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History is about our ancestors. All our relations. The topology and natural formations that shape the formation of human communities and the migrations and forms of transportation that determine human activity flow. History is also about remembering what we don't know yet. Singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn has a song called Stolen Land which came to me when I was thinking of the history TVC enters in to. I'd like to read you a verse and chorus from Stolen Land:
In my mind I catch a picture - big black raven in the sky
looking at the ocean - sail reflected in black eye
sail as white as heroin - white as weatherd bones
guns and rum and smallpox gonna change the face of home
in this stolen land.If you're like me you like to think we've learned from our mistakes
Enough to know we can't play god with others lives at stake
so now we're all discovering the world wasn't only made for whites
what steps are you gonna take to try and set things right
in this stolen land?Stolen land - and it's all we've got.
Stolen land - and there's no going back.
Stolen land - and we'll never forget.
Stolen land - and we're not through yet.
I thought of this song even more when I picked up this book on the history of DC's neighborhoods - Washington At Home: An Illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation's Capitol. This is a delightful book. There are great chapters on the development of Takoma - Maryland and DC both, and on Shepard Park and Brightwood - two sister neighborhoods. Great stuff about the civil war forts and the dairy farms that used to be here and the trolley lines that encouraged growth and what kinds of people came to build and live here. And then I realize - but, it's all written as if life began in the 1700's. Didn't humans live here in this area and walk the land before then? Didn't they have villages and neighborhoods?
Of course they did. When I was little my Mother often told me the story of how she and Dad partly choose Takoma Park as a place to live because of the stories she'd heard about the sacred Indian spring down the street from our new house, the spring that people came from miles around to fill their jugs with pure clear water. We were taught that the word "Takoma" comes from the Indian word for high up, close to heaven. But what tribe, what language? Genocide and colonialism have robbed us, have stolen these facts. And it's all we've got. And we're not going back. We know that. But what steps are we going to take to try and set things right? That's the question I ask you today.
All I can do today is give you a few vivid images from my own personal history with this neighborhood, and tell you that if you invite David and me back, we will help you do more of your own work on understanding neighborhood history and TVC's rightful place here.
Here's a picture. This picture was taken in the 1920s. It shows 6104 Third St., NW, the home where my mother grew up, about 6 blocks south of the TVC site. Back then, there was a trolley line going from Takoma Park, down 3rd St., into downtown. My young grandfather rode the trolley to his job as a Veterans Administration clerk every morning while grandmother stayed home keeping house, raising the kids, and teaching piano lessons to the neighborhood children. That's them in the picture, standing proudly in front of their new house. When I moved into that house sixty-some years later, after my grandmother Lucile finally died at age 91, I found some of her papers shoved into the back of a drawer. The envelope contained copies of a letter she wrote the Bishop of the Methodist Church back in the 1950s. "I have often been ashamed of being white," she wrote, "but now I am ashamed of being Christian also," and went on to tell him how appalled she was at the racism of the Methodist Church and its white members, who were refusing to open their churches to black people who were moving into this neighborhood at the time. I myself was embarassed, again, last summer, when I was living at that 3rd St. house, before Eric & Betsy moved in, and one of my white housemates got in a fight with one of our neighbors, over a minor fender-bender in the street, and shouted, "Well, you just get the FUCK out of OUR neighborhood, then!" - this to a young woman, albeit drunk and unreasonable, who had GROWN up next door, a young woman whom my white housemate from Virginia didn't realize knew more about what it was like to be pushed out of or unwelcome in neighborhoods than he ever would. "Your fear of racial distrust on these streets is NOT the same as hers," I tried to tell him, but I'm not sure I got through. And I myself was embarassed, once again, to be white in my neighbors' eyes.
My grandmother couldn't vote. It wasn't just that she had no elected government here or that DC residents weren't allowed control of the city's own local budget. My grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote for President of the United States. I remember this vividly because grandmother told us the story of how her high school teacher took their whole class downtown during the great women's suffrage march of 1914, you know, the one where suffragists chained themselves to the White House fence until President Wilson ordered them arrested. Even after women in the rest of the country won the right to vote, my grandmother couldn't vote, because she lived in occupied territory, last colony, Washington, DC. (DC residents finally got the right to vote in presidential elections in the '70s.)
