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> Race and Urban Renwal
Duke Ellington's Washington (2000)
Largely unknown to students of America history, Washington had a thriving African American community before the Harlem Renaissance. With Howard University as a magnet, this community was the capital of black America in the early 20th century, sending a stream of such shining talents as hometown jazz legend Duke Ellington, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell and pioneering surgeon Charles Drew into the nation at large. Washington's U street, nicknamed The Black Broadway" by Pearl Bailey, was the center of vibrant black business and culture, despite the oppressive weight of Jim Crow.
But like many other urban centers of Black America, Washington's U Street community lost its glory and cohesion and spun into decline in the 1950s and 1960s, hit first by the end of legal segregation and then by the rioting in 1968 after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King. But in the 1990s, U Street has made a stunning comeback by building on its celebrated past. After the DC government put up a major office building and a new metro station, developers and charitable organizations began restoring legendary sites. Jazz clubs and restaurants reopened. Handsome old 19th century row houses were restored. Modern condos appeared and Manna, a community development corporation, reconditioned more than 300 houses for low-income owners. As historian James Horton observed, U Street's renaissance offers hopes to a Detroit, a Cleveland, a Newark. We're talking about a community that has a history. History is important to a community. It provides the foundation."
Hope is not what most Americans associate with the nation's inner cities but this program, delving into the predominantly African-American community across the Anacostia River from the U.S. Congress, challenges media stereotypes of inner cities. It offers a rare series of encouraging portraits of urban heroes - former felons-gone-straight working with troubled youths, a community developing corporation inspiring an economic renaissance, a successful school-within-a-high school opening up new pathways into the economic mainstream, a housing developer reclaiming large areas once ravaged by the drug binge of the 1980s; solidly middle class churches serving as rallying points to restrain black middle class flight.
In addition to reporting on a one-hour documentary on these impressive but largely unheralded examples of community dynamism, Hedrick Smith hosts a one-hour town meeting bringing together downtown civic leaders with ordinary residents and local activists from Anacostia Instead of stimulating an ethnic crossfire, this dialogue brings diverse people together to work on a common agenda of community development and better understanding.
Outside Resources:
Department of Housing and Urban Development
Michigan State University Urban Affairs Program
Addresses the problems of poor housing and quality of life and unequal access to education and other resources.
National Community Building Network
An alliance of locally-driven urban initiatives to reduce poverty and create social and economic opportunity.
The Urban Institute
An urban-issues think-tank
