ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: COUNTER-CAPITAL: BLACK POWER, THE NEW LEFT, AND THE STRUGGLE TO REMAKE WASHINGTON, D.C. FROM BELOW, 1964-1994 Timothy Daniel Kumfer, Doctor of Philosophy, 2023 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Christina Hanhardt, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Maryland College Park “Counter-Capital: Black Power, the New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994” traces how grassroots organizers in the nation’s capital fought for greater control over the city and its future between the War on Poverty and rise of neoliberal austerity, helping to shape its recent past and present. Comprising a set of linked case studies, it explores how a generation of activists forged in the crucibles of the Black freedom struggle and resistance to the Vietnam war responded locally to redevelopment schemes, planned inner-city freeways, nascent gentrification, and an exponential rise in homelessness from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The campaigns they waged brought them into confrontation with federal administrators, legislators, mayors, and even the president. They also led to moments of collaboration with the state, altering the course of urban and social policy locally and nationally and contributing to the growth of community development and direct service approaches. Going beyond the boundaries of policymaking, the radicals it follows fostered emancipatory and participatory visions for the District and urban life more generally rooted in their movement ideals, ones which remain instructive even as they encountered obstacles to their full realization. Drawing on a diverse array of archival materials including organizational newsletters, meeting minutes, event flyers, campaign brochures, and correspondence; underground press and community papers alongside mainstream news outlets; documentary film and preserved footage; and oral histories and personal interviews, “Counter-Capital” contributes to debates in the fields of African American, social movement, and urban history. The project is further animated by and participates in discussions taking place across the correlating interdisciplinary fields of African American studies, American studies, and urban studies, bringing aspects of these fields that don’t always speak to one another into closer conversation. Laboring at these intersections, it shows how sustained attention to space—and specific places—can reframe the historiography of Black Power and the New Left and how centering activists and their campaigns expands the literature on Washington while troubling conventions in the composite portrait of late 20th C. US cities. COUNTER-CAPITAL: BLACK POWER, THE NEW LEFT, AND THE STRUGGLE TO REMAKE WASHINGTON, D.C. FROM BELOW, 1964-1994 by Timothy Daniel Kumfer Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2023 Advisory Committee: Professor Christina Hanhardt, Chair Professor Nancy Mirabal Professor David Freund Professor Amanda Huron Professor Samir Meghelli © Copyright by Timothy Daniel Kumfer 2023 ii Acknowledgements I have been privileged to work with a ‘dream team’ dissertation committee who represent a diversity of expertise and each demonstrate how scholarship can contribute to social change. My advisor Dr. Christina Hanhardt has served as an intellectual lodestar, a source of encouragement, and a steady guide to the twists and turns of the professionalization process. Her admonitions to think critically, write clearly, and remember the stakes at play have strengthened both this project and me as a researcher. Her archivally driven and theoretically rich scholarship—which takes seriously how social movements reshape the lives of cities and wrestles forthrightly with their contradictions alongside analyzing their contributions—is a model I will always aspire towards. Dr. Nancy Mirabal’s research on the racialization of space, from the different ways that Cuban exiles envisioned the island’s future to how contemporary urban displacement participates in a longer history of colonial dispossession, has deeply informed my own. It was in her seminar on gentrification and displacement and our impromptu 3rd floor Tawes office conversations that this project first began to form. Dr. David Freund’s seminars and scholarship on the role of federal policy within the creation of metropolitan inequality and evolution of racial ideology enabled me to think more deeply about the constitutive capacities of state power. His advice also helped me to anchor my work in relation to the urban history subfield. My two outside readers, Dr. Amanda Huron and Dr. Samir Meghelli, each bring a wealth of knowledge related to the history of Washington, DC, and the multiple movements that have sought to build a more just city. Conversations with each of them significantly shaped the project in its early stages. Dr. Huron’s intertwined historical research on DC’s limited equity cooperatives, theorization of the urban commons, and local activism related to affordable housing embody praxis at its best. Dr. Meghelli’s research on the politics of Black cultural production and curatorial work on the iii everyday lives and struggles of District residents offer a powerful example of public scholarship. Each of my committee members has gone above and beyond to support me throughout this process, writing letters of recommendation, providing feedback on fellowship applications, and being available for coffee chats and Zoom calls when I needed help thinking something through. Throughout my time in the program, I have also had the opportunity to study with and learn from Dr. Julie Greene, Dr. Perla Guerrero, Dr. Suleiman Osman, Dr. Jan Padios, Dr. Mary Sies, and Dr. Janelle Wong. Cohort members Yvonne Bramble, Anne Hoffman, Kristy Li Puma, Mark Lockwood, and Brian Watkins have been a source of intellectual companionship and comradery over the past six years. Teachers at previous institutions who indelibly marked my intellectual trajectory and informed my desire to pursue an academic career include Dr. J. Cameron Karter, Dr. James W. Lewis, Dr. Merle Strege, Dr. Robyn Wiegman, and Dr. Norman Wirzba. Dr. Alison Kibler of Franklin and Marshall College has provided both vital feedback on my teaching