Exhibit Documents Historic Neighborhood Change, Successful Collective Action

This article was written for The DC Line and you can find it on their site here.

What are the boundaries for collective ownership, and which residents own what “rights” to their communities? A new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum dives into these complex questions, exploring real-life stories of change and activism across six DC neighborhoods.

The mixed-media exhibition,  “A Right to the City,” sheds light on change in the communities of Anacostia, Brookland, Chinatown, Southwest, Shaw and Adams Morgan over the last half-century. “A Right to the City” showcases past examples of the same forces that continue to reshape D.C. today — including public policy, development, gentrification and displacement.

The mixed-media exhibition highlights stories of change and activism in Anacostia, Brookland, Chinatown, Southwest, Shaw and Adams Morgan. (Photos by Robert Bettmann)

Curator Samir Meghelli says the exhibit, which draws on more than 200 oral history interviews conducted over the past three years, “tells the story of how and why DC neighborhoods have changed and been transformed.”

In a June 9 talk at the museum, author and American University professor Derek Hyra added to the conversation, presenting research and analysis from his 2017 book Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City.

Hyra discussed the need for proactive and inclusive housing policies in neighborhoods with skyrocketing property values — against a complex backdrop of race and political factors.

Since Home Rule was instituted in 1973, and until very recently, the city experienced majority black leadership, Hyra noted in an interview. In the days when DC was dubbed “Chocolate City,” over 70 percent of its population was black, he said.

“And now you have a larger percent of whites who live in the city,” Hyra said. “And with that demographic shift you’ve seen a political shift, and since 2015 whites have been the majority in the city council.”

Meghelli’s exhibit documents dramatic episodes of change in the years before and after Home Rule. These include cyclical patterns of segregation in Anacostia; Adams Morgan residents taking control of their neighborhood school from the DC Board of Education; the defeat of a planned freeway in Brookland; and federal urban renewal projects that leveled neighborhoods in Anacostia and Southwest DC.

The exhibition includes photos, artifacts, text, and oral history video footage. The only non-interview video included is a prominently displayed loop of a powerful 1968 speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., supporting Shaw residents in their organized (and ultimately successful) fight against urban renewal projects in that neighborhood. In his speech — delivered just months before his assassination — King exhorted the crowd to “prepare to participate.”

Hyra’s recent study of the Shaw neighborhood details not only how gentrification has forced longtime residents to move, but also the new segregation that exists within the neighborhood as its demographics have changed with the influx of affluent, white residents.

“The amenities that seem to be undergirded by the DC government these days seem to be things like bike lanes and beer gardens and coffee shops, and high-end condominium buildings,” Hyra said. “And these amenities aren’t always appreciated by long-term, low-income African-Americans, who feel like these amenities are not for them.”

As Rebecca Summer,  a scholar of DC gentrification, put it: “In DC, stories about neighborhood change are always stories about race.”

Summer, a DC native and doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is currently writing a dissertation on the history of alleys as public space in the city. She noted that DC’s current changes “are building on well-established and deeply rooted legacies of segregation and marginalization.”

One section of Meghelli’s exhibit documents the destruction of Southwest DC and parts of Anacostia through urban renewal projects.  Framing the discussion is a quote from author and poet James Baldwin equating urban renewal with “Negro removal.”

While Summer noted that race is an “essential” factor in understanding neighborhood change in DC, she said “it would be a mistake to attribute all change to wide-sweeping racial categories of black, brown and white.”

“This oversimplification is tempting,” she said, “but the reality is that there’s more nuance to neighborhood change in DC.”

The forces, and nuances, of change are effectively displayed in “A Right to the City,” which offers an unflinching look at policies that destroyed neighborhoods as well as inspiring examples of individuals and groups that bridged cultural and racial divides for community benefit. With the DC government in the midst of considering major revisions to its guiding Comprehensive Plan for development, “A Right to the City” is an instructive exhibition, appropriate for all ages, but probably best-suited for ages 13 and older.

