There’s the celebrated Washington, D.C., of grand acts on the national and global stage. And there’s the nearer life of the city itself.

In the Civil War’s wake, an African American community sprouted in Anacostia and thrived. It was called Barry Farm. There was room enough for house and garden, and orchards and farms that sent produce for sale across the river. Businesses grew, including amusement parks that drew African Americans from other areas.

Eventually, the community dissolved under pressures it could not resist. Alcione M. Amos, a curator at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum and ex-World Bank researcher, traces the residents’ struggle with their own growth, outside exploitation and the ever-swinging cudgel of racism. A nuanced mix of characters emerges in “Barry Farm-Hillsdale in Anacostia: A Historic African American Community”. It’s a richly detailed account and a cautionary tale for any place facing change.

The community carried the name of the slave-owning Barry family that sold the property on which it was built. A rebranding appeal by its new denizens got as far as a D.C. legislative act that approved the name Hillsdale, for the lay of the land. But that name never appeared on official maps. The malignant moniker stuck, embedded in deeds and habits, and now even in the title of Amos’ book.

The aftermaths of World War I and II saw surges in the population. Drivers of city design, including the U.S. Congress’ D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, targeted African American communities as expendable, adjusting the speed of the screws depending on the order of the day but always turning them. Amos cites testimony before a city committee from Howard D. Woodson, an African American architect with long experience in D.C., including work for the Treasury Department. In Woodson’s view, the intent was to push Black people out of downtown and establish “ghettoes in the southeast.” The publisher of Pulse magazine likened the redevelopment effort to a “reincarnation of a Hitler-Nazi plan of population shifting.”

Amos points to construction of what is now Suitland Parkway as a key to the Freedmen settlement’s demise. It cut the community in half. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed off on building the “military road” to connect Bolling and Andrews bases, despite doubts about its necessity and protests about the impact. Land seizures by eminent domain forced people out and compensation failed to make them whole elsewhere. Among the casualties were two grocers, whose businesses faced each other on Sheridan Road.

Planted amid all-White “suburbs”, the community struggled through the 1950s and 1960s for equity in schools and recreation facilities, and against racist law enforcement. Amos describes how city school authorities built a new junior high school in Anacostia for White students while neighboring Black students were sent to a dilapidated building. Crowding put schools on double shifts, a tactic used primarily at schools with Black student enrollment. Meeting everyday needs required invention, such as starting a cab ride-splitting system to cut the cost of reaching lower prices and better selection at distant groceries.

Policies and practices of government and commercial actors ate at community ties. Tracts were rezoned from detached single-family to allow greater density, which drew apartments and public housing complexes. The Federal Housing Administration financed projects that allowed developers to borrow more than the value of the project, take a windfall before construction and then put up shoddy buildings. A report by Southeast civic groups called the shifts a cancerous “conglomeration” to “support the growing population inadequately.”

“The most pleasant and beautiful place in all this country.”

Community activists pressed their concerns with government agencies. Mary Kidd, a White Canadian transplant drawn to Anacostia by cheap rent, was trained as an organizer by a local civil rights group. She had a dim view of an advisory group formed to address police misconduct: the White members were “racists at heart” and the African American members “were just as determined to be hard on black people …”. She saw racist slurs carved into furniture where policemen sat at meetings. She made rubbings and alerted African American journalist William Raspberry of The Washington Post, which published a column about the matter.

Racial strife fueled blockbusting. Real estate agents sold to Black people and then sowed fear among White people of declining property values. Fleeing White owners sold for less and the agents then resold at “inflated prices to African American buyers anxious to buy property in areas that had been closed off to them in the past.”

Amos writes that the lack of “real integration” led to the departure of White and Black residents with the means to leave. The scourge of crack cocaine in the 1970s and 80s “destroyed the last remnants of the cohesion of the historic community.”

Following this arc of history, it’s easy to wonder what the locale will be in the coming decades and what price will be paid. Amos begins her book with an observation from Captain Henry Fleet, a 1632 visitor to the shore once the land of the Nacotchtank people: “This place without all question is the most pleasant and healthful place in all this country, and most convenient for habitation … aboundeth with all manner of fish … And as for deer, buffaloes, bears, turkeys, the woods do swarm with them, and the soil is exceedingly fertile.” By 1663, the St. Elizabeths tract had been patented and was owned by John Charman, a 1648 arrival. Another course was set.

For more information, see: Anacostia Community Museum exhibit We Shall Not Be Moved.