How the Black Power movement shaped DC as we know it

“Washington represents the clearest contradictions of black and white in America,” Stokely Carmichael said in 1968. That quote is displayed front and center on historian George Derek Musgrove’s sweeping interactive web page, which details the history of the Black Power movement in DC.

Musgrove, a co-author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, and a history professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, argues that the Black Power movement wasn’t just a force in DC politics. It was the force for four decades. From the Civil Rights movement to DC’s first years of Home Rule to the resurgence of activism in the 1980s and 1990s, these activists were instrumental in shaping the District as we know it today.

This fractious movement took many forms, and was comprised of a diverse group of people from many different ideological paths. But, Musgrove considers Black Power activism to have three core aspects: Black self-determination, self-love, and self-defense. Musgrove’s website maps this history, quite literally, with a series of maps plotting more than 180 events and organizations across the cityscape between the 1960s and 1990s.

Below, we talked with Musgrove about the project, DC activism, and the echoes of this history we can see in local activism today. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited.

GGWash: What inspired you to take on this project?

George Derek Musgrove: The project is an outgrowth of [my book] Chocolate City. When [co-author Chris Myers Asch] and I would do talks, I liked to frame them around the title of the book, which was the city’s unofficial nickname from the mid-1960s roughly through the mid-1990s.

One of the things that I would always say is that you can have a Black majority, but that doesn’t make it a Chocolate City. One of the key ingredients that made DC a Chocolate City — a great place for Black people to live — was the Black Power movement.

I always wanted to develop that idea further and tell this story of the Black Power movement, so I came up with this idea of a map.

There is growing awareness of the ways in which racism shaped the District as we know it today, from police violence to segregation — but we know white racism wasn’t the only force affecting local politics. How did the Black Power movement shape the District?

That’s one of the arguments of the map — that this generation of activists and their style of politics shaped almost every aspect of the District’s politics and culture. Even people who disagreed with them at least had to react to them. It really is the driving force for 35 or 40 years.

I also believe that a lot of younger activists today — we sort of lump them under Black Lives Matter — are reaching back to this style of politics today, after a roughly 20 to 25-year hiatus. You can see it in the candidacy of someone like Janeese Lewis George. You can see it in the protests that occurred downtown on what’s now Black Lives Matter Plaza. It’s this insistent politics that the progress of a society should be measured based on whether or not policies positively affect the most vulnerable among us.

Could you talk about some more of the similarities between Black Power activists and the Black Lives Matter movement today, and some of the differences between them?

The similarity is that both groups were foregrounding the concerns of the Black poor and marginalized communities, and insisting on not just handouts, but actual power sharing. They’re also foregrounding and celebrating African-American culture.

The differences are pretty stark, actually. I think one of the biggest is that DC didn’t get an elected government until 1974, the tail end of the Black Power movement. And [before that] the ultimate people in charge were not just white but were proud and avowed racists.

That’s not the case today. We have a Black government. The reason we have a Black government is because of the Black Power movement. They fought for a council and a mayor that was popularly elected. They even went on to organize to make DC a Black state; they failed in that regard, but we may be able to pick that back up in the coming months.

And they populated that government and used it to redistribute resources to African-Americans and to the poor. But Congress basically set us up when they handed over Home Rule to have a structural deficit. And eventually, those bills became due, and we went bankrupt in 1994.

That is absolutely not the case today. DC is swimming in money — primarily because the white population that flooded out of the city in the 40s, 50s, and 60s is flooding back in. So you have similar demands but very different circumstances.

Where can we see the legacy of Black Power in the built environment in DC today?

The complicated thing that has occurred is that the old centers of the Black community in the 60s, 70s, and 80s have been the principal centers of gentrification and hyper-development in the last couple of years. A lot of the landscape that would have been familiar to people then is gone. And not just the physical landscape, but the social, human landscape has also been changed. For instance, Shaw in the 60s and 70s was well over 90% Black. Today, I believe it’s [closer to] 20% Black. An entire social community has just vanished. So I just want to point that out before I answer the question.

Tons of the buildings where things occured are still there, like the old office of the Black United Front. The New School for Afro-American Thought is a restaurant on 14th Street. You would struggle to recognize it because it’s been pretty substantially altered, but you can see it.

The Model Inner City Community Organization, an organization that led the urban renewal campaign in Shaw, worked with local churches to build low-income housing for poor people across Shaw. Were it not for that effort in the 60s and 70s, there wouldn’t be any Black people left in Shaw, because the vast majority of Black people left in that neighborhood are in that low-income housing. The same goes for Adams Morgan, where the Adams Morgan Organization and other groups were able to help low-income people form limited equity cooperatives. You can see the physical manifestation of this movement in those pockets of affordable housing that still exist in some of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods of the city.