and letters of recommendation. Counsel from Dr. Tamika Nunley, my DC History Center fellowship mentor, has strengthened both my cover letters and sense of the academic landscape. Financial support from the DC History Center and Graduate School enabled me to focus my energies on completing the project. I also want to express my thanks to all those whose labor makes academic research possible, including those who clean the facilities and prepare meals. Many others contributed to the project and made its chapters possible. Interviewees Moussa Foster, Judith Howell, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Marie Nahikian gave generously of both their time and their stories—a gift that I don’t take for granted and that comes with responsibilities. Interviews conducted by Dr. Samir Meghelli for the Anacostia Community Museum’s A Right to iv the City exhibition and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Lessons of the Sixties project committee also served as vital primary sources. Archivists at the following institutions provided access to materials, including scanning documents during pandemic-related closures and developing safety protocols that enabled a return to in-person research: The DC History Center’s Kiplinger Research Library, The District of Columba Archives, The People’s Archive at the DC Public Library, George Washington University’s Special Collections Research Center, Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center, the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. An early preview Dr. G. Derek Musgrove provided of his Black Power in Washington, D.C. 1961-1998 story map spurred my interest in the Black Land Movement, the subject of the first chapter. The commitments of the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles team and Washington Area Spark contributors to ensure past histories of struggle in the city are not forgotten are also important to recognize. The questions I grapple with in the project emerged largely from my experiences with ONE DC. Working alongside and learning from its members in campaigns resisting displacement and asserting a right to housing profoundly expanded my political horizon and spurred me to learn more about the history of movements for self-determination and equitable development through formal study. Among the multiple members of the organization who have shaped how I see the world and seek to act in it I especially want to thank Claire Cook, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ka Flewellen, Kelly Iradukunda, Dominic Moulden, Rosemary Ndubuizu, and Patricia Penny. The project has also been shaped by my years with The Church of the Saviour and Sojourners, two faith communities whose histories are deeply intertwined with Adams Morgan and Columba v Heights, respectively. Maria Barker, Rose Marie Berger, Joseph Deck III, Yolande Ford, David Hilfiker, and Kayla McClurg each served as formative mentors and friends, among many others. The pandemic reinforced the sustaining power of friendship. I want to thank the crew: Brad Clark, Breana Clark, Elizabeth Buchanan, Jessa Llewellyn, Patrick Llewellyn, Monica Rogers, and Adam Weaver. Our time together has been a source of joy, laughter, and support through transitions, including the commitment to still see one another as we have scattered across the map. Eddy Ameen, Brennan Baker, Julian Forth, Beverly Pratt, and Jamie Reich are among some of my oldest friends in DC, and our many conversations about social change and how our lives might contribute to its advancement are reflected in the pages that follow. Nathan Myers, Matt Smith, and Mac Sidey have been close friends since our days as undergraduates. I am grateful to have the support of family. My parents, Timothy E. and Cynthia Kumfer, always encouraged me to keep learning and modeled lives of service and commitment. My sister Jyllian is a source of strength, both for her two daughters and for the rest of us, and my brother Andrew ensures we continue to ask the big questions. Most of all, I am grateful for the accompaniment of my partner Elizabeth Clift. Throughout this process she has both helped me to believe in myself and my capabilities and reminded me that in the end what matters is the care we show for others. I am thankful for the life we have built together, including with our rambunctious pup Leia. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Table of Contents vi List of Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “A Nation Must Begin Somewhere”: The Black Land Movement and the 39 Struggle for Self-Determination in the Era of Urban Renewal Chapter 2: “The Power to Control Our Lives and Our City”: The D.C. Statehood Party 75 and the Quest for Social Democratic Self-Government in ‘The Last Colony’ Chapter 3: “People Should Participate in Every Decision Affecting Their Lives”: The 129 Adams Morgan Organization and the Fight for Neighborhood Control over Redevelopment Chapter 4: “We Cannot Live with the Administration Saying it has No Responsibility”: 192 The Community for Creative Non-Violence and the Battle for Shelter Against Austerity Epilogue 254 Bibliography 261 vii List of Abbreviations ACT Associated Community Teams AMO Adams Morgan Organization ANC Advisory Neighborhood Councils / Commissions BLM Black Land Movement CAA Community Action Agency CEHC Capitol East Housing Coalition CIA Central Intelligence Agency CCNV Community for Creative Non-Violence CDC Community Development Corporation CHCOP Columbia Heights Community Ownership Project CORE Congress on Racial Equality CRUST Community Rehabilitation Under Security and Trust CURAC Community Urban Renewal Action Council CWHC City Wide Housing Coalition DCPIRG Public Interest Research Group, DC Chapter DCSP D.C. Statehood Party DHCD DC Department of Housing and Community Development DOD Department of Defense DOJ Department of Justice ECCO East Central Citizen’s Organization ECTC Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency viii FEW Federally Employed Women FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation FHLBB Federal Home Loan Bank Board GAO Government Accountability Office GSA General Services Administration GWU George Washington University HUD Department of Housing and Urban Development IPS Institute