Review: Chevy Chase: A Home Suburb for the Nation’s Capital, by Lampl & Williams

    This excellent book, part of my reading as I created the singing walking tours of DC which went into my book Stayed on Freedom’s Call,

StayedOnFreedomsCallGoodReads

was coauthored by Elizabeth Jo Lampl and Kimberly Prothro Williams, adn published by Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, the Montgomery county historical preservation commission, and the MD Historical Trust Press.  It covers the history of Chevy Chase, which is the immediate across-the-border neighbor of upper North West DC, as you go up Connecticut Avenue, which is the main drag of the city, as far as I am concerned, since that is where I spent my earliest summers with my Grandma Marie at what we called ‘the old folks home’ -which was really just an apartment building set aside for the elderly by the DC Housing Authority.  Like CC, which is about a twenty minute walk north of that part of Connecticut Avenue, the entire neighborhood, or both of them, rather, are reasonably quiet, but as soon as you cross the city line into Chevy Chase, you get much more shade, from many more trees. It seems that a Col. Belt (for Beltsville, MD?) got a land grant in 1725 (his house apparently stood about 500 yards se of CC circle) for the entire area.  There were three main plantations (CC, No Gain, and Hayes Manor).  It seems that the area was chosen as a suburb in 1885, by the CC Land Co. The breezes made it cooler in summer, which is important in DC.  In 1862, Congress charters the Washington and Georgetown Railway (yes, G’town was part of the District, but it is so hard to get to that even now it feels like a different city…) to run three horse-drawn streetcar lines from the LeDroit Park and Mt. Pleasant neighborhoods up “immediately beyond city limits.”   That gets us the first streetcar neighborhood or suburb.  Then, in 1873, the B & O steam rail line crossed Montgomery county into DC, which opened up Upper Montgomery county to forming the new ‘rail road suburbs’ (which are now near the ends or at the extended ends of the Metro lines, like Takoma Park).  The electric trolley comes along in 1888 to Richmond, VA, then to DC and forms more suburbs in Montgomery County.

     At about this point, behind the scenes over three years, from 1887-1890, Francis Newlands begins secretly buying land, and in June of 1890, the CC Land Co. goes public.  Then, he and architect Frederick Olmstead start planning separate business and dwelling areas with non-grid streets, larger parks, and water so pure that District residents took the street car to bring water home to DC.  [Gee wiz, no change there from our horrible water quality back in the 1980’s huh? -Shira comment]

   The lack of stores was made up for by delivery wagons (see who is benefiting from all the extra transportation infrastructure required by their intentional division of businesses from residential areas…).  Then, the CC Land Co. sold lots with building covenants enforcing restrictions, resulting in upscale residents building expensive homes with mandatory levels of frontage, and banned businesses in all residential suburbs.

   In the 1930s, GM completed the catastrophe by starting to systematically buy up streetcar companies, and replace the streetcars with buses.

Lovely.  So that is how the end begins.

Let’s Do Better.   Please.

Shira

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Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

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Book Review: Smith’s Washington At Home, and Adulting Education

Today, adulting education, part of Project Do Better, comes as a short post on financial self-defense in DC history, which is one of the pre-requisite bits of knowledge to be proven before one can show that one is a true Serving Adult, in the proposed Service Adulthood Challenge. This part of the three parts of self-defense (physical, financial and emotional self-defense), involves knowing your rights and responsibilities in your state or region, as well as in your nation of residence (and origin, if that nation, as often happens, has a claim on you, still). It also involves understanding our shared histories. This book, happily, has a good bit of DC history, even Black history, and a bit of Jewish DC as well.

—

Before I delve into DC history, please remember to “Adult” for yourself, and find out what your legal financial rights are, for instance regarding statutes of limitations on debt, which is is your responsibility to know and defend…

     Here is why I am using an old photo taken of me with a fellow anti-war peaceful protester at the weekly silent Stop The War vigil    in Bath, England, back in 2007 (yes, the same year that I stood in that gap to stop a beating…):  it reminds me of where I personally have been, just as the research I did on DC history reminded me where my family and those around them, from DC and the MD, VA, but mostly DC area, since well before the Civil War, in varying states of free-ness, but all either MU (mulatto) or Black, and thus subject to the Black Codes in whichever of the three states they live in or passed through.  So they really had to be Adults, and know the laws of every area they were in or from.  Part of that “adulting,” as some people like to call it these days, included protecting themselves and their family members whenever possible by owning property  (Note: updated in 2023…).  So, here is the review.

