Washington, DC

The Southwest Quadrant of Washington occupies a peninsula where the Washington Canal separated the neighborhood from the rest of the city through most of the nineteenth century, earning it the nickname the Island. African Americans established a large community there during and after the Civil War, numbering 14,000 by some counts in the eastern half of the quadrant. A Jewish immigrant community supported two Orthodox synagogues west of 4th Street by the 1880s. An Irish and German Catholic community shared the western blocks. By 1950, the neighborhood was 69 percent Black overall, and Project Area B, the densest clearance zone, was 98 percent Black.

The D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, created by a 1945 act of Congress, began large-scale acquisition and demolition in 1952. On November 22, 1954, the Supreme Court issued Berman v. Parker, a unanimous decision holding that the District could take even non-blighted properties within a designated renewal area and could treat aesthetics as a valid public purpose. The decision became the legal foundation for every urban renewal clearance in the United States for the next half century, including the 2005 Kelo v. City of New London ruling. By 1963, workers had razed 99 percent of all structures within the 560-acre boundary, erasing the entire street grid. Only 13 percent of the original displaced residents returned to the rebuilt Southwest.

Organized resistance at the time was nearly absent, a fact the essay names directly. The most significant legal challenge came from Max Morris, a white Jewish merchant whose non-blighted department store was condemned; his executors carried the case to the Supreme Court and lost. The fish market vendors successfully preserved the Maine Avenue Fish Market, which still operates. Reverend Walter Fauntroy founded MICCO in 1966 to prevent a repeat of Southwest’s clearance from reaching Shaw. The filmmaker Dolores Smith conducted 33 oral history interviews with former residents in 1983 and 1985; that collection, held at DC Public Library, and the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum’s “A Right to the City” exhibition are the primary instruments of recovery.

The essay under this city documents the clearance, the absence of resistance, and the reparative documentary record the community built after the fact.