Emancipation Day and Washington D.C’s Living Legacy of White Theft, Black Loss
Every April 16, the District of Columbia commemorates Emancipation Day. On this day in 1862, the federal government authorized reparations for slavery. What is largely forgotten is that the government paid slave owners — not slaves. The District of Columbia Emancipation Act freed slaves in the city and allotted one million dollars to compensate slave owners for the value of the slaves. To disburse the funds, the law created a three-man commission to hear petitions from slave owners, offering the white elites a forum to narrate the gravity of their losses. For example, in one petition, Anna Stone wrote that, when she was a child, her grandmother gave her a slave, Clara Adely, who served as a “good cook [and] washer” until emancipation. The federal government awarded Anna $481.80, or about $7,300 in today’s dollars.
While Anna could present facts and receive payment for the loss of her unpaid cook, Clara was not given the opportunity to voice her experiences and sense of justice. Instead, the bill made her, and others like her, each eligible to receive just $100. There was a catch, too. Recipients would have to leave the land where they were born and emigrate to Liberia, Haiti or other countries approved by the president.
No ex-slaves set sail for Monrovia or Port-au-Prince. They stayed in D.C., yet it would be a mistake to say the city welcomed them. In the years to come, the white majority in the District allied with segregationist Southern politicians to resist black uplift. Together, they fought relentlessly for black codes to remain on the books, for the electoral franchise to stay in white hands, and for whites and blacks to be born in separate hospitals, buried in separate cemeteries, and — inbetween — to live in two separate worlds.
Ninety years later, just as the Supreme Court struck down formal segregation, it blessed de facto segregation. In 1954, only a few months after the Supreme Court told Oliver Brown that his daughter could attend an integrated school in Topeka, the justices took stock of the depths of black poverty in D.C. In Berman v. Parker, the Court dryly recited the physical conditions of a neighborhood that was 97.5% black in Southwest D.C.: “57.8% of the dwellings had outside toilets, 60.3% had no baths, 29.3% lacked electricity, 82.2% had no wash basins or laundry tubs, 83.8% lacked central heating.” The facts served not as the basis for an order mandating aid to the black community, but for destroying the black inhabitants’ tenements as part of a grand plan for “urban renewal.” Indifferent to the plight of existing residents, the Court, in a unanimous decision, reasoned that the federal government deserved deference in its determination that “the Nation’s Capital should be beautiful as well as sanitary.”
Citizens, scholars, and even conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have observed that, in practice, “urban renewal” has amounted to “Negro removal.” This was true of black communities in Washington D.C., including that featured in Berman. Nearly 6,000 new housing units were constructed in the new Southwest D.C. development, but only 310 were affordable to the prior residents. With this dearth of affordable housing, the black population of Southwest was dislocated and dispersed to other parts of the city, and the area soon became majority-white. A study of 500 of those displaced, completed five years after their dislocation, found that though most lived in better physical conditions, they experienced despair at the destruction of their old, strong communal bonds.
Although there are individuals alive today who experienced the Berman displacement, we like to deem racial problems of that kind, and scale, a relic of the past. Yet, as law professor Christopher Peterson has observed, by the time it is over, the still-unfolding foreclosure crisis will have forcibly displaced more people on American soil than at any other time since the Great Depression, or perhaps the Civil War. And black Americans have comprised a disproportionate share of those dislocated, including in Washington D.C. Here, black homeowners have been 20 percent more likely than their white counterparts, with comparable incomes and lifestyles, to lose their homes. Meanwhile, the lobbying outfits and white shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, who profited from supplying the extralegal infrastructure for the mortgage trading melee that preceded the financial crisis, are settling in to luxurious new offices downtown.
Today, we remain the heirs of Anna and Clara, inheriting and transmitting a legacy of white plunder and black dispossession. A fitting remedy would be to finally give the black working class the same reparations that white slave owners received and their descendants have surely benefited from. The sum disbursed ought to account for not just the interest, but the injustice, that has compounded since the original Emancipation Day.
