Spend some time in the parts of the District west of Rock Creek Park, and you will find cute neighborhoods, vibrant commercial areas, great schools, and lots of green space. You will also probably notice another quality of the place: Its residents are overwhelmingly white. It’s been this way for a very long time.
Turn back the clock to the start of the twentieth century, when those cute neighborhoods were but a twinkle in developers’ eyes, and you will find that establishing and maintaining a white utopia was exactly what was intended by their founders. Policies such as minimum construction costs evolved into racially restrictive covenants, exclusionary zoning, racist citizens’ associations, segregated schools, blockbusting, and government-supported redlining.
Sadly, these efforts were incredibly successful. As the number of Black residents in the District soared mid-century, the very white neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park became even whiter, and small communities of color were forced out to make room for new white institutions. As a result, the opportunity to create generational wealth through homeownership benefitted only white families; the aforementioned policies ensured that Black families could not do the same.
Starting Thursday, April 11, 2024, and continuing for three months, the lobby of the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library is home to a new interactive traveling exhibit, Undesign the Redline, which explains the history of redlining and other race-based policies of exclusion in the United States, especially the displacement of people and communities of color from their neighborhoods in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the policies that fueled structural racism and inequality, the systems that resulted, and how we can come together in an intentional way to “undesign” those systems and their impacts. It looks at events nationally, and locally in the District, specifically in upper Northwest neighborhoods.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Bob Ward over at Greater Greater Washington