     I found my old notes, from 2010, in my research notebook, and realized that I had never written them up after creating the tours for SHIRtour, my DC community cooperation walking tour company.  What strikes me most immediately about these notes is page 200, where Smith notes that the 1874 DC disenfranchisement “was definitely influenced by ” the fact that more than a quarter of the District’s population was Black, suggesting further reading in Brown, 1978, The Negro In Washington.  In my review of the Guide to Black Washington/ (reviewed back on Feb3rd…), we saw mention of John F. Cook, Sr., and Smith mentions him here, also, as setting up the 15th St. Presb. Church, the first Colored Preb. church (in DC, I presume).  The famous paper of the DC Negro Press, The Washington Bee, is mentioned alongside The People’s  Advocate, and on to Black Broadway on U St, NW, from the 1920s -1950s, and the Howard Theater in DC, which opened at the same time as many other places, in 1910, but Ben’s Chili Bowl doesn’t open until 1958!  🙂  (made famous by President Obama, but we local native Washingtonians all have parents who’ve eaten there for their entire lives…)      And most astoundingly of all, that we were never taught in school, was the fact that on 23 July, 1919, at 7th & U, NW, over two thousand armed Black residents defended their neighborhood White attacks, provoked by the mainstream (white) press!   Who knew about this, and why did we never learn about it?

     More notes about Mt. Pleasant as an early integration neighborhood, cooperation instead of White Flight in Adams Morgan, and Moses Liverpool, George Bell, & Nicholas Franklin opening a school, and Pres. George Washington’s letters to the Touro Synagogue, in Newport, RI as precedent for shuls in DC, cooperation in the Deanwood neighborhood, and Shepherd Park against Block Busters (& Boss Shepherd pbbl turning in his grave!!)…

–

2011-08-08 16:52:00
gender-diffs among Black landowners in Wash. County, 1855… Curious…
I do not have time now, but I am dying to look into why (on p. 127 of Washington at home: An illustrated history of neighborhoods in the nation’s capital; second edition, 2010, JHU Press, Kathryn Schneider Smith, ed.)

4 of the 5 black landowners in what is now roughly the Brightwood neighborhood (via the 1855 Washington County assessment listing 31 landowners along the 7th St. Turnpike, opened in 1822, from Rock Creek Church Rd to the District Line

(presumably meaning to what was then Boundary Street, now FL ave., marking the border of the Federal City, aka City of Washington)  Line, were women.

No time to delve, must check this wonderful book out again in a few weeks!

–

So, it turns out that many of the former slaves who owned property were light-skinned women, manumitted by their owners, as has happened in at least two cases in my family.  This may or many not partially explain the lack of Black male property owners in DC at the time vis-a-vis Black Women owners.  More research is needed, but it holds with commentary down the family line about women being differently positioned in the DC black community.  As for the Jewish community in DC,   Washington Hebrew Congregation starts without a building, much of the community living along on 7th Street, NW, which was also known as Market str if I recall correctly, as it leads down to the Wharf, back in 1852.  The YMHA, on 11th and Penn. was also an important center of the community.  Several families came down from Baltimore around and especially after the Civil War.  For more details on the synagogues, see pages 62, 91, & 94.

    More on my continuing striving with family history and financial self-defense next week, friends:

Yassas,   γεια σας!    Salût !  Nos vemos!  Görüşürüz!     ! שָׁלוֹם

Action Items in support of literacy and hope that you can take right now:

1.) Share  two different resources on your ideas of financial self-defense.

2.) Share your thoughts on how you found and like each of the resources you found.

 

ShiraDest

based on a post  originally drafted in September of  12020 HE

Review: The Guide to Black Washington

    This this is a book with several authors, Sandra Fitzpatrick, Maria R. Goodwin, and Adele Logan Alexander,  that I referred to extensively while I was writing Stayed on Freedom’s Call: Cooperation Between Jewish And African-American Communities In Washington, DC, to fill out background information from the Black-Jewish community cooperation tours I’d created in 2010.