for Policy Studies MICCO Model Inner City Community Organization MWPHA Metropolitan Washington Planning and Housing Association NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NCPC National Capital Planning Commission NDC Neighborhood Development Center NWRO National Welfare Rights Organization OEO Office of Economic Opportunity ONE DC Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC RAP Regional Addiction Prevention RLA Redevelopment Land Agency SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SPUR Shaw People’s Urban Renewal UPO United Planning Organization USAID U.S. Agency for International Development ix TCP The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness WRDC Washington Residential Development Coalition YPNA Young Pioneers of New Africa 1 Introduction On July 10, 2010, over one hundred people streamed into the vacant lot at the corner of 7th and R Streets NW, bypassing the fences and no trespassing signs. Located in Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood, the historic heart of Black cultural life in the city, the plot of public land known as Parcel 42 had sat empty following the shuttering and demolition of the community health center. The city’s promise to develop the site as deeply affordable housing had fallen through, with the Fenty administration citing shifting market conditions following the 2008 financial crisis. Refusing to accept this reversal, area residents and activists decided to take matters into their own hands, liberating the land and reclaiming it as a space for collective use. Starting with a block party, they went on to stake their tents, establishing an occupation that would carry on for two sweltering months. Over the coming weeks, the site served as host to free community meals, film screenings, collective healing sessions, cooperative economics teach-ins, and gardening workshops in addition to providing space for a growing number of unhoused residents.1 Convened initially by ONE DC (Organizing Neighborhood Equity), a community organizing group dedicated to centering the leadership of DC’s low-income Black residents, the tent city at Parcel 42 not only dramatized the city’s racialized displacement crisis, its epicenter in Shaw, and the social cost of policies that prioritized private developers. It also acted as a symbol, however inchoate, of the world that residents wanted to build—one in which housing is a human right, food is freely available to all, and opportunities for education and wellness are more fairly distributed. Linking the decommodification of space to the demand for Black self-determination, a flag hoisted in the middle of the occupation sounded the collective call for “land and liberty.”2 1 Jesse Zarley, A Battle for Affordable Housing in DC,” Socialist Worker, July 26, 2010, https://socialistworker.org/2010/07/26/affordable-housing-in-dc. 2 ONE DC, “Press Release for July 10 Site Occupation,” Tent City DC, July 12, 2010, https://tentcitydc.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/press-release-for-june-10th-site-occupation/. 2 The seizure of Parcel 42 and the aims that animated it drew on a deeper well of struggle than some of its observers realized. Forty years earlier, Shaw residents and organizers put forward a similar bottoms-up vision for the neighborhood’s regeneration—one that contrasted with the federally backed urban renewal plans for the area, which they feared would ultimately underwrite their displacement. The power to prevent such an outcome, they held, could “only come to Black people if they control the land.” Coming together as the Black Land Movement, the group devised a set of detailed proposals for fostering Black autonomy that revolved around the creation of cooperatives, collectively owned and managed institutions through which Shaw residents’ needs for housing, employment, education, healthcare, recreation, and transit would be met. Taking the first steps towards realizing these wider aspirations, they formed a food buying cooperative, trained youth in carpentry and design alongside teaching them African and African diaspora history, and drew up a comprehensive plan for the area, honing it block by block in resident-centered design charettes. For group members, forging a self-reliant Black community one and a half miles northeast of the White House offered more than a path out from the crises imposed on Shaw by hostile and exploitive outside forces. Claiming the land directly under their feet, they hoped, could be the first step towards an alternative model of urban development that meets the needs of an ascendant Black nation.3 “Counter-Capital: Black Power, the New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994” chronicles the story of the Black Land Movement and other grassroots groups in the nation’s capital, tracing how they fought for greater control over the city and its future between the War on Poverty and rise of neoliberal austerity, helping to shape its recent past and present. Comprising a set of linked case studies, it explores how a generation of 3 “Why LAND?” Black Land News, May 1, 1971, Microfilm P00-22 DN99-1077, Wisconsin Historical Society Library. Former Black Land Movement member Khalid Moussa Foster served as a mentor to ONE DC organizers. 3 activists forged in the crucibles of the Black freedom struggle and resistance to the Vietnam war responded to redevelopment schemes, planned inner-city freeways, nascent gentrification, and an exponential rise in homelessness from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The campaigns they waged brought them into confrontation with federal administrators, legislators, mayors, and even the president. They also led to occasional moments of collaboration with the state, altering the course of urban and social policy not only locally but nationally. Going beyond the boundaries of policymaking, the radicals it follows fostered emancipatory and participatory visions for the District of Columbia and urban life more generally rooted in their movement ideals, ones which remain instructive even as they encountered enduring obstacles to their full realization. Born in rapid succession between 1969-1972, the organizations whose histories it details —the Black Land Movement, the D.C. Statehood Party, the Adams