Disintegration (7 page)

It’s important not to lose sight of the larger context: Compared
in the aggregate to white Atlanta, black Atlanta was poor, undereducated, and underemployed. The luxury and excellence of Sweet Auburn and the universities glittered against a backdrop of meager housing, inadequate health care, neglected schools—and, given the environment, all the social ills that poverty so efficiently nourishes.

But just look at those once-rising inner-city communities today.

Alonzo Herndon’s mansion, once the jewel of a neighborhood meant to overlook the sylvan college campuses, is crowded by development and decay. Sweet Auburn, long since bisected by a freeway, looks utterly unremarkable to anyone not familiar with its storied history; once the height of African American status and achievement, it is no longer the height of anything. Historical markers and spotty efforts at preservation are little more than a wish. The University Central District remains as a shrinking island in a troubled sea: Spelman and Morehouse are still elite and viable institutions, though not as exclusive as they once were, while Clark is struggling to recall its former glory. Morris Brown has lost its accreditation. It is true that black Atlanta is enjoying a renaissance, but the action is taking place miles away in the suburbs, where successful African Americans have clumped together, and in other parts of the city that used to be reserved for whites only.

In Atlanta, one of the most vibrant and successful African American communities in the nation underwent a long, slow process of disintegration. The same process took place across the country—as one black America, to all appearances indivisible, became four.

H
ow did disintegration happen? It was the gradual, natural, and perhaps inevitable product of both triumph and tragedy.

To understand how the process evolved, the best place to start is with the opening of the deepest and most significant cleavage in black America, involving by far the largest groups: the gap between the Mainstream and the Abandoned. The history of this separation is written on U Street in Washington, D.C.

Washington’s obsessive-compulsive system of naming streets—letters, numbers, quadrants—offers no clue as to what a given neighborhood might look or feel like. To anyone unfamiliar with the city, “U St. NW” is, at most, a rough geographical marker. To Washingtonians, however, this spoonful of alphabet soup is full of local flavor—and redolent of black American history. The story of U Street is the story both of triumph and of disintegration.

I moved to the Washington area at the end of 1979. A couple of years later, a dear family friend came to visit—a man who wasn’t a blood relative but had been taken in by my grandparents,
becoming like an older sibling to my mother; when I was christened, she had asked him to be my godfather. I was driving him through the city, and when we happened to cross U Street he was suddenly flooded with nostalgia. When he had visited Washington as a young man in the 1950s, U Street was
the place
. He remembered the Lincoln Theatre, where he had heard Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He recalled the shops, the restaurants, the elegance, the sophistication, the snap and bustle, the prosperity, the nonstop action. U Street, any proud (and perhaps slightly chauvinistic) black Washingtonian would have told you, was just like Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn, but with class instead of, ahem, crass.

But as I drove through town with my godfather, the U Street before our eyes was a very different place.

The Lincoln Theatre wasn’t a showcase for the geniuses of jazz; it was a derelict shell that gave no hint of former glory. There were no shops anymore except cheap dollar-store-type establishments that sold a lot of tube socks, underwear, and hair products; there was certainly no elegance or sophistication. Restaurants included Ben’s Chili Bowl, a brave survivor from the late 1950s, and a bunch of takeout joints. Wig shops and beauty salons held on by their (fake) fingernails. There was plenty of snap and bustle, all right, but of a different kind: U Street and its environs had become one of the city’s most notorious open-air illegal drug markets, offering mostly heroin but now, as the hyped-up ’80s began to gather steam, quickly diversifying into cocaine. At certain hours of the day, the empty street would magically fill with spectral figures who materialized out of boarded-up buildings and weed-choked empty lots; immediately, cold-eyed young men arrived to sell
little packets of bliss. Police called it “feeding time.” When afternoon gave way to evening, the commerce of prostitution settled in for the night. U Street was an exciting place full of opportunity and enterprise, all right, but in a sense that could give only pushers and pimps a sense of accomplishment and pride.

That was nearly thirty years ago. Today U Street is one of the liveliest, most desirable neighborhoods in town. Old landmarks—not just the Lincoln Theatre but also the Bohemian Caverns nightclub, where past performers included Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and just about every other midcentury jazz artist you’ve ever heard of—are open again for the amusement of moneyed young patrons. There is more retail commerce up and down the street than ever—make that more
legal
retail commerce—with funky boutiques selling what passes for hip fashion in buttoned-down Washington. Where once there were empty lots and burned-out shells, new apartment buildings offer anyone with a million dollars the opportunity to live in spacious, spanking-new “lofts” that look almost like the real thing. There are cafés and wine bars; there are stores selling designer furniture. Around the intersection with Ninth Street, a lively row of restaurants draws patrons from around the city.

The temptation is to say that U Street is “back,” but that wouldn’t be accurate. Sixty years ago, or certainly thirty years ago, you would have been surprised to see a Caucasian soul within blocks of U Street. Today, roughly half of the people you see out and about on U Street at any given moment are white. The restaurant row along Ninth Street is noteworthy in that
the proprietors of most of the thriving new eateries are black—but they also happen to be recent immigrants from Ethiopia.

It is not my godfather’s U Street.

The trajectory of black Washington’s most storied district traces the arc of black America in the late twentieth century—a parabola of success, failure, rebirth, and divergence.

By the early 1960s, U Street had already passed its heyday. Inner cities had fallen out of fashion; those who could afford to do so, both black and white, were moving away. The streetcar system that once had knitted the city together was gone, and those with means—and automobiles—had moved to what was once considered the periphery. The newspaper heiress Katharine Graham, who grew up blocks away from U Street in a mansion on the other, much whiter side of Meridian Hill Park, had decamped to Georgetown, a neighborhood that became synonymous with power and wealth; Jack and Jackie Kennedy lived there, as did Pamela Harriman, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, and later Bob Woodward. Few residents of Georgetown today are aware that they are living in what had once been largely a working-class black neighborhood before a prewar wave of gentrification had made it
the
place to live in Washington. Years from now, I suppose, only historians will know that U Street was once one of black America’s jewels.

