Ledroit Park

Built as a gated, all-white community, in the 20th century LeDroit Park became the premier neighborhood of Washington, DC's Black elite. LeDroit Park's famed arch offers entry into a tree-lined neighborhood with unique architecture and a captivating history. Developed in 1873 by a Howard University trustee who refused to sell lots to Black Washingtonians, the neighborhood was designed to be both town and country, one of DC's earliest suburbs. Not long after the fences of this gated community were torn down, the demographics changed as members of the Black elite of Washington moved there. During the 20th century it was home to educators and activists, military men and artists, doctors and scientists - both white and Black, men and women. Local historian and guide Canden Schwantes leads you through this neighborhood, small in size but large in history, to discover the stories of the people who called LeDroit Park home.

Let residents tell you what it's been like to live in D.C.'s most gentrified neighborhood. When Gretchen Wharton came to Shaw in 1946, the houses were full of families that looked like hers: lower-income, African American, two parents with kids. The sidewalks were full of children playing. When Leroy Thorpe moved in in the 1980s, the same streets were dense with drug markets. When John Lucier found a deal on a house in Shaw in 2002, he found himself moving into one of four occupied homes on his block. Every morning, he waited by himself on the empty platform of the newly opened metro station. When Preetha Iyengar became pregnant with her first child in 2016, she jumped into a seller's market to buy a rowhouse in the area. Journalist and Shaw resident Shilpi Malinowski explores the complexities of the many stories of belonging in the District's most dynamic neighborhood.

Built as a gated, all-white community, in the 20th century LeDroit Park became the premier neighborhood of Washington, DC's Black elite. LeDroit Park's famed arch offers entry into a tree-lined neighborhood with unique architecture and a captivating history. Developed in 1873 by a Howard University trustee who refused to sell lots to Black Washingtonians, the neighborhood was designed to be both town and country, one of DC's earliest suburbs. Not long after the fences of this gated community were torn down, the demographics changed as members of the Black elite of Washington moved there. During the 20th century it was home to educators and activists, military men and artists, doctors and scientists - both white and Black, men and women. Local historian and guide Canden Schwantes leads you through this neighborhood, small in size but large in history, to discover the stories of the people who called LeDroit Park home.

Culled from the records of the National Register of Historic Places, a roster of all types of significant properties across the United States, African American Historic Places includes over 800 places in 42 states and two U.S. territories that have played a role in black American history. Banks, cemeteries, clubs, colleges, forts, homes, hospitals, schools, and shops are but a few of the types of sites explored in this volume, which is an invaluable reference guide for researchers, historians, preservationists, and anyone interested in African American culture. Also included are eight insightful essays on the African American experience, from migration to the role of women, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. The authors represent academia, museums, historic preservation, and politics, and utilize the listed properties to vividly illustrate the role of communities and women, the forces of migration, the influence of the arts and heritage preservation, and the struggles for freedom and civil rights. Together they lead to a better understanding of the contributions of African Americans to American history. They illustrate the events and people, the designs and achievements that define African American history. And they pay powerful tribute to the spirit of black America.

For a period of eighty-five years, the M Street / Dunbar High School was an academically elite, all-black public high school in Washington DC. As far back as 1899, its students came in first in citywide tests given in both black and white schools. Over this eighty-five-year span, approximately 80 percent of M Street / Dunbar’s graduates went on to college even though most Americans, white or black, did not attend college at all. Faculty and students were mutually respectful to one another, and disruptions in the classroom were not tolerated. Yet in this era of best practices, this public high school has received virtually no attention in the literature or in policy considerations for inner-city education. The Dunbar High School today, with its new building and athletic facilities, is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards and low test score results despite the District of Columbia’s record of having some of the country’s highest levels of money spent per pupil. The purpose of this study is to explore the history of a high school that was successful in teaching black children from low-income families and to determine if the learning model employed there could be successful in a modern inner-city public education environment.

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents lack full political rights. Tracing D.C.'s massive transformations--from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation's first black-majority city, from "Chocolate City" to "Latte City--Asch and Musgrove offer an engaging narrative peppered with unforgettable characters, a history of deep racial division but also one of hope, resilience, and interracial cooperation.