My even starker memory of DC as occupied territory comes from Easter week, 1968. How many of you are old enough to remember that year? (About 6 out of 35 did) 1968. How many of you were living in the Washington area then? (about 4 did) [......pause......] It was Easter break, 1968. I was going to college outside Chicago then, boarding a plane at O'Hare, hearing from the airline officials that Washington, DC was under curfew that night, that I could not, literally would not be allowed to board, white me, unless I guaranteed that I lived in the suburbs, not the city. The city was locked down, no one going in or out. The city was in flames. Two days ago Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assasinated and people were rebelling in grief and rage in many cities around the land. My uncle picked me up when I landed at National and pointed out the red fires to me lighting up the city skyline across the bridge, the dense pillars of smoke were visible for miles, as he whisked me safely away and delivered me to my parents home in Takoma Park, MARYLAND. The next day, we got in the family car to go into DC for Easter Sunday, to attend church. And there were 11,500 armed troops occupying the streets of Washington. There was an armored tank stationed on the corner of Blair Road and Aspen Street, where my friend David (whom you'll meet later when we do our workshop with you) and his family lived, a tank stationed on this same corner where TVC folk hope to soon live. This is RECENT history, we're talking in our own lifetimes. The sense of occupation, of loss of control, of disenfranchisement is quite, quite strong.
Two last quick images/memories. One - the racial composition of this neighborhood changed dramatically during the time I was growing up in the 1950s. My parents moved from the DC to the MD side of Takoma when I reached school age, the same year Brown v. Board of Education was decided in the Supreme Court. The schools started integrating and black people who were getting good government jobs after the War started being able to move into neighborhoods like Takoma which had previously been all white. By the time I was in third grade in my Sunday School class at Brightwood Park Methodist Church at 8th & Jefferson Sts., NW, the class where I met my friend David Hamilton, after his parents moved into the neighborhood from the south. By this time I was in third grade Sunday school the white flight was so complete at our church that I was the only white kid left in my class, our entire church became black. My parents and grandparents were the kind of folks who believed a neighborhood church belongs to, is defined by, its neighborhood, and stayed there when the other whites left, to help re-make the church as a integrated one. They also taught me what was happening with the community's real estate; how racist, mercenary realtors and bankers were exacerbating the racial divisions and panic by doing what was called "block busting," what we now relate more broadly call red-lining and speculation. Angered by and concerned about countering these practices, my parents and grandparents and others founded Neighbors Inc., a community organization that still exists in Takoma today. My friend David grew up to become active in when he bought his own home and started raising his own family on Aspen Street, (right across from his parents house and right down the street from the TVC site today). How did my family help the new black people moving into the neighborhood as the whites left feel comfortable and welcome at our church? They organized a small group that went door-to-door, up and down each block in the neighborhood, knocking on doors and telling people that Brightwood Park Methodist Church was open to them, was their new church home, if they wanted to make it so. My vision for TVC is that you all fan out and go door-to-door too, now, before the houses are built, on several weekends this summer, that you hold block parties and picnics on the site, bring musical instruments and games for the children, and find ways to involve yourselves in the community events and institutions already organized and taking place around you, so that, by the time the homes are occupied, there will be so much good will and understanding woven that your moving in will truly be a celebration for the community as a whole, beyond just the families and individuals who make their new homes on this spot.
There's another, last DC/MD line coalition image I'll leave you with, (no, not the CVS fight, way before that). But it IS about working BOTH sides of the DC/MD line, getting neighbors on both sides to mobilize together. Again, as I was saying, I was reading this DC neighborhoods history book last night which relies heavily on transportation trends as causation factors. I mean, of course they are, but, in this history book, one never hears analysis of the power interests behind different kinds of transportation, just the stark fact of the building of a railroad or a trolley line, or a beltway, and the "development" that follows. (Could have something to do with the fact that this book was funded by a bunch of Washington bankers, real estate entrepreneurs and retail businessmen, but ...) Be that as it may the book's Takoma history chapter reminded me that the Capital beltway was completed here in 1964 "and spurred plans for a series of 10-lane highways that would move large volumes of automobile traffice in and out of the center city." (pg. 168) One of these, The North Central Freeway, threatened to displace hundreds of homes and thousands of residents in Takoma and surrounding areas. In response, Sammy Abbott (who later became Mayor of Takoma Park) helped organize the Save Takoma Park Committee to oppose the building of the freeway. The coalition's slogan was "White Men's Roads Through Black Men's Homes." It "argued for a rapid transit system instead of highway construction as a cure for Washington's traffice congestion." After a lot of fighting and mobilizing, the Save Takoma folks won!! This same coalition was revived in the early 70s to affect the planning of the Takoma Metro station. It helped preserve residential zoning and low-density commercial zoning, as well as limited parking and unwidened side streets around the Metro, keeping the surrounding area of the future site of TVC more people-friendly and pedestrian-friendly and human-scale than it would otherwise have been likely to be.
So. David and I have been talking with Sarah and the membership committee about designing an experiential brainstorming workshop for you all that focuses more intensively on the history of this neighborhood and TVC's current place in it. I hope you'll help us make that happen soon. In the meantime I just want to leave you with the last line from Bruce Cockburn's song, "What steps are you gonna take to try and set things right in this stolen land?" Think about it. We have a lot of exciting work to do. And I thank you, for thinking about it, too.
[comment added on here about end about the group's use of the term "minorities" and how we can use different terms.....]