The first blow to U Street was a positive development: African Americans suddenly had more choices. Washington was always something of a special case in terms of how segregation worked. Lying south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it was in essence a Southern town. But it was the site of the federal government, which gave the city a unique status as neither fish nor fowl—it wasn’t as relatively laissez-faire as some Northern cities but neither was it as rigidly locked down as an Atlanta or a Birmingham.
And when change came, it often came to Washington first because of its federal status. President Truman integrated government workplaces in 1948, which opened employment opportunities to blacks in the city’s principal industry. Under President Eisenhower, first parks and other recreation facilities and then the public schools were integrated in 1954. By 1957, Washington had become the first large U.S. city with an African American majority.

As strictures in public accommodations and the schools fell away, so did the formal and informal rules that had segregated the city’s neighborhoods. Black families who lived in close-in enclaves such as LeDroit Park, up the hill from U Street near Howard University, departed for parts of the city that once would not have welcomed them, especially the leafy neighborhoods at the city’s far northern tip. Or else African Americans fled all the way to the suburbs—more to the Maryland side than to Virginia—where new ranch-style homes and split-levels offered all the modern conveniences. This was a time, remember, when there was nothing remotely pejorative about the concept of suburban sprawl. Rather, it was seen as progress. Except in Manhattan and arguably in Chicago, urban density had become the antithesis of the American dream.

Many of the African Americans who once patronized upscale retail stores along U Street had moved away, and those who remained had other options. Blacks in Washington had long been able to go downtown and shop at the reasonably priced department stores like Hecht and Lansburgh, and they were even welcome at the midrange department store Woodward and Lothrop. For many years, however, they were not invited to patronize upscale Garfinckel’s, which was the jewel of the main F Street shopping corridor not far from the White
House. Mrs. Lucille Foster, a longtime black Washingtonian who grew up in Georgetown and subsequently lived for many years near U Street, recalls that when she saw a particular dress in the window at Garfinckel’s that she wanted to buy—with her own money—the wealthy white matron for whom she worked as a cook had to go into the store and make the purchase. By the mid-′60s, though, the doors of Garfie’s were open to all—as were most restaurants and other places of business.

The need for a blacks-only venue like the Lincoln Theatre had disappeared, now that establishments downtown such as the grand Warner Theatre and the venerable National Theatre were happy, or at least willing, to welcome African Americans. The Bohemian Caverns lost its ability to attract top-line performers when integrated clubs opened their doors, such as Blues Alley in Georgetown, which was established in 1965 and became the city’s principal venue for jazz. Soon only the people who lived nearby had any reason to go to U Street. Those local residents—the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t move out of the old neighborhood—tended to be less educated and affluent than those who took advantage of the new possibilities that racial integration offered.

The public schools serving the U Street area began to decline, not just because of a lack of attention and funding from the authorities—the ultimate authority over the District of Columbia in those days was Congress, and since the city had (and still has) no voting representation in the House of Representatives or the Senate, there was no one to hold accountable for how the city was being run—but also because the student population changed. The stable, middle-class, two-parent families that were most likely to prepare their children for school were leaving. Those students who remained
were unlikely to get the kind of support at home that produces sustained academic achievement. As standards began to slip, more of the best and brightest students were pulled out; either they ended up in private or parochial schools, or their families moved to the suburbs and sent them to public schools where expectations were high, discipline was strict, and going on to college was considered inevitable, not impossible.

Thurlow Tibbs, a prominent African American art dealer who died in 1997, once recalled of the old days on U Street: “We are forced to deal with one another on every economic level. In my block we had school teachers, a mail man, a retired garbage man, and a registrar of Howard University.”
¹
But by the late 1960s, many if not most of the educated professionals had moved away. A community that once had been racially segregated but economically and socially integrated was well on its way to becoming segregated in all three senses—black, poor, isolated.

A vacuum was developing on U Street, and into it came a rush of undesirable pathology—poverty, teen pregnancy, single motherhood, drugs, crime, growing isolation from the mainstream. Which is not to say that those things did not previously exist. There is a sense in which the hollowing out of the middle class on U Street simply allowed everyone to see dysfunction that had been there all along. There were always poor people on U Street; there were always single mothers; there were always “ladies of the night” and “dope fiends” and drunks. It’s true that more of this pathology arrived, but it’s also true that out-migration of affluent, intact families and the demise of the neighborhood’s economic underpinnings made it easier to see the pathology that was already present. And the phrase “growing isolation from the mainstream” can be misunderstood.
U Street was always isolated from mainstream white society—that was the whole reason for U Street’s existence. What happened was that some black Washingtonians were allowed to join the white mainstream. Those who failed to make the shift—those left behind—became increasingly isolated from mainstream values, mores, and aspirations.

That was the situation on the morning of April 4, 1968. By that evening, the U Street neighborhood—and the rest of black America—had changed forever.

* * *

Crowds began gathering spontaneously up and down U Street when the shocking, tragic, unbelievable yet all-too-believable news from Memphis began to circulate. Black America was never monolithic, but at certain rare moments it had recognized a single leader and made him the repository of our hopes and dreams, the symbol of our perseverance and pride, the avatar of our relentless, righteous aspiration for the justice that America had promised but cruelly withheld. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had become such a leader, and now he was dead, assassinated by a sniper as he stepped onto a balcony at the Lorraine Motel. Even the first news reports included the detail that the suspect, who was still at large, was a white man.