Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America

Chapter 3. The Creation of the Ghetto

Chapter 3 The Creation of the Ghetto In 1870, as freedmen were participating in their ‹rst local elections in the nation’s capital, Frederick Douglass, like many blacks in the District , was celebrating newfound suffrage: “The ideas of progress, of selfdependence , and self-government,” he wrote, “have taken root and are ›ourishing among our people. Each feels that he is a part of, and has an interest in, the welfare of the city, the District, and the nation.”1 Freed slaves were ›ocking to the city, which offered voting rights to blacks far earlier than most states. The Civil War had been won, and many thought that full citizenship was at hand. More so perhaps than even at the height of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, blacks in the District during this period had a sense of possibility and prospective inclusion. Unsurprisingly, as blacks ›ocked into the District, they moved, for the most part, into what were already largely black neighborhoods. Migrant groups typically follow the powerful pull of kinship, and black migrants were no exception. But if blacks migrated to predominantly black neighborhoods by choice, they were kept there by social and political forces that emerged quickly in the aftermath of the Civil War. By 1874, representative local government had been undone in the District , and all of‹cials were appointed by the federal government.2 The Supreme Court not only upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson3 but overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875.4 The end of democratic rule in the District, the intransigence of the Supreme Court, and the social practices of whites in the District created a web of restrictions that effectively barred blacks from predominantly white neighborhoods. Once in the District, those who attempted to leave the con‹nes of the black neighborhoods were blocked by zoning and exclusionary laws that were considered constitutional until 1917 and then by racially restrictive covenants until 1948.5 Frustratingly, even after the abolition of formal segregation and the striking of private racial covenants, landlords, white landowners, banks, and real estate agents simply refused to rent, lend, sell, or show properties to blacks looking to leave black neighborhoods.6 At midcentury, the neighborhoods of Southwest, Foggy Bottom, and what would eventually be called Shaw had become crowded with black families, small towns within a city.7 While still a minority in the District —blacks represented about one-third of the population in 1950—the black population had been growing more quickly than the white population . Over thirty thousand blacks in the District lived in “the Alleys,” as the teeming and poorly constructed neighborhoods south and west of the Capitol were known.8 Many had parents and grandparents who were ex-slaves and had brought with them the extended networks of kin that have been described in numerous accounts of plantation life. As James Borchert has noted: While its forms varied considerably, the alley family facilitated individuals ’ survival in dif‹cult conditions. . . . These extended-augmented family networks represented adjustments to a new environment, displaying continuity with the slave and post-Civil War rural experience as well as with the larger ghetto experience of more recent years.9 Those who grew up in the Alleys recall the 1940s and 1950s with mixed emotions. Despite the impoverished conditions, most remember life there as rich with social support. As one woman who grew up in the Alleys described her childhood: “You almost had to be close to survive. Nobody had anything. We didn’t lock doors, nobody locked a door. There wasn’t anything to steal.” “It was hard to go hungry, because everyone would feed you, take anybody’s child and feed them.”10 Another woman, thinking back to her childhood, also remembered hardship mixed with a good deal of friendship: “In that awful place where I lived there was so much love and affection—not just in my Doing Time on the Outside 24 house but in all of Southwest. We had a real community.”11 Despite poverty and decrepit housing conditions, inhabitants of the Alleys had what many of today’s urban neighborhoods lack: a feeling of belonging and a sense that those around them cared. The 1950s brought urban “renewal” and “redevelopment,” during which these alley communities of Southwest were physically demolished , effecting the mass eviction of thousands of black families from the heart of the capital. As one woman, still angry...