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The Battle of Fort Reno
This is an article in the Washington City Paper in the classic mold. I haven't seen a story like this in the City Paper in twenty-five or thirty years.
The Battle of Fort Reno
The long and little-known story of how neighbors and developers used a plan for a park to push a thriving African-American community out of Fort Reno.
Neil Flanagan
Nov 2, 2017 6 AM
Three African-American activists hurried to the Capitol on the morning of March 28th, 1926. They had heard Congress was considering a bill that would wipe out a community of 370 families in the growing suburbs west of Rock Creek Park. In the small neighborhood known as Reno, black and white residents mixed like a checkerboard.
James Lincoln Neill, a Howard-educated attorney and businessman, led the group that morning. At the door to the committee room, he stopped the chairman of the House District Committee, Ernest Gibson, and made his protest: The black residents were never offered a hearing. The chairman took heed and promised the men they would have a chance to plead their case. This gave the activists time to organize. ... They were fighting for 52 acres where African-Americans had made a decent life. Reno was a community with modest houses and churches, clubs, and a thriving social calendar. But white suburbs had recently grown up around Reno, and many of the people moving to them sought racial exclusivity. Real estate developers were relentless and zealous in their efforts to provide it.
The freedoms of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era lasted longer in the District of Columbia than they did in many other parts of the nation, but an upset election brought Southern white power to Washington in 1913. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration slowly instituted segregation in D.C., and Southern congressmen pushed segregationist practices on a city that not only couldn’t vote for president, it couldn’t elect its own government. ... It was during D.C.’s 1920s economic boom that color lines grew clearer and homes became a vehicle of white wealth and black dispossession. The federal government grew, and at the same time racist sentiment increased.
Neill’s harried intervention with the congressman, recounted in the Washington Tribune, was the beginning of a forgotten fight for civil rights in the middle of the creation of modern Washington. In 2017, it can feel like gentrification is a racially tinged contest over space that runs like a live wire through every interaction. The story of Reno reveals a critical part of the history behind this dynamic.
***
The long and little-known story of how neighbors and developers used a plan for a park to push a thriving African-American community out of Fort Reno.
Neil Flanagan
Nov 2, 2017 6 AM
Three African-American activists hurried to the Capitol on the morning of March 28th, 1926. They had heard Congress was considering a bill that would wipe out a community of 370 families in the growing suburbs west of Rock Creek Park. In the small neighborhood known as Reno, black and white residents mixed like a checkerboard.
James Lincoln Neill, a Howard-educated attorney and businessman, led the group that morning. At the door to the committee room, he stopped the chairman of the House District Committee, Ernest Gibson, and made his protest: The black residents were never offered a hearing. The chairman took heed and promised the men they would have a chance to plead their case. This gave the activists time to organize. ... They were fighting for 52 acres where African-Americans had made a decent life. Reno was a community with modest houses and churches, clubs, and a thriving social calendar. But white suburbs had recently grown up around Reno, and many of the people moving to them sought racial exclusivity. Real estate developers were relentless and zealous in their efforts to provide it.
The freedoms of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era lasted longer in the District of Columbia than they did in many other parts of the nation, but an upset election brought Southern white power to Washington in 1913. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration slowly instituted segregation in D.C., and Southern congressmen pushed segregationist practices on a city that not only couldn’t vote for president, it couldn’t elect its own government. ... It was during D.C.’s 1920s economic boom that color lines grew clearer and homes became a vehicle of white wealth and black dispossession. The federal government grew, and at the same time racist sentiment increased.
Neill’s harried intervention with the congressman, recounted in the Washington Tribune, was the beginning of a forgotten fight for civil rights in the middle of the creation of modern Washington. In 2017, it can feel like gentrification is a racially tinged contest over space that runs like a live wire through every interaction. The story of Reno reveals a critical part of the history behind this dynamic.
***