Category: Washington D.C.

Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation’s Capital, 1967-1973

.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Ryan Reft “The cost to the community of drug-related crime is staggering,” Chief Judge of the District of Columbia Court of General Sessions Harold H. Greene asserted to the United States Senate in June of 1970. Accepting more “conservative estimates,” Greene suggested that 10,000 addicts resided in the District of Columbia, spending “$40 to […]

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Fifty Years of Home Rule in Washington, DC

.Reading time 34 minutes.

“Self-government died early in the District,” note historians Christopher Asch and G. Derek Musgrove. “Not even a generation after Americans went to war to protest ‘no taxation without representation,’ Congress stripped Washingtonians of democracy’s basic unit of currency, the right to vote.”[1] As they demonstrate in their 2017 work Chocolate City: A History of Race […]

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The Travails of Urban Redevelopment in post-1968 Washington, DC

.Reading time 21 minutes.

This is the second entry in our Metropolis of the Month for November 2023, Washington D.C. By Kyla Sommers In response to the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, African Americans took to the streets in more than one hundred American cities. The rebellions in Washington, DC, resulted in […]

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Dream City Skepticism? A 20th-Century Bibliography of the Nation’s Capital

.Reading time 40 minutes.

This is the first post in our Metropolis of the Month for November 2023: Washington, DC, in the Twentieth Century. “If any city in the United States has borne the burden of serving as a symbol of American aspirations and has simultaneously been the place. . .where the issues of civilization have been focused, it […]

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