Morgan Organization, and the Community for Creative Non-Violence—spanned the spectrum of Washington’s grassroots left social movement landscape. While their on-the-ground actions often confounded neat and clean ideological distinctions, their political orientations corresponded with the currents of Black nationalism, democratic socialism, radical localism, and Christian anarchism, respectively. Some of their memberships were multiracial, others were intentionally Black or predominantly white. Distinct in their strategic approaches and socioeconomic bases, they nevertheless operated within a shared ethos and wrestled with many of the same questions. Resonant across their politics, and running throughout the project’s four chapters, are the concepts of autonomy and cooperation. Whether articulated as self-reliance, self-determination, self-rule, or decentralization, each shared the goal of deepening community control and elevating the power of people to shape their immediate surroundings. Each also understood cooperation as autonomy’s enabling condition of possibility, whether cast in the valences of collectivism, coalition, community action, or care. 4 The sources of these grounding assumptions were numerous, from Third World decolonization and the War on Poverty’s call for “maximum feasible participation” to movement experiments in participatory decision-making and the counterculture’s quest for personal authenticity. In seeking to expand the realm of freedom, these organizers firmly held, we must first look to ourselves.4 Prioritizing independent initiative, the activists it centers confronted the state as a site of strategic dilemma: does the path to greater self-determination pass through the state or evade it entirely? What kinds of policy reforms provide a favorable terrain for collective empowerment and what kinds act to stave them off? When expectations of imminent revolution have faded and reforms do not appear forthcoming, what do you do in the meantime? Washington’s grassroots organizers were of course not alone in grappling with these predicaments, which have long haunted the left and which the global upsurge of radicalism epitomized by 1968 made especially urgent. The District of Columbia, however, offered a particularly generative place for working them through due to its constitutive contradictions. On the one hand, the state and state power were immediately evident: not only was the federal government the economic base of the city and wider region, Washington formed a locus for federal policy experiments, receiving an outsized share of government funding and attention. On the other hand, District residents lacked even the most basic channels for democratic redress at the time, with neither the power to elect and hold accountable their own local government or have their voices heard in Congress. With the dismantling of Jim Crow voting restrictions in 1965, the inability of the District to elect its own leaders grew even more conspicuous. Over the previous decade and a half, the 4 On the slippages between self-help and self-determination and how they were constitutive of poverty governance under mid-century US liberalism, see Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). On participatory decision-making practices within social movements, see Francesca Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: Chicago, 2012). On authenticity as a driving concern of the New Left, see Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia, 1998). 5 proportion of city residents who were African American had grown from just over one third to nearly twice that figure, making the nation’s capital the first major city with a majority-Black population. This incongruity was noted by a generation of young yet battle hardened veterans of the southern freedom movement, who with the winding down of organizing drives in Alabama and Mississippi turned their sights towards Washington. Among them was Marion Barry, who moved to the city to launch a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chapter and soon instigated the Free D.C. Movement, a boycott drive to get local businesses to back the call for home rule. The creation of a presidentially appointed mayor and city council to replace the three-member board of commissioners by the Johnson Administration in 1967, while a majority of its members were Black, deferred the deeper issue of self-governance.5 The denial of democracy in the capital spurred multiple struggles for autonomy, from the Black Land Movement’s plan for a self-reliant Shaw to the formation of an elected neighborhood government by the Adams Morgan Organization. Organizers built alternative institutions such as community assemblies, economic cooperatives, and mutual aid projects to express their visions for the future. Residents found regular ways to thwart the designs of meddling Congressmen, federal administrators, and the appointed city council through creative and often controversial forms of protest. Activists did not wait, in other words, to start creating the city they wanted. Yet they also took advantage of opportunities for formal political participation as they became available, refusing to see doing so antithetical to their other strategies for pursuing change. With the passage of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in 1973, residents obtained the power to elect the mayor and city council while Congress preserved final say over the city’s budget and laws. Even as it dismissed home rule as a colonial half measure that preserved the 5 Lauren Pearlman, Democracy's Capital: Black Political Power in Washington, D.C., 1960s-1970s. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 19-56. 