We had a very clear understanding when we wrote Chocolate City — which I carried into the creation of the map — that new residents who didn’t know this history had a real hunger to understand. They wanted resources that would allow them to understand not just the built environment, but also understand why their neighbors respond to them and think and act the way they do. We also knew that older residents had a real hunger to have the history that they had been key players in creating acknowledged and communicated to the larger public.

You talked on your website about the War on Poverty and the millions of dollars being funneled into DC during that period through the United Planning Organization (UPO). Could you talk a little about the effect of that?

UPO (which is still around) at the time was a real magnet. Activists who had come out of the Southern Civil Rights movement came here and got jobs with UPO. And then dozens of people who were seen as the underclass — people who had been in prison, welfare mothers, people who lived in the projects — UPO was willing to hire them if they showed promise.

All these people who were seen as castaways by the larger society were able to rise into seasoned organizers, managing a lot of money through UPO. Some really important folks were able to get their start through that organization, and really would not have otherwise, because no other organization gave them a serious chance.

How did (longtime DC mayor) Marion Barry’s involvement in the District’s Black Power movement affect his approach to governing DC?

Some of his signature programs like the Summer Youth Jobs Program were modeled on his Black Power activism with Pride Inc., which was a UPO-funded War on Poverty program where he essentially hired young men to clean alleys, to kill rats, to deal with all of the issues of the ghetto. He also used the movement as a springboard into politics. If Marion Barry was not a Black Power activist, I don’t think he would have been able to get into politics the way that he did, or governed the way that he did.

Barry’s first cabinet was startlingly diverse, because he really wanted to make sure that groups that had been shut out had a voice. There were huge numbers of women, there were a number [of] representatives of the gay community. He really made sure that his government reflected the city that he governed. That sounds sort of normal for a democratic government — but we have to remember that DC was not a democratically governed city for the hundred years before the 1970s. So it really was an important change.

Could you talk a little about the resurgence of the Black Power movement in the 1980s and 1990s and some of the effects of that movement that people might recognize today?

I don’t think people know what to do with the 80s and 90s. It’s not the idealistic, revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. It’s not Barack Obama and BLM. it’s just sort of this moment in-between that people usually just ignore. They act as though those ideas and ideologies just jumped 40 years, from 1968 to 2018. And they didn’t. Many of the elder advisors to today’s BLM activists got their start in the 80s and 90s, sitting at the knees of Black Power activists who had come out of retirement to fight against the Reagan Administration and crack.

This movement came back, but in a slightly more conservative fashion. Most of the Black independent schools that were still in existence in the 80s and early 90s talked a lot less about imperialism and a lot more about Afro-centricity. I experienced all this stuff, but by the time I met Stokely Carmichael, or by the time I visited one of these African schools, they were a little less radical than when my parents encountered them, because the context in which they were operating was different.

Was part of that difference in context the difference between being an outsider revolutionary force versus having some amount of power in government?

The process of institutionalization absolutely dulled the radical edge of many of these people. For instance, Marion Barry, when he got into office and realized the city was broke, had to scale back a lot of his promises. The national and international political environment was also a little less revolutionary. You weren’t protesting in the midst of the Vietnam War or independence movements across Africa.

But the biggest change was that in the 60s you had liberals dominant in the federal government who were willing to do things like create a War on Poverty to funnel money to poor African-Americans. By the time you get to the 80s you’ve got Ronald Reagan, and he’s cutting all these programs and impoverishing people. And the thing that replaces many of the jobs that people in DC would have gotten through War on Poverty funds is crack. So the focus of local activists turned away from freedom and toward stopping the carnage and social disorganization that crack was creating.

If you look at major protests of the period, there’s the Black Family Reunion, started by Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women. There’s the Million Man March, which is about demanding Black men do a better job being husbands and fathers. They’re the same activists, but they’re really focused on trying to get Black people to clean up their communities themselves, conceding the fact that the federal government had abandoned them. In the 60s that wasn’t necessarily on the table — the federal government still appeared to be willing to help.

What can people today learn from the history of these movements?

I really hope folks just dive into the map and look at the many different ways that African-American activists attempted to address the major issues of their day, and take inspiration from them. Black Power activism is very ideologically diverse. You’ve got Black capitalists and Pan-African socialists and Black nationalists all mixed together in there. There are people who fit many of those descriptions today and they’ll find inspiration from different groups in the map. I hope this history helps them refine and challenge their views, and find ways to address many of the issues they’re out there fighting for today.