On P. 36, the DC Jail, the second one, from 1839-1874, was a Federal jail, not the City jail as we know it today, on Judiciary Square, and was used as a slave warehouse.  This was documented in 1815 by Jesse Torrey: “kidnapped freemen … transportation to the slave regions.”  Anyone arrested had to “prove free status & pay for stay” until by the late 1820s even the government was noticing, when PA Rep.  Charles Miner charged them with “gross corruption” -important to remember so that nowadays we do not allow government facilities to effectively become private warehouses, thus subsidizing those businesses.  There is also an interesting note about the “Back to Africa” movement society beginning in 1817, but my notes cut off there, and pick up several pages in my notebook later.  A bit confusing, to say the least.  Reminds me of the rather chaotic state of things for me back at that time.  I’m glad that I managed to hang on to this notebook, and now have the time to redact these notes and try to get them into some sort of order.  I recall being very moved by the work of Anthony Bowen, whom I had never even heard mentioned as I attended the most prominent historically Black academic high school, Dunbar, which had been The M Street School, the feeder to Howard University.  Bowen started the first YMCA open to Colored youth in the District, he was a conductor on the Underground RailRoad, and he served with John F. Cook, Jr. and the Rev. Henry McNeal Turner, eventually also becoming a recruiter for the 1st US Colored Troops (noted as a 1st USCT recruiter, so likely a recruiter for that particular regiment from DC).  Pages 46-8 note the locations of several private slave jails and slave pens in DC.  In a fascinating note for those of us who grew up shuddering with dread at the state of the projects at Berry Farms, by the late 1980s, the authors note that Anacostia and Berry Farms began as a commitment to self help at the end of the Civil War.  So the Black community has not gone down due to our own depravity, as we have always been told, but rather due to a deliberate lack of resources, I must say, but back to the book review.

     By page 115, we come to Griffith Stadium: 1924 Giants v. Senators was considered a big game, apparently, for the white players, but when the Senators were away, and the Grays (DC’s Negro Leagues baseball team), pulled 28k fans to the Senators 3k fan!  The Redskins, whom we grew up calling the Deadskins until they won two back to back Superbowls, came to DC in 1937, and in 1963 they got RFK stadium, and finally had to integrate.  The Howard theater, please note, was always integrated, in stark contrast to The National Theatre, whose odious practices, like hiring “spotters” from the Black community, as Constance Green notes in her 1967 book  Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital, were well known.  Many more notes that I simply haven’t got time to enter:

     There is much much more, about the Strivers’ Section, The Gold Coast, Georgetown before it gentrified in the 1970s, Mt. Zion UMC (my grandma Marie’s church) as the oldest Black church in DC, Yarrow Mamout’s home and history, and the old Slave Quarters, all in G’town.  I found this book very helpful, in conjunction with several other little know books on DC, for uncovering histories that are rarely spoken of these days, particularly, I believe, with regard to The Washington Grays, DC’s Negro League team.  My notes end with a reference to a Resurrection City protest encampment on The Mall of which I now have no recollection, unfortunately, so I will clearly have to read this book again, one day.

Highly recommended. …

Shira

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Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

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Review: The Jews of Washington, D.C.: A Communal History Anthology by David A. Altshuler, ed.

     First, our usual SoL Saturdays PSA reminding Cooperators to share with friends and neighbors on your local consumer protection laws.

Now, the review.

      This book  has a far more narrow scope than Garfinkle’s more recent (and more comprehensive) work,  The Jewish community of Washington, D.C.      But, this book is also still essential to understanding relations between communities in the District.  From the first recorded Jewish person in DC, in 1795, to Captain Jonas P. Levy (on page 14)’s opposition, in the 1850s, to a treaty on POW rights that left out Jews, to the YMHA, to the JCC, DC has an interesting Jewish history.  Especially the history that surounds a little know group mentioned on page 249: the Sons of Israel Fraternity.   In 1857, they protest an anti-Jewish Swiss treaty, about which I’d like to learn more, if any fellow researcher has the time to look up for us.  Unfortunately, my notes from 2010 leave off here, from this book, after mentioning several synagogues and Albert Small, a very well-known personage in the DC Jewish community.  This book was one of the many that I read in 2009, 2010, and 2011 while creating walking tours meant to illustrate the cooperation that had been quite strong between several different communities in DC, and which  led to my further writings about those tours, DC, and how we can start to  rebuild community cooperation today.

Shira

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Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

  Shira

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Review: The Talented Tenth, by W. E. B. Du Bois, on GED Lesson Plan Set Day 49/67

     This essay came as a bit of a shock, given how much my Pre-Engineering classmates and I were told that we had a responsibility, as part of the talented tenth, to give back to the community. The phrase was also part of my grandparents’ generational idea of Black uplift, and being “a credit to the race.” So, seeing just how men-only and elite focused this work is should never have shocked me, but it did. Every school assembly started/ended with a reminder of the Dunbar legacy, in DC, and Lift Every Voice and Sing, as a reminder that we had a duty to give back, and to lead. But it was never this strikingly clear just how elitist that idea could be, until I finally read the essay that popularized the phrase, but which I was again shocked to learn that Du Bois did not originate. Nevertheless, much of what he said remains valid, even to this day, sadly.  Especially what he says about the need for rigorous education, but I would extend that need to all citizens, more especially in the area of local financial debt laws, which Day 49 aims at in part.

