(Amanda Voisard/ THE WASHINGTON POST ) - Joyce Scott, left, and Sandy Allen.
The two Southeast Washington women met in the 1970s as activists in their Anacostia neighborhoods. Their friendship grew as they pushed for better schools, programs for teenagers and more jobs. Together, they went into crack houses, coaxing addicts to return home to their families.
One woman, former D.C. Council member Sandy Allen, 67, turned to politics to help her community. The other, the Rev. Joyce Scott, 58, turned to faith.
The Crime Scene
Early on Jan. 2, tragedy brought them even closer. Scott’s grandson, Brian C. Scott, 21, was gunned down at 13th Place and Congress Street SE, becoming the city’s first homicide victim of 2011.
Five years earlier, Allen’s grandson, Jon Allen Jr., 15, was fatally shot on the same corner.
For the two grandmothers, the corner in the Congress Park neighborhood has become a shared reminder of personal loss. For the city, it is a grim symbol of the gun violence that has shattered so many families. Over the past decade, 17 people have been slain within a few yards of the intersection. The most recent was Ra-Heem Jackson, a 16-year-old basketball standout at H.D. Woodson High School who was shot April 7.
Six weeks ago, Scott forced herself to return to the corner. It was the first time she’d been back since Brian Scott was killed and another grandson, Tavon Bell, 21, was critically wounded.
With a microphone and a Bible, Scott brought out her church members, friends and as many residents as she could find for an anti-violence rally. They were there, she told the crowd, to “proclaim this street for peace.”
Sandy Allen was beside her.
“Sometimes you can save everybody else’s child but your own,” Scott said.
The two- and three-story brick apartment buildings that surround the corner are worn but not shoddy. One of them is surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. Thirteenth Place ends in a cul-de-sac locals call “the Circle.”
The Congress Park complex, built in 1950 as affordable housing for World War II veterans, evolved into a thriving majority-black community. It fell into decay in the late 1960s. And in the 1980s, crack cocaine turned quiet streets into open-air drug markets.
Many of those who could afford to move did. Many of those who stayed retreated behind heavy curtains and double-locked doors.
“The ‘neighbor’ went out of the neighborhood,” Scott said.
Scott and Allen each have connections to Congress Park. Both have relatives who live near the corner. Just as it links them now, the neighborhood helped bring them together more than three decades ago.
In 1978, Scott was working for a company that helped find jobs for juvenile offenders when she volunteered for then-council member Marion Barry’s first mayoral campaign. Soon after, the campaign recruited Allen.
The women didn’t know each other even though they were commissioners of adjoining advisory neighborhood commissions in Anacostia. But when Barry (Ward 8) wanted holiday food baskets delivered to residents, they volunteered.
At Scott’s Mississippi Avenue SE apartment, they lined up supplies, blasted “Superwoman” by R&B songstress Karyn White and got to work.
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