“A Right to the City” will have a two-year run, through April 20, 2020. The exhibit is part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, which is located at 1901 Fort Place SE and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

My Experience with Nazi Reparations

Top image is of the author’s grandmother on vacation with her parents and sisters, her hand over the side of a boat.

In 1982, when I was nine years old, my grandparents took us on vacation to Austria and Germany. It was a chance for my siblings and me to see where they had grown up, but a lot of the meaning of the trip went over my head at the time.

We met my grandparents in New York, flew with them to London, and then on to Vienna. In Vienna we stayed in a ‘pension’ – a small bed and breakfast – and spent a lot of time wandering around the city streets looking at the fountains and the buildings. It was impossible for me to understand what that meant to my grandmother. Before our trip she had returned to Austria once since fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938.

In 1938, my grandmother lived with her parents and two sisters in an apartment in central Vienna. In March of that year Germany annexed Austria and nearly overnight all of the Austrian laws were replaced with German laws. One month later, in April 1938, my great-grandfather was dragged from their apartment in the middle of the night, taken to the police station, and beaten unconscious. When he was released in the morning they told him they could have killed him and no one would care.

They had close family friends, neighbors with kids of similar age with whom they had gone on vacations, and when I was older my grandmother recalled that her father knew they had to flee – even after the beating — when they were walking down the street and that family crossed the street to avoid talking to them.

And there we were, in 1982, walking those same streets.

Part of what is so horrifying about the Holocaust is that we all – my family, our community, all of us German citizens, French citizens, Hungarian Citizens – were going about our ordinary lives and suddenly the only thing that mattered was that we were Jews. Suddenly we were no longer professionals, citizens of a community, a city, a country. We became only Jews.

Growing up I saw my grandparents struggle with their identity. My grandfather was very proud of being German. Our relatives (including my grandfather) fought for Germany in World War I. My grandparents were immigrants, parents, New Yorkers… but maybe they were only Jews. They were professionals, suburbanites, music lovers… but maybe they were only Jews. They were activists, proud Germans, proud Austrians… but maybe they were only Jews.

The author's grandfather in his German military uniform.
The author’s grandfather in his German military uniform.

In addition to the apartment in Vienna my grandmother’s family had a country home not far outside of Vienna where they spent weekends. In 1982 we took a train out to the countryside and walked a series of ordinary streets up from the train station to that house, and I remember naively holding my grandmother’s hand as she knocked on the door. An old man opened the door and my grandmother told him that she used to live there. He seemed nervous and refused to let us in, but told her we could look around outside, which we did.

It was an everyday home with an everyday back yard nestled on a hillside street and I mostly remember the leaves on the ground. As a child it was all entirely unremarkable and I wasn’t really sure what we were doing there. I knew it was somehow special and I can remember showing a handful of fallen leaves – pine needles and deciduous leaves mixed – to my grandmother, sort of asking: is this the special part?

After the war the apartment and country house were returned to my great-grandparents but by then they had new lives in the United States and they chose to immediately sell (for nearly nothing.) The post war economy was dire and the apartment had been damaged in Allied bombing.

My grandfather’s side of the family had a similar-but-different experience. My grandfather grew up in Leipzig, a metropolitan center in the eastern part of Germany best known for being the location of the Thomaskirche (the church where J. S. Bach worked as music director for the majority of his career.) His father was a physician who practiced from a storefront surgery a few blocks from the Thomaskirche. When they fled they were allowed to leave with only the clothes on their backs and that property became owned by the Nazi state.

After the war, the Allies divided up the old German state into quadrants. West Germany acknowledged that it was a successor state to the old Germany and attempts were made to return properties owned by the state to prior owners. But East Germany, a part of the Soviet Union, did not consider itself a successor state and no property reparations were made to survivors or their heirs.

When the Berlin wall fell in 1989 and the reunification of Germany became possible Western Germany was still under Allied control and it was the Allies – including the United States – that negotiated terms of the German reunification with the Soviet Union. Those terms included: settlement of prior ownership claims in the former East Germany. Subsequently codified in (new) German law, the period negotiated for the filing of reparation claims was October 1990 to December 31, 1992, followed immediately by a complete accounting for all claims by a successor organization.

