Chapter Three: Voices
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 18,1995
[Mrs. Edmunds] went door-to-door among neighbors she had known for a quarter-century, sharing hugs and memories and giving in to tears.
"I just hated to go. My neighbors, too. They said they were worried about who would move in after me," she said.
But on July 18, 1979, it was done. Edmunds, then a 54-year-old practical nurse who had been active in her church and PTA, who had campaigned for Barry, rode out of Northeast Washington. She joined an exodus that is perhaps the single sharpest irony of home rule.
Blacks in the District had waited for a voice in local affairs for the better part of two centuries—a wait that seemed particularly unjust after the 1950s, when they became the majority. Yet when home rule finally arrived, they were clearing out of Washington at the rate of 1 percent of the black population a year. About 7,000 families moved out every year throughout the 1970s.
Those who left included the educated and the employed, the church-going and the ambitious. They were from so-called typical families: father and mother living together in the same house with the children. And those children, who each year left behind thousands of empty seats in D.C. public schools, were the ones who tended to get the best grades, who did not act up in class and whose parents were most likely to raise holy hell if they did.
The disintegration of D.C. schools, of course, cannot be blamed solely on fleeing students. While losing 33,000 students between 1979 and 1992, the school system added 516 administrators. Compared with other big-city school systems, D.C. schools have the highest-paid teachers on average and rank near the top in per-student spending, but they languish near the bottom in test scores.
(Since well before home rule began, few white parents have enrolled their children in public schools. Whites accounted for less than 6 percent of enrollment in 1971 and account for less than 4 percent now.)
Edmunds was not running away from anything when she moved out of the District. Her son, then a student at the University of the District of Columbia, had received what she regarded as a fine education in the D.C. schools. Crime in her neighborhood, River Terrace, was not yet a particular problem.
Edmunds was not fleeing from; she was going after. For her, as for many blacks then leaving the city, moving out was moving up. She was newly married, after having been widowed, and her elderly mother needed a house that did not have so many stairs to climb. So Edmunds went to a ranch house in Fort Washington—in a grassy promised land called Prince George's County.
Doors to the suburbs had been unlocked by a cluster of federal laws that forbade discrimination in housing and employment. By the time home rule arrived, many black families in Washington had money in the bank, children hungry for space and nothing holding them back.
Back in District neighborhoods such as River Terrace, the absence of residents like Mary Edmunds and her family began to tell. Over the course of a decade or so, boarded-up houses began to dot the streets, and gunfire pierced the night. The mismatch between pinstripe downtown jobs and blue-collar skills in black neighborhoods pushed up unemployment. The percentage of black families headed by a single parent nearly tripled, from about one-quarter in 1970 to about three-quarters in 1993. Rates for infant mortality, juvenile crime and children born into poverty all soared.
Not everyone, of course, was poor. There was slight growth in the number of well-off black households, those making more than $100,000 a year. But the real growth was in poor black households, those making less than $20,000. Middle-income households continued to drift off to the suburbs.
Fauntroy, a minister, uses the word "pathology" again and again to describe parts of black Washington where the middle class has disappeared: "Around my church [New Bethel Baptist on Ninth Street NW], you got a whole block of people who are engaged in a cycle of violence and family disorganization. There is not a single mother with a child who has a father living in the house. You got [white] people on the outside saying this is a problem of black leadership. But that isn't what's driving this."
According to Fauntroy, 80 percent of his parishioners now live in the suburbs.
Like many former District residents, Edmunds comes back to the city for church. She belongs to First Baptist Church of Deanwood, which has 1,500 members—half of them living in the suburbs. The church's mission is shaped by service to those left behind. Its soup kitchen served 4,302 meals last winter. It has a prison correspondence group. There are programs for life skills and health care, male mentoring and job searches. Parishioners from the suburbs run most of the programs, serving people who live in the neighborhood.
Edmunds volunteers at the soup kitchen whenever she can. Still, she knows the neighborhood. Because of crime, especially on dark winter evenings, she is reluctant to come to town.
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