February 2022 – Page 3 – Truxton Is In Shaw

WSIC- 1903 Ownership of Sq. 615

February will have a fire hose of Carter G. Woodson’s Mis-Education of the Negro posts, so I’m sneaking in one Washington Sanitary Improvement Company post today and maybe another near the end of the month.

There are so many lots owned by trustees of WSIC. So who was a trustee? Let’s look at George M. Kober’s book The history and development of the housing movement in the city of Washington, D.C. From page 26 the elected directors were: David J. Brewer, Charles C. Cole, John W. Foster, Charles J. Bell, George Truesdell, Gardiner G. Hubbard, Anthony Pollok, Walter Wyman, Henry F. Blount, Mrs. George Westinghouse, Crosby S. Noyes, George H. Harries, William J. Boardman, William C. Woodward, Augustus S. Worthington, Henry Y. Satterlee, George L. Andrews, Bernard T. Janney, Mrs. Clara G. Addison, William C. Whittemore, G. Lloyd Magruder, Joseph C. Breckinridge, Marcus Baker, Katherine Hosmer, Charles E. Foster, Simon Wolf, George M. Sternberg, S. Walter Woodward, George M. Kober, and John Joy Edson. The executive board was George M. Sternberg, as president; S. Walter Woodward, John Joy Edson, Charles J. Bell, George Truesdell, George H. Harries, George L. Andrews, Ms. Katherine P. Hosmer; and Dr. Kober as secretary. Now let’s look at who owned property on Sq. 615, which was the first Truxton Circle block the company developed.

According to the General Assessment, just two of the above . Here we go:

Sternberg- 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265.

Kober- 65 and 66

Looking at the Library of Congress page for the 1903 DC Baist map, Plate 39, Kober’s lots 65 and 66 are 24-26 Q St NW. Sternberg (for WSIC) had odd side 31-43 Bates St NW (lots 134-140), even side 46-60 Bates St NW (lots 170-179), even side 53-77 Bates St NW (lots 195-207), and 94 Bates St NW, odd side 15-29 Bates St NW, and even side 30-44 Bates St NW, odd side 45-51 Bates St NW, 12 Q St NW, and even side 62-76 Bates St NW (lots 236-265).

Check back towards the end of the month to look at WSIC’s Sq. 615 ownership in the 1920s and 1930s.

Carter G. Woodson – Mis-Education of the Negro-Chapter 2: How We Missed the Mark

This is a series regarding Shaw resident Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro.

In this chapter Woodson looks at the history of education for African Americans after the Civil War. I had heard an audiobook that threw general criticism of Southern education, and Woodson does here too a bit. “The participation of the freedmen in government for a few years during the period known as the Reconstruction had little bearing on their situation except that they did join with the uneducated poor whites in bringing about certain much-desired social reforms, especially in giving the South its first plan of democratic education in providing for a school system at public expense. ”

In this chapter, the way I’m reading it, Woodson is not happy with the practicality of African American education, in addition to the quality.

Others more narrow-minded than the advocates of industrial education, seized upon the idea, feeling that, although the Negro must have some semblance of education, it would be a fine stroke to be able to make a distinction between the training given the Negro and that provided for the whites. Inasmuch as the industrial educational idea rapidly gained ground, too, many Negroes for political purposes began to espouse it; and schools and colleges hoping thereby to obtain money worked out accordingly makeshift provisions for such instruction, although they could not satisfactorily offer it. A few real industrial schools actually equipped themselves for this work and turned out a number of graduates with such preparation. Continue reading Carter G. Woodson – Mis-Education of the Negro-Chapter 2: How We Missed the Mark

Carter G. Woodson- Mis-Education of the Negro- Chapter 1: The Seat of Trouble

This is a series regarding Shaw resident Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro.

Last year I reviewed this book and I’m updating those posts.

I understand Woodosn was a man of his time and the challenges of what was being taught in the public school system and in Black colleges were real. There are new challenges, but I’m going to ignore them because they make me steaming mad. That challenge then, 100 years ago, was an education system dismissed the Negro (I’m going to use his words) and the African.

“At a Negro summer school two years ago, a white instructor gave a course on the Negro, using for his text a work which teaches that whites are superior to the blacks. When asked by one of the students why he used such a textbook the instructor replied that he wanted them to get that point of view. Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority. “

So that was a problem.

“Practically all of the successful Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had no formal education at all. The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.”

It doesn’t really get any better. He pretty much considers the Black college graduate useless.

“The Negro children, as a rule, come from the homes of tenants and peons who have to migrate annually from plantation to plantation, looking for light which they have never seen. The children from the homes of white planters and merchants live permanently in the midst of calculations, family budgets, and the like, which enable them sometimes to learn more by contact than the Negro can acquire in school. Instead of teaching such Negro children less arithmetic, they should be taught much more of it than the white children, for the latter attend a graded school consolidated by free transportation when the Negroes go to one-room rented hovels to be taught without equipment and by incompetent teachers educated scarcely beyond the eighth grade.”

I have no doubt whatsoever that 100 years ago Black schools lacked equipment. The one room school house or ‘rented hovel’ as Woodson puts it, Continue reading Carter G. Woodson- Mis-Education of the Negro- Chapter 1: The Seat of Trouble

The History of the Negro Church- Chapter 1 The Early Missionaries and the Negro

Carter G. Woodson, a Shaw resident, living and working on the 1500 block of 9th St NW, created Negro History Week. This later became Black History Month. Last year I reviewed Carter G. Woodson’s Mis-Education of the Negro. I thought I would review his other book The History of the Negro Church this year.

