TODAY: Barry Farm is the latest battleground for grass-roots housing advocates in the nations capital, where intense gentrification has altered the citys demographic landscape dramatically. Because Washington was Americas first city to have a black majority, it came as a shock to many in 2011 when DCs black population dropped below 50 percent for the first time in more than 50 years. In the past decade, the district lost nearly 40,000 black residents, many driven out by skyrocketing rents fueled by an influx of mostly white professionals flocking to increasingly gentrified neighborhoods. TYPICAL PATTERN - Whats most frustrating for many people in these communities is that the nice stuff doesnt surface until affluent people move in. HISTORY: General Oliver Otis Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, in a trust to develop “normal collegiate institutions or universities” USED these funds to purchase 375 acres from the descendents of James D. Barry in 1867. Sitting just beneath the Government Hospital for the Insane, which saw its first patient in 1855, the sale of lots would help relieve “the immediate necessities of a class of poor colored people in the District of Columbia.” Within two years, more than 260 families had made Barry Farm their home, the Fredrick Douglass sons included. “Everyone who visited the Barry Farm and saw the new hopefulness with which most of the dwellers there were inspired, could not fail to regard the entire enterprise as judicious and beneficent.” “African Americans have used cooperative economic development as a strategy in the struggle for economic stability and independence.” WAS THIS NOT SHOWING A COLLECTIVE AND COOPERATIVE SHOWING OF HOW WE LIVED?? (pic L-R_Charles Douglass, Joseph Douglas (grandson of Frederick D) , Lewis Douglass.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:31:57 +0000