Georgetown's Hidden History

Then, in 1950, Congress passed the Old Georgetown Act "to preserve and protect places of historic interest," but it had the effect of making Georgetown's gentrification legally enforceable. It was pushed through despite fears from "Negro groups," The Washington Post reported at the time, that it "might drive them from the area." Less than a decade later, Georgetown's black population had dwindled to fewer than 3 percent, and in 1972 The Post noted that fewer than 250 remained, "so few that some Georgetown residents are unaware they are there."

Blacks were thus becoming invisible by the time the likes of Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman started creating Georgetown's all-white "social salons" of such ludicrous legend. Indeed, racism was so entrenched in the nation's capital that even the glamorous young Sen. John F. Kennedy voluntarily signed a deed containing a "restrictive covenant" when he bought his house on N Street NW in 1957, agreeing that the home should not "ever be used or occupied or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to Negroes or any person or persons of the Negro race or blood."

Which brings us full circle to 2006. My son and I went to Mount Zion church on a recent Sunday morning and met an 84-year-old black parishioner named Carter Bowman, who was born in Georgetown but who long ago moved out. With neat serendipity, we met three generations of Bowmans because his son and grandson, who attends university in England, happened to be visiting. But if you go three generations in the reverse direction, you find that all of Carter Bowman's great-grandparents were born and raised when slavery was at its most intense in Georgetown. For all I know, they could have resided in that crude basement in my house, or someplace like it.

Knowing what I know now, I found it strangely moving when the Rev. Robert Slade, chief pastor at Mount Zion -- who doesn't live in Georgetown -- told my son that "when we didn't have anything, the church was our everything. . . . When there was nothing and no place to go, [it] was the one place to go." Slade's words, to us, explain why the emotional bonds to the black churches in Georgetown remain so strong.

It took a 16-year-old to bring all these realities of life in Georgetown, past and present, home to me. As a foreigner who remains deeply attached to America, I find it bewildering how so self-reverential a country can proclaim that all men are created equal but then proceed to implement racist oppression that manifestly expresses the reverse. The truth that my son and I discovered is that for many decades, blacks in Georgetown were treated little better than rats. He will never forget that, and neither will I.

newstatesman@usa.net

Andrew Stephen is the U.S. editor

of the New Statesman magazine.