Issues & Trends
Revisiting D.C.’s History as the Capital of Black America
March 01, 2022
“Every single day is Black History Day, every week is Black History Week, and every month is Black History Month in the District of Columbia,” D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine said on February 24 during a conversation with George Derek Musgrove, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and co-author of the book Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital. The virtual event focused on the historical importance of the District as the first big American city with a majority Black population.
Musgrove laid out the economic and social conditions leading to Black prominence in the District, providing anecdotes that demonstrated the tension between the nation’s idealistic notion of liberty and the economic and social realities of slavery. He began with the selection of Washington, D.C., over Philadelphia as the location for the center of federal government.
Northern states wanted war debt to be assumed by the federal government, while more fiscally solvent southern states were concerned about exposing their servants to Philadelphia’s abolition movement. Leveraging these positions, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison brokered a deal with Alexander Hamilton in which the South would get its southern capital and the North would receive its debt relief. Racine jokingly commented that he had only been made aware of these negotiations because of the popular musical Hamilton.
The District’s early tobacco plantations and its location at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers made the city a hub for slave trade, resulting in a significant Black presence from its establishment. Musgrove noted that the slave trade resulted in Black people representing 20 percent to 30 percent of the population in the early 1800s, a figure that has largely been maintained as a “floor” for Black representation in the District in the years since. “The city is built upon a slave society,” Musgrove said.
But the District also quickly developed its own burgeoning abolitionist movement, driven in part by the Revolutionary War’s slogans of universal liberty and egality and the War of 1812, in which the British promised slaves their freedom in exchange for joining Great Britain’s forces. Musgrove said another factor contributing to the decline in slavery was the District’s transition from tobacco to grain cultivation, reducing the need for labor. In many instances, allowing slaves to purchase their freedom became economically attractive to area slave owners.
Musgrove told the story of Alethia Browning Tanner, who had been enslaved in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Her vegetable market, run with her owner’s permission, financed the purchase of freedom for herself as well as many family members and friends. A park in NoMa was named in her honor.
The introduction of the cotton gin and the need for labor further south in Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana fueled a new demand for people sold “down the river.” “In 1833 or so, the free Black population exceeded the enslaved Black population for the first time,” Musgrove said. While a growing portion of the local Black population was emancipated, D.C. was, nevertheless, a major slave-exporting city. Musgrove noted that a property on Duke Street in Alexandria that currently houses the Freedom House Museum was the site of the sale of 10,000 people in the 1830s.
Prior to the 1920s, Black residents could purchase property more or less unimpeded, Musgrove said. Residential blocks during this post-Civil War period commonly included people of a wide range of races and classes, he added.
“It was because there weren’t segregation ordinances that kept them in certain parts of the city. Starting in the 1890s and accelerating during the 1920s, the real estate industry here focused on creating both race- and class-segregated neighborhoods. They did this through a bunch of different tactics,” said Musgrove. These tactics included “racial steering,” in which agents showed houses in white neighborhoods to only white buyers and houses in Black neighborhoods to Black buyers. The other was restrictive covenants, agreements written into house deeds not to rent, sell, or transfer their property to people of different races.
Musgrove said that the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1948 eliminating restrictive covenants led to another exploitative practice called “blockbusting.” This practice involved real estate agents calling homeowners to say that a house in the neighborhood had been purchased by a Black buyer and that the homeowner should sell before their property price dropped. The homeowner would then sell at a loss, and the property would be flipped by the agent to the growing number of Black buyers hungry for better real estate options, at a premium. Musgrove said that these practices continue, to some extent, even today.
Racine addressed racial discrimination in housing, remarking upon litigation his office has pursued against slumlords and developers in attempts to ensure decent, livable, and affordable housing for District residents. Racine referenced a matter that was recently brought to his attention involving a Black family and a homeowners association in the city’s upper northwest that has been allegedly restricting amenities to white residents. “This stuff can continue even as we try to strive for a more perfect union,” he said.
A number of resources are available for those interested in learning more about Black history in the District. Musgrove drew attention to mappingsegregationdc.org, which provides maps and documents relating to the history of restrictive covenants; his own website on Black power in Washington, D.C., from the 1960s to the late 1990s; and articles he has previously written on the topic of gentrification.
