and the energetic folks moved out and the neighborhood collapsed. It’s being rebuilt now. Shaw grew out of the freedman’s camps established during the Civil War and was always heavily black. (It is named for William Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts, and as far as I know, the renamers haven’t gone after it yet.) Next door, Ledroit Park was built as an upscale white neighborhood but became majority black in the 1920’s, partly because of its proximity to Howard University. So, DC has always been a mix.
Anyhow, you are absolutely correct. In most of today’s overheated debates about the evils of gentrification, the “historically black neighborhoods” being claimed by activists were actually historically white areas that flipped in the 50’s-70’s, and in a few cases earlier. The lefties operate on the Brezhnev Doctrine of racial entitlement. But it does leave me curious: what neighborhoods were in fact built originally for black homeowners, back when DC was still a segregated southern city? I’ve never seen a good list.
Agree, blacks had always lived scattered all around DC and many had jobs with the railroads, trucking, grocery or merchandise distribution, gardening, portering, doormen, domestics, cooks, waiters, drivers, cabbies—lots of kinds of service work, including segregated jobs for the black community like barbering, corner stores, all types of public accommodations. Philadelphia was the same, with "alley streets" in many neighborhoods. There were also black upper class people in DC after the Civil War, particularly educators and lawyers, and several U.S. Representatives.
The postwar "central planning" bug out of FDR's wake started becoming very aggressive after the U.S. government announced at the start of the 50s that blacks could apply for civil service jobs. Hence, block-busting and "white flight" in response to a rapid, large influx of rural, less-educated people into our working-class, yet comparatively urbane environment. Even the middle- and lower middle-class whites, having lived in DC for generations (it's almost unheard of now) had been educated in history and current events, including international events, by the daily DC newspapers and the many free museums and monuments. There was even a Republican newspaper until 1981, The Washington Star. During the same postwar era, the CPUSA and the ACLU (both founded along with the Soviet Revolution in the 20s) gained ascendancy, relishing their chance to organize animosity and resentment. They love a good class war.
I pity the border towns and destination cities of the latest influx thanks to Bide-a-wee.