I’ve read the first chapter. I want to find who edited this thing and do bad things to their grave. If Dr. Woodson edited it, then, this is evidence that authors should get someone else to edit their work.
I’m going to start with something from the book’s preface:

Whether or not the author has done this task well is a question which the public must decide. This work does not represent what he desired to make it. Many facts of the past could not be obtained for the reason that several denominations have failed to keep records and facts known to persons now active in the church could not be collected because of indifference or the failure to understand the motives of the author. Not a few church officers and ministers, however, gladly cooperated with the author in giving and seeking information concerning their denominations.

Given the current lack of popularity, compared to Mis-Education, I will say he had not done his work well. It is a hard read.

My summation of chapter one is that Blacks were a second thought to European missionaries. When they did get around to bringing Christianity to those of African descent into the New World there was a resistance because of an unwritten law (no citations) that once slaves became Christian, they would need to be freed. Catholics didn’t try hard enough and Protestants were more successful at evangelization to Blacks in America.

The one thing I learned reading this chapter was that Quakers taught African American slaves to read in Virginia and North Carolina.

I just wish there were citations for this piece of information and that gets to my first pet peeve. This book is 100 years old and historians of this period have a bad habit of not providing citations to back up anything they wrote. In the copy I have, I do not see end notes, nor is there a bibliography at the end. I blame the time period.

The other pet peeve I’ve revealed early on, was the need for an editor. This was not written for a general audience. It has the charm of a graduate dissertation. He uses $4 words when a $.25 word would do. He’s overly wordy as if he’s getting paid, per word, like a Raymond Chandler novel. The deep need for an editor, someone to strike out some sentences and suggest a better way of making a point, just annoyed the heck out of me.

I just discovered there is an audio book of The History of the Negro Church from December 2020. I will try to listen to this and maybe I’ll do more than 2 chapters this month.

Rando Shaw resident – S. Larnardo Acker- 614 S St NW

I was doing something else and there is nowhere to put this guy. But it is Black history month, and this fellow is Black.

I came across S. Larnardo Acker as I was working on another project and would have moved on, but I was trying to figure out if he was a Larnardo S. Acker and if I had the right person. One of the documents I came across was a marriage certificate and lo, I came across his marriage certificate listing his, and his bride’s (Ms. Bessie L. Hill) address as 614 S St NW.

Currently the New Community Church has 614 S St NW as its address. It might have been an apartment building. They both lived there, maybe they met there, running into each other at the end of the work day, exchanging pleasantries, discovering they both hailed from Mississippi, and a romance blossomed. Or they were shacking up and decided to make it legal. Or they were already married and the first one didn’t stick?

Who was Samuel Larnardo Acker? He was a Sargent in the US Army who served in World War II. He was born May 5, 1909 in Picayune, MS (or Hancock, MS depending which doc you go by). According to the 1910 census he was one of six children. In the 1930 census he was a student attending the Prentiss Normal and Industrial Institute, a Black college which no longer exists. Looking at the census it appears he and a long list of students were living with the school’s founders, Jonas Edward Johnson and Bertha LaBranche Johnson.

In the 1940 census he and his wife Bessy/Bessie (in NY records he married a Bessie Lisker in 1924) lived at 529 Florida Ave NW on the LeDroit Park side of Florida. The lived there with their 9 month old daughter Dorothy. He worked at the Library of Congress, as part of the WPA, as a Research Editor. A year later he worked as a Junior Clerk Typist for the War Department. He and Bessie later had a son, Larnardo Menelik Acker, in 1942. In the 1950s he was mustered into the US Marines (Co C 1St Engr Bn 1St Mar Div, Mri 6 Pearl ), I don’t understand how the military works so….. The Army record I could find makes it look like he was in the typing and secretarial group.

In 1954 the family was living at 1913 Frederick Place SE. But a few years later, in September 1956 Bessie, who was an undergraduate nurse at the Emergency Hospital (where’s that?), died. She is buried at Arlington with Samuel Larnardo, who later died in 1966. Their graves are next to each other.

It’s Black History Month- Thank Shaw’s Own Carter G. Woodson

It’s February so that means it’s Black History Month. I think I will make this an annual thing, where I look at the “Father of Black History” Carter G. Woodson. He picked a week in February for Black History Week, then that week turned into a month and ta-da we are in Black History Month.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson (PhD, Harvard, 1912) noticed there was a lack of history documenting and telling the story of Black Americans in America. So he saw a problem and then fixed it. Quoting the NPS biography of Dr. Woodson, “The public knew very little about the role of African Americans in American history, and schools were not including African American history in their curriculum. He worked tirelessly throughout his life to remedy this problem, becoming nationally recognized as “the Father of Black History.” ”

Dr. Woodson lived and worked at 1538 9th Street NW, which is in Shaw. This would explain the statue, if you missed it, at 9th and Rhode Island Avenue NW. And the National Park Service historic house.

To celebrate the month I had pondered the idea of looking at his 1912 book The History of the Negro Church, because last year I did a deep dive of his Mis-Education of the Negro. There are some problems. For one the first book I ordered had type so small I could not read it. When I did order a book these older eyes could read, I discovered the book was very boring. I have discovered that The History of the Negro Church is in the public domain (yay), on the Project Gutenberg site and may have the Kindle read it to me. I seriously looked at Fivver for audiobook narrators. On the other hand I could just wait for the next round of DC Humanities grants and have them chip in for an audiobook production of Woodson’s public domain works. Feel free to steal this idea.

Instead this year, I’ll do one chapter or more chapters (not the whole book) of The History of the Negro Church, a second review of Mis-Education, other Dr. Woodson related posts and a Truxton Circle related African American history book that was pretty good. I may do a few WSIC posts and one or two 1930 Black Home Owners of Truxton Circle.