Tag: neighborhood history

I can see why children hate history. I’m returning the textbook on the history of the District of Columbia to my library since it is ILL (inter library loan) and it is just depressing. Really, I can see why school children can hate history. I love history. It is like learning about another country, where you can’t get a visa.
The textbook, City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Washington, District of Columbia is useful in that it is crammed, crammed I say, with dates and facts. What I learned from what little I read and skimmed through has been fascinating. However, I read very little because I could not read this like I have been able to do with other books. Reading, I felt like tons and tons of facts were being shoved at me and the story, the narrative was secondary. It was like reading the encyclopedia…. for those of you who remember encyclopedias when they were in book form.
I understand why the book was written the way it was written. Gotta shove those dates and facts at the kids. You can test for that. But it does not make for leisure reading and I can see how a reader can get resentful.
It is most enjoyable when you flip through it. The photographs of people and locations around the District are interesting and the maps showing growth in the region has been helpful. Reading subsections of chapters is do-able, and pausing to think about what was written, and applying it to the present, allows for ah-ha moments. For example there is a section on neighborhood history and white flight to the suburbs and an organization “Neighbors, Inc”. A caption in the chapter reads:

By fostering communication and cooperation, Neighbors, Inc. helped halt “white flight” in the part of Northwest roughly east of 16th Street and north of Kennedy Street.

It ends on a sad note as it was published in 1997. It leaves with a Control Board overseeing the District government, Marion ‘the bitch set me up’ Barry was re-elected, and downtown DC decaying. Sitting here 10 years in the book’s future with no control board, a young bald mayor named Adrian and a vibrant downtown, I feel good.

Okay, I have finally dug up my Wikipedia log in info and I’m now dangerous. I thought about making changes to the Shaw, DC wiki article but the changes would be so extensive, it frightens me. For example:

Shaw once included the areas of smaller neighborhoods, such as Logan Circle and Truxton Circle, but in recent years those neighborhoods have grown into their own and become separate from Shaw.

It was the RLA and the National Capital Planning Commission that created it, who else is to say what’s in and what’s out. The Post still occasionally refers to parts of Logan as Shaw. Besides I consider myself part of Shaw. I wouldn’t know where to start with that statement.

Shaw grew out of freed slave encampments in the rural outskirts of Washington City. It was named after Civil War Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

There were houses located in the Shaw area prior to Lincoln’s presidency and the Civil War. And then there are those pesky white people, who really don’t fit in this wonderful AfAm History narrative. I don’t doubt the Shaw in question is Col Robert G. Shaw. But the actual naming the neighborhood after him…. I’d have to wipe out the whole dang paragraph and replace with something that reads like. In 19?? (50 something 60 something) the Government agency (RLA? NCPC? Model Cities? I gotta look back and figure out who to blame) carved the Shaw School Urban Renewal Project out of the city’s 2nd District. The Shaw school, a junior high school named after Civil War commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, covered an ??? square acre area running from 15/14th Street on the west, Florida Avenue (and some other little streets above FL) on the north, North Capitol Street on the east and M Street to the south. The Shaw School Urban [whatever] became what is currently called Shaw.

Shaw thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the pre-Harlem center of African-American intellectual and cultural life. Howard Theological Seminary received its first matriculates in 1866; by 1925, Professor Alain Locke was advancing the idea of “The New Negro,” and Langston Hughes was descending from Le Droit Park to hear the “sad songs” of 7th Street. The most famous Shaw native to emerge from this period—sometimes called the Black Renaissance of DC—was Duke Ellington.

The problem with establishing the neighborhood name in the mid 20th Century is referring to the cool stuff that happened before the establishment of the recognized name. Also where the heck was the Howard Theological Seminary? Yes, I could look it up, and I will, maybe around lunchtime. I’m worried about stealing another neighborhood’s history, which is a problem when certain things are close to or straddle the boarders. Also the notables need addresses that actually put them in the neighborhood, so as that we are not stealing another neighborhood’s historical figures.
Oh, and there is not a single solitary thing about the urban renewal. Can’t ignore the urban renewal. And more importantly, the why, the reason for the urban renewal in the first place.
Since as a habit, I tend to work with primary sources and not secondary sources, that makes writing a history of something probably more difficult for me than it really needs to be. Secondary sources, like books on the topic, and there is one out there, sum up what the primary sources (like newspaper articles from the day and eyewitness accounts) say.
PS- Blagden Alley people, the wiki for your area is ripe for the pickin’.
Update: As of 1/2 through my lunch dish I wandered around the net and found that Howard Divinity School was (according to the Divinity School website) in Douglass Hall, which is north of Florida Ave, was never in the Shaw School borders (and why would any part of Howard U be part of the urban renewal plan).