Just a few of his comments, and mine, as I read the essay (via The Internet Archive):

“There can be but one answer : The best and most capable of their youth
must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land. ”

No, this is not current popular grass-roots ideology, but is it true that anyone can do quantum physics? Every person capable of grasping higher concepts must be encouraged to do so, for the benefit of all human potential.

47.62% ” …it placed before the eyes of almost every Negro child an attainable ideal. ”

On the importance of teachers as role models…

59.52% ” Negro teachers have
been discouraged by starvation wages and the
idea that any training will do for a black
teacher.”

This includes the still low expectations for us by most white people.
Even to this day.

Pretty abrupt end to the essay, and it makes a devastating point.
Please read it.

Shira

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Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

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Review: Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital, By Constance M. Green

An excellent survey of the mostly forgotten history of Washington, DC (particularly the city’s 2nd race riots, in 1919, which we were not taught about at Dunbar!). The only fault is that Morty Kaplan was actually Marvin Caplan, of Shepherd Park, founder of Neighbor’s Inc. Otherwise, Green does a superb job of describing a history which needs updating (which was partly why I wrote “Stayed on Freedom’s Call,”

StayedOnFreedomsCallGoodReads

which of course cites Green and many others in the history of Black-Jewish cooperation in DC.

We can Do Better.

Shira

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B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/Protector & Sihirli Annem,  Lupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

           or Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  Guest post writers welcome.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

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Library Book Review: Snow Storm in August, By Jefferson Morley

DCPL had several different editions of this book.  It has excellent and extensive work documenting the circumstances surrounding the Snow Riots in DC.  The article on the riots starts in the third column from the left, about mid-page:    Read for research while writing my book Stayed on Freedom’s Call.  I wrote that book after creating tours, for which I then started a tour guiding company, as a means of educating in the District::

I have written a bit about this book earlier, about how Moreley, in his book, Snow-storm in August : Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the forgotten race riot of 1835, edition of his book, not only puts together a sound context for the Snow Riots, but also draws together strands which began then, and still define, he claims, our politics today.  I found most striking his juxtaposing of property rights and individual vs. community as well as freedom of speech, and whether free speech is applied best for owners (elites) vs. the people (the 99%).

Snow, the almost unrelated star of the event, was in the habit of  placing very attention-getting, and mouth-watering ads to   attract customers, and was a manumitted former slave who’d established a very successful Epicurean Eatery in DC,    described in Morley’s excellent book, which I got from the DC Public Library.

He makes further interesting points in his fascinating book on DC´s 1st race riot (available via DC Public Library, but most certainly worth buying…).  He build some excellent arguments showing direct causal relationships between events and ways of thinking then, and events and ways of thinking now, worryingly.

A second version of his book (Snow-Storm in August: The Struggle for American Freedom and Washington’s Race Riot of 1835) This book needs to be read not only for the excellent analysis of how our political history led to our political present, but also for logic. The logic of mob mentality, the logic of blame, and the logic of ‘divide and rule,’ as our British friends say. White workers against Free men of Color rioted for mistaken reasons, but for understandable anger.

And another excellent quote regarding “The South’s violent reaction,” from page 174. Deliberate, even if indirect, incitement to violence is inimical to the cause of Democracy.

This book shows why when some are enslaved, none are free.

Excellent work.

ShiraDestinie

This is another work that needs to be resurrected from the forgotten oblivion to which our society has consigned it.

   Continuing Education is crucial to our republic, and to our future.  Reading and critical thinking on the work like this is crucial to how we vote, as well, in the immediate term.  Over the long term, empathy, built through tools like free adult education, probono legal aid, and #languagelearning, is crucial.

We really can Do Better.

Shira

*****************

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B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/Protector & Sihirli Annem,  Lupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

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Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

           or

Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing.

And then, please:

Thoughtful Readers,

please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.   Guest post writers welcome.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

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Library Copy Review: Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865, By Stanley C. Harrold

 Noting that the DCPL did not have a copy of this book, but I was able to read it at the Library of Congress -thank you to our public libraries!

This is an Excellent and extensive work documenting cooperation in DC.   Read for my book: Stayed on Freedom’s Call.