The first successor organization was incorporated in 1947, and the concept of the successor organization was to prevent formerly Jewish-owned assets becoming the property of the state simply because no heirs existed. Before the war there were more than 9 million Jews, and after just over 3 million. Many whole family trees were wiped out. The successor organization became a collective heir — a successor — for the Jewish people, using heirless assets to serve survivors.

In 1995 the successor organization, a non-profit based in New York city, secured ownership of the Leipzig property formerly owned by my great grandfather, and sold it, before my family was even aware of the opportunity to file for reparations. (My grandfather Ernst was born in 1899 and passed away in 1988.) Through the successor organization our family will receive a percentage of the 1995 value of the property.

The reality of Nazi reparations fifty years on is complicated, and what was stolen from our families goes far beyond anything that can be repaid. I recently searched the internet for the address of our old family home in Leipzig, and the family apartment in Vienna, and used the street view function to take a virtual walk around those neighborhoods. I couldn’t help but think: this is where we lived before they tried to kill us.

Three years ago a painting showed up for auction that had been owned by my maternal grandfather. Weeks before they fled Vienna, and while they were still living in it, the contents of their apartment were forcibly sold, auctioned off. One of the items sold that day was a painting of modest value that happened to have three daughters in it. One could speculate that perhaps my great-grandfather bought the painting because he had three daughters, and it reminded him of his family. Because the individual who brought the painting to auction had purchased it legally from a third party, my family was given the opportunity to purchase the painting — right of first refusal — but it was not returned to us. After the auction all proceeds from the sale went to the individual that brought the painting to auction.

Photo emailed to the author's family by the auction house.
Photo of a painting once owned by the author’s family, sold by the Nazis. The picture was emailed to the author’s family by the auction house.

I grew up with our emigration stories, and as a child imagined that somehow my family was special. As an adult I look back and realize that they were just ordinary people, ordinary Jews, who were incredibly lucky to survive.

It seems as if every other day there is another story of some great treasure stolen by the Nazis returned to its rightful owner. The reality of Nazi reparations, fifty years on, is not so simple.

What Lyle Lovett Can Teach Us About Audience Engagement

I started doing trainings for arts advocates almost a decade ago. At that time, I gave a lot of thought to what advocates need to know in order to start being advocates. I came up with two messages. First: you already know enough to be an effective advocate. And second: carry a little water for all of us.

Some novice advocates are worried they don’t know the right thing to say. I encourage advocates to start with their individual experiences and truths. Expertise only grows with practice and even the most novice advocates already know more than enough to be effective. Second, while telling their personal stories, I encourage advocates to also carry a little water for the field, to speak to the generalities of what other artists and organizations do and need.

Writing here about audience engagement and audience development, two bourgeoning fields in our industry, I’m reminded of my “first principles” for advocates. Because while the field is busy developing all kinds of exciting new best practices we’re not doing enough to carry water for the twentieth century’s standard-bearers for audience engagement and audience development: arts journalists.

Riva Lehrer's portrait of Alison Bechdel, a winning entrant in the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Competition, was included in a recent article created by the author's NEA-funded arts journalism project, Artapedia. Image used by permission of The National Portrait Gallery.
Riva Lehrer’s portrait of Alison Bechdel, a winning entrant in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Competition, was included in a recent article created by the author’s NEA-funded arts journalism project, Artapedia. Image used by permission of The National Portrait Gallery.

For generations, the arts community has benefited from the expertise of arts journalists in bridging the gap between professional practice and community participation. (Of course the whole story isn’t all that simple: journalism has also been a tool for exclusion.)

The digital transformation affecting the arts industry is equally impacting the field of journalism. We in the arts are not doing enough to support new business models for arts journalism that also support the arts. One reason we’re not is that we like the increased control we now have over our messaging.

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