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Please join us on May 14 for “Chevy Chase DC Under Jim Crow,” the third in a four-part webinar series hosted by HCCDC to reflect on our community’s role in the founding and development of the nation over the past 250 years. This episode, on Zoom from 7 p.m. to 8:15 p.m., will explore the era after the Civil War and before World War II, when the suburban landscape familiar today was forming.
Click this link to register for the free May 14 webinar.
That period of our history largely shaped our community of today, where high land values and a largely prosperous population provide enrichment and opportunity for homeowners today. But there was a period when Chevy Chase DC began excluding longtime landowners, such as the pockets of African American families that settled here in the 1800s. They worked fields and gardens, hired out as laborers and seamstresses, until eventually some were able to buy land on which to raise generations of families. Their tenure endured for more than a century. But by 1940, every single Black landowner had been pushed out.
Panelists will provide an inside look at how racial displacement was no accident; rather it was a deliberate act by developers and planners to exclude all Black landowners regardless of their ability to afford to live here. Tactics included Jim Crow practices; unscrupulous land speculators buying up tax-arreared parcels, or in some cases, government-sanctioned displacement to “improve” the area for the new white suburbanites flooding in. Some just found opportunity elsewhere as life here became unwelcoming.
Jocelind Julian, a direct descendant of those landowners, will provide a first-hand account of how that displacement left scars evident even a century later. HCCDC’s Carl Lankowski and Mark Auslander will introduce the topics and moderate the discussion. Chas Cadwell will host.
The series, “Chevy Chase at 250: Beyond the Burgers and the Fireworks,” is a thoughtful examination of the local area a century at a time.The May 14 webinar picks up the story after the Civil War, which drastically changed the physical landscape and economic base of the area that until then was largely farm fields. The fourth and final webinar in the series, scheduled for June 24, will examine the local response to a modern democracy, with visionary leaders that included local citizen Walter Tobriner, and how the Great Migration – into and out of Washington, DC – affected life within our neighborhood. The webinar will look at redemption efforts targeting the promises of the nation’s Declaration of Independence.
Listen to the first two webinars in the series by using these links: The first webinar, on Jan. 29, is titled "The First 100 Years. The second, held March 26, is "The Civil War Came to Chevy Chase."
The webinar series is an outgrowth of HCCDC’s work over the past several years to understand how Chevy Chase DC became the community it is today, and what it owes to our future residents especially as community and city leaders contemplate development of the civic core. This community is unique in that it has had a front-row seat to the entire arc of American history through the experiences of Native Americans, to Colonial farmers, to free African American market gardeners and their white middling farmer counterparts; then later, developers and homeowners in a suburb that succumbed to Jim Crow practices, to middle class homeowners, to Civil Rights pioneers, and today’s residents.
We look forward to having you join us on this journey and invite you to help identify steps we can take to redeem the promise of our founding documents. And, as always, we thank you for your continued support of HCCDC!
Sincerely,
Carl Lankowski, President
Historic Chevy Chase DC
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