StayedOnFreedomsCallGoodReads

Particularly:

Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, 1790-1846 [WorldCat.org]

quoting Cook’s need “to be very particular to do nothing knowingly, that would in the least tend to disturb the public weal…” P. 41 of Harrold, Subversives, 2003

and
“best known” Israel Bethel (split from white Ebenezer, 4th st.) minister. Mentioned with Mt. Zion Negro Church, 1814 in Georgetown (earliest Black church in DC) contrasted with cut ties to mother denomination. Praised with Wesleyan Metropolitan AME Zion church aka African Wesleyan Society on D St, (S.E?) split under Abraham Cole. Began welcoming white abolitionists to their churches -P. 41, No Segregated Seating!!

and

American slavery, 1619-1877 (Libro, 1993) [WorldCat.org] worldcat.org
Harrold (in “Subversives” LSU, 2003) uses Kolchin to claim that most Whites saw Black ppl as needing slavery to control..

found this related info. in the bibliography of “Snow-storm in August : Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the forgotten race riot of 1835″, p. 4   (I will post an article combing the three reviews I’ve somehow managed to write but not post as proper blog articles…)

Congressional spitting/coarse lang. <-slave-owners; Slave despair & falling #s=slavery vulnerable in DC. Defense of slaves in DC <->legitimate institutution. P.6: 1850 GA secede if DC slavery abol. MD manumissions <-$ ->darker skinned free ppl, seen as more threat than mulatos. P. 16 Judge Cranch, 1821 ruled William Coston grandfathered out of new $20 free Black good behaviour bond. Black-White Cooperation: Quakers Tyson (est. school) & Lundy (pub. Genius of Univ. Emancip.). Mary Billings, George Drinker & Joshua Leavitt (1834 slave pen tour), Charles Torrey & Elisha Tyson (1840s), John Needle & William Chaplin (1850), M. Miner & (Gtown) Maria Becraft. Snow, Cook, Bradley. 1836 Gag Rule. J.Q.Adams, Gates, Giddings, Leavitt & Weld, Child & Torrey. P. 37: Geog. vs. Relational Community
ShiraDestinie

This work needs to be resurrected from the forgotten oblivion to which our society has consigned it.

Please, please, please, read this book, which I was fortunate enough to be a District resident when I needed to read it, as DCPL did not have it, but the Library of Congress did.  Sitting in the Jefferson Reading Room to take notes was amazing, given the size and history of that room, which is more the size of a lecture hall.

   Continuing Education is crucial to our republic, and to our future.  Reading and critical thinking on the work like this is crucial to how we vote, as well, in the immediate term.  Over the long term, empathy, built through tools like free adult education, probono legal aid, and #languagelearning, is crucial.

We really can Do Better.

Shira

*****************

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B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/Protector & Sihirli Annem,  Lupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

           or Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  Guest post writers welcome.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

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Review: Farther Along: A #CivilRights Memoir, By Marvin Harold Caplan

      I was certain that I’d reviewed this book earlier, as it is one of the most important references for both the singing walking tours of DC that I created back in 2010, and also an important reference for my book Stayed on Freedom’s Call, about Black-Jewish cooperation in DC. That is because Marvin Caplan practically personified that cooperation, by 1963. He courageously spent years in the deep south organizing Black workers into unions, and then came up to DC to find his neighborhood threatened by blockbusters. So he founded Neighbors, Inc, to stop them.

 And it worked.

Please, please, please, read this book.

   Voting in the current midterms is crucial to our republic, and to our future.  Reading and critical thinking on the work like this is crucial to how we vote, as well, in the immediate term.  Over the long term, empathy, built through tools like continuing education and #languagelearning, is crucial.

We really can Do Better.

Shira

*****************

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           or

Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing.

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Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

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Why Searching Matters on Juneteenth

For years, many newly freed people searched across the country for their formerly enslaved loved ones who had been sold away.   

             Heartbreaking advertisements for missing family members appeared for years after the emancipation.    

From the first Compensated Emancipation in DC, to the ratification of the 13th Amendment, freed slaves moved around “restlessly” seeking their people, whom they remembered and loved, who had been sold from plantations and away from families by owners, traders, speculators, or debt collectors.   Please find  more examples, as there are many records of this, dear friends.  And I wonder if, in a few years, Willow and or Anna will be engaged in this same search for lost loved ones? 

    I look forward to your comments on honoring True Seekers this Minbari and Juneteenth Monday, Thoughtful Readers.

Shira

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And

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Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

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