6 unequal treatment of Black citizens, the D.C. Statehood Party backed Julius Hobson’s run for a council seat, concluding that doing so would provide a platform for relaying both their argument for statehood and agenda for social reconstruction. With an inaugural council comprised largely of civil rights veterans, activists moved quickly to make their stamp on the city, pushing for laws that strengthened tenants’ rights, discouraged property speculation, and amplified the voices of local communities. They also pursued ballot initiatives, taking their fights for statehood and the right to shelter directly to voters and the city’s Black majority when the council was reluctant to address their demands. Alongside these local forays, DC’s activists used their proximity to the federal halls of power as an asset, working with members of Congress to hold hearings on residential displacement and homelessness and secure funding for their campaign objectives. In combining community power building and disruptive forms of dissent with the more traditional tools of legislative advocacy and electoral campaigning, organizers often made powerful inroads. The passage to home rule and the openings it created despite its limitations occurred in the same moment that federal support for cities was swiftly receding. While spared the worst effects of deindustrialization, DC shared with other urban centers the intractable problems of disinvestment, residential flight, rising social service costs, and a diminishing tax base. Federal retrenchment in the wake of the abandoned War on Poverty and a wave of deep recessions only further compounded these problems. Elected on reform agendas, Barry and other Black mayors then taking the helm across the US instead found themselves slashing city budgets and courting private business. From holding high hopes for the city’s new direction, organizers were forced to defend modest gains, and advances made in affordable housing were outpaced by rising rates of homelessness. Activists such as those affiliated with the Community for Creative Non-Violence also increasingly filled in the gaps of the faltering welfare state, channeling energies once 7 dedicated to long-range goals to the meeting of immediate needs. Already present by the mid- 1970s, these trends accelerated and consolidated under the Reagan administration, which embraced domestic austerity as an essential feature of its New Federalist vision of governance.6 Examining how organizations formed in the early 1970s fared over the long haul reveals how the spatial imaginaries of left urban social movements shifted in relation to this changing conjuncture and activists' perceptions of the opportunities it afforded. The transformations in geographic scale traced across the dissertation’s chapters—nation, city, neighborhood, shelter— corresponded with the recalibration of federal social and urban policy and wider retreat from state provision taking place in the period, shifts which circumscribed what reform-oriented elected officials could achieve locally and re-entrenched temporarily destabilized racial and economic hierarchies nationally. While not fully representative of the diversity of grassroots organizing within Washington from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, the four organizations the project follows are in this deeper sense exemplary. From utopic longings for self-determination that grated against the upper boundaries of the War on Poverty, activists a decade later found themselves struggling to secure the daily survival of their communities. As dreams of revolution receded, local problems remained, and organizers were resolved to tackle them when and where they could. While the question of scale and where social movements should best concentrate their energies had long been a subject of strategic debate, Black Power and New Left radicals weathered a largely one-sided winnowing of the terrain of struggle from above. Resisting these restrictions, they also adapted to them out of necessity, and the strategies they developed over the following years often reflected these structural constraints even as they held out hopes for more profound forms of transformation. 6 Robert Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945-2000 (Lawrence: Kansas, 2011), 200-286. 8 While reckoning head-on with the structural constraints these organizations faced—as well as the internal contradictions that inhibited their reach—the story “Counter-Capital” tells is not simply a tale of defeat. Nor is it primarily one. Tracking the many twists and turns of their campaigns, it narrates the stunning successes these organizers achieved despite often long odds. Dismissed by some as impractical dreamers and obstinate radicals, it considers how a number of the ideas these activists advanced have now become commonplace, from the demand to prioritize racial equity in urban planning and growing support for DC statehood to community benefits agreements and housing first policies. Following their experiments, it assesses how they served as important forerunners for later efforts and furnished a base from which future generations could build. In offering a genealogy of struggle within the capital, the project reveals how past battles set the stage for those of the present while relaying lessons that remain pertinent to campaigns for the right to the city both within Washington and far beyond it.7 Literature Review and Project Interventions Drawing on a diverse array of archival materials including organizational newsletters, meeting minutes, event flyers, campaign brochures, and correspondence; underground press and community papers alongside mainstream news outlets; documentary film and preserved footage; and oral histories and personal interviews, “Counter-Capital” contributes to debates in the fields of African American, social movement, and urban history. The project is further animated by and participates in discussions taking place across the correlating interdisciplinary fields of African 7 The World Charter for the Right to the City was developed from a series of dialogues held at the Social Forum of the Americas, World Urban Forum, and World Social Forum in 2004-05. See “The World Charter for the Right to the City,” UCLG Committee on Social Inclusion, Participatory Democracy and Human Rights, 2005, https://www.uclg-cisdp.org/sites/default/files/documents/files/2021-06/WorldCharterRighttoCity.pdf. For an intellectual genealogy of the concept of the right to the city, see David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), ix-26. For a digital museum exhibition that employs the right to the city framework in its examination of neighborhood-based struggles for racial equity and urban autonomy in the District of Columbia, see Samir Meghelli, curator, A Right the City, Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, 2020, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/34d99cccb2c5454da7b4f08e482c1987?item=1. 9 American studies, American studies, and urban studies, bringing aspects of these fields that don’t always speak to one another into closer conversation. Laboring at these intersections, it shows how sustained attention to space—and specific places—can reframe the historiography of Black Power and the New Left and how centering activists and their campaigns expands the literature on Washington while troubling conventions in the composite portrait of late 20th C. US cities. Contested Legacies of the Black Power Era Over the past twenty-five years, historians have undertaken a wide-ranging reappraisal of the Black Power era and the quests for political, economic, and cultural self-determination that it inspired.8 Challenging the post-civil rights declension narratives that have long held sway in the discipline, these studies have dismantled the Manichean opposition of civil rights and Black Power strategies along with the prevailing periodization that bound the latter between 1966 and 1975.9 Beginning with studies of key figures such as Amiri Baraka and Robert F. Williams and groups with national reach such as the Black Panther Party and the US Organization, the burgeoning subfield of Black Power Studies has dramatically expanded, detailing lesser-known battles for community control over housing, jobs, and education and struggles for self-definition in cities across the nation.10 Analyzing the gender politics of Black Power’s many modes, 8 Peniel Joseph’s widely cited charge to reconceptualize the movement’s origins and ends is often regarded as a watershed moment within the new Black Power historiography. See Peniel Joseph, “Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,” The Black Scholar 31, no. 3-4 (2001): 2-19. See also his overarching account of the era, Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt, 2006). 9 See Joseph’s assessment of the field’s dramatic growth nearly a decade later in Peniel Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (2009): 751-776. 10 Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Charles Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998); Scot Brown, Fighting for Us: Maulana Karenga, the Us Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton, 2005); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Penn, 2005); Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South (New York: Palgrave, 2003). 10 scholars have provided nuanced accounts of the role of women’s leadership within nationalist formations and the emergence of autonomous Black feminist organizations that challenged both their limits and those of the majority-white feminist movement.11 They have examined Black Power’s impact behind prison walls, on college campuses, and in arts venues, demonstrating how it engendered new forms of political insurgency, intellectual analysis, and cultural production. 12 Scholars have also traced its global itineraries, from its Pan-African roots to revolutionary routes in the 1960-70s, decentering accounts of Black Power anchored solely to the United States.13 The rise of Black Power Studies and its increasing prominence within the discipline has brought to the fore interpretive debates over both the overarching frameworks used to understand the larger Black freedom struggle and its evolution in the twentieth century and the legacies of the Black Power era in particular. Advocates of the “Long Civil Rights” approach and the related assertion of a combined civil rights and Black Power era assert an underlying continuity between 11 Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Ashley Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017; Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Ula Y. Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 12 Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Stefan M. Bradley, Harlem Vs. Columbia University : Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Ibram X. Kendi, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965- 1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Derrick E. White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Jonathan Fenderson, Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 13 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Seth M. Markle, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964-1974 (Michigan State University Press, 2017); Quito Swan, Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Quito Swan, Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020); Christopher M. Tinson, Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 11 campaigns for community control in the urban north, the battles to desegregate the South, and fights for fair housing and access to jobs in the 1930-40s.14 While not discounting these lineages, critics of these frameworks contend that they evacuate the conceptual distinctions between civil rights and Black Power, their often contrasting long-range objectives, and the historical ruptures that occasioned them.15 Synthetic accounts of Black Power that assess its ongoing relevance have heightened these debates, with disagreements over its relation to the rise of Black officials and the turn to Democratic Party politics typically occupying their center.16 Wading into these debates, this study sides with those that refuse the implicit maturation thesis of accounts that posit a broad arc from the call for self-determination to the growth of a Black political class to the 2008 election of Barack Obama and instead locate Black Power’s chief inheritances within the ongoing forms of grassroots struggle.17 The amalgamation of the civil rights and Black Power eras requires a smoothing of rough edges that was rejected by many Black Power adherents in their own time. In so doing, this popular interpretive schema can at times relay what were highly contested matters through a gauzy, reconciliatory haze. Chapter one’s treatment of the Black Land Movement foregrounds a moment when the meaning of community control was a subject of fierce disagreement among Black activists, describing the different ways this aim was taken up through a close examination 14 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–63. 15 Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ As Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 265–88. 16 Peniel Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (New York: Basic, 2010); Jonathan Fenderson, “Towards the gentrification of Black Power(?),” Race & Class 55, no.1 (2013): 1-22. 17 Joshua M. Myers, We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Edward Onaci, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Akinyele Umoja, “The People Must Decide: Chokwe Lumumba, New Black Power, and the Potential for Participatory Democracy in Mississippi,” The Black Scholar 48, no. 2 (2018), 7–19; Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (London: Routledge, 2015). 12 of the Shaw neighborhood. For Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) members such as Walter Fauntroy, the founder of the Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO), citizen participation in the urban renewal process offered the potential to finally extend the benefits of full citizenship to African Americans confined in the nation’s ghettoes, providing social uplift while powerfully affirming their voices. Those in Shaw drawn to the call for Black independence initially doubted MICCO’s ability to deliver on these promises; in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. King and the four-day uprising that followed, many found MICCO’s process and the presuppositions underwriting it no longer tenable. State-delegated Black administration of the redevelopment process, they contended, paled in comparison to a grounded vision of self-determination initiated directly by Shaw residents. Siding decisively with the latter, the Black Land Movement reframed community control as a prefigurative practice of Black nation building. In tracking closely these debates within a single neighborhood and how they evolved in relation to specific events, the project corroborates the need to analytically disentangle these eras and clarify the breaks that attended them, the stakes of which extend far beyond questions of historiographic interpretation. Chapter two’s discussion of the D.C. Statehood Party would seem, at first glance, to signal the opposite conclusion. Its founder Julius Hobson limned the boundaries between civil rights and Black Power. The party also regularly ran candidates for local elections. Its history, however, offers a counterpoint to narratives that convey the pragmatic turn to the Democratic Party on the part of Black activists as the logical next step for the movement and a sign of its political maturity. In working to assemble Black electoral power outside of the Democratic mainstream, the party demonstrated how activists could take part in electoral politics without making concessions to private interests or distancing themselves from bold social movement 13 demands. When elected officials embraced incremental reforms as the path to expanding the city’s political rights, the party acted as a sole voice insisting that only statehood would ensure DC control over its own affairs. The 1982 Statehood Constitutional Convention, a product of seeds the party had sown over the previous decade, put forward a deeply progressive vision for the city’s self-governance rooted in the aspirations of its working-class Black majority.18 The Black Land Movement and D.C. Statehood Party’s commitments to their principles each came at a cost, though, with the former struggling to gain ground in Shaw and the latter operating mostly at the margins of the city’s political life. The Black Land Movement’s fierce attachment to independence meant they also struggled to secure financial resources, as a result much of their constructive agenda for the neighborhood was consigned to the drawing board. The D.C. Statehood Party not only dealt with the multiple barriers to victory that confronted third parties, they also struggled to thread the needle between centering Black leadership and creating a multiracial party formation, revealing the tensions between Black Power emphases on self-determination and the hopes some maintained for forging a wider New Left coalition. Both organizations were formed initially around charismatic male leaders, an orientation which brought multiple drawbacks even as it offered a certain dynamism. Owing to their radical stances, members of each group were also subjected to state surveillance and targets of federal investigation. Wrestling with the tensions their trajectories each generated, the project considers the dilemmas that attended efforts to build grassroots Black Power in the District. 18 For studies critically assessing the Black electoral turn towards the Democratic Party in the 1970s, see Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006, 3rd edition (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); 146-181; and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015), 75-106. Conversely, scholars have shown how Black elected officials within the Democratic Party maintained ties to Black Power ideals, from calls for reparations to policies promoting African development. On the latter, see Benjamin Talton, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Philadelphia: Penn, 2019). 14 Upending Reductive New Left Mythologies While scholars have painstakingly demolished caricatures of the Black Power era, reductive and misleading portraits remain in circulation when considering the broader political and cultural radicalism to which it was linked: the New Left. Such accounts chart its hopeful rise in the early 1960s with the heroic Southern freedom struggle as its vanguard; its height in mass protests against the war in Vietnam and defection from the dominant social order more broadly, seeming to herald revolutionary change; and its largely self-driven implosion shortly thereafter. In these narratives, the 1970s appears as a forlorn coda: a period of declining political activity punctuated by violent excess, with what was left of ‘the movement’ retreating into the cul-de- sacs of identity or joining doctrinaire Marxist sects increasingly divorced from the real world. Ironically, among the main sources of these myths have been New Left veterans themselves.19 This distorted picture relies on a truncated view of both who comprised the New Left and what constitutes left politics more generally, with Students for a Democratic Society and a small number of white male activists and intellectuals standing in for a diverse, fractious, overlapping series of movements.20 Challenging this meta-narrative and its repeat circulation, historians and interdisciplinary scholars have traced the multiple upsurges that took place across the terrains of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, occupation, and religion, redrawing the boundaries of who formed part of the New Left while charting how they reshaped the cultures of radicalism within and beyond the United States.21 They have also pushed back its chronology, locating the New 19 Movement memoirs and scholarly analyses produced by former participants include Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987); Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988); and James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). This section draws on Van Gosse’s assessment of New Left historiography in Van Gosse, “A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, eds. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenweig (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 277-302. 20 Wini Breines, “Whose New Left?” Journal of American History, 75, no. 2 (1988): 528–45. 21 For representative edited collections and texts indicative of much larger bodies of literature see: Dan Berger, ed. Hidden Histories of the 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Dan 15 Left’s roots in the “Old” left, early civil rights alliances, and the pacifist movement.22 Finally, they have offered balanced assessments of its lasting impact across civil society, the academy, electoral politics, and popular culture, demonstrating how many of its assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality have become commonplace even as they remain sites of contention.23 While a complete overview of this literature is outside the scope of this section, I want to highlight two areas of recent intervention that demonstrate how closer attention to the activism of particular communities in the 1970s topples depictions of the decade as dominated by political apathy and overturns the assumption that explorations of identity led activists away from broad- based organizing. First is the growing body of scholarship that considers the movements for self- determination that the call for Black Power helped to inspire among other groups, including Arab American, Asian American, Latinx, and Native revolutionary nationalist organizations. From local organizing around housing, schools, and hospitals to transnational campaigns focused on securing treaty rights or challenging imperialist policies, such groups remained active often well into the decade. In the process, they helped create pan-ethnic formations across distinct national Berger and Emily K. Hobson, eds. Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020); Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (London: Verso, 2020); Martin Duberman, Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBT Uprising that Changed America (New York: Dutton, 1993); Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (London: Verso, 2002); Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 22 Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communists and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001; Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso, 1993); Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity. 23Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); L.A. Kauffman, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017). 16 origins, contested their exclusion from academic curricula and popular culture, built lasting political coalitions, and formed a front line of resistance to the retreat from civil rights gains.24 The second body of scholarship is the literature that explores the entangled struggles for feminist and queer liberation in the 1970s and how activists sought freedom from both state and interpersonal violence. Women and gay, lesbian, and queer organizers drew connections between the unevenly disbursed vulnerabilities they confronted daily and larger systems that produce harm, challenging the assumption that personal safety could be achieved through the expansion of policing and prisons. They also situated sexual autonomy as inherently linked to the struggles against war and racism, forging multiracial and internationalist alliances and further developing intersectional forms of political and cultural analysis. Challenging single issue politics and its circumscriptions, many feminist and queer activists expressed an expansive politics in the 1970s that built out from their examinations of personal experience and embodied social location.25 Shifting perspective to the local level, this study further contributes to the project of reevaluating the New Left and its multiple trajectories in the 1970s. Changing scales, it argues, disrupts the interpretive tropes of fragmentation and dissolution by mid-decade and how they 24 Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019); Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Karen Ishizuka, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (London: Verso, 2018); Diana Johnson, Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970-1999 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023); Jimmy Patino, Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Pamela E. Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 25 Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Emily K. Hobson, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee Reiver Collective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017); Emily L. Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 17 preclude a more accurate accounting of grassroots organizing and its evolution in the period. 26 Instead, in looking locally and paying attention to the politics of place one finds ongoing efforts to form viable coalitions across race, gender, class, sexuality, and language; attempts to pilot municipal and neighborhood alternatives in the absence of federal reforms; and enduring commitments to the pursuit of social transformation that contradict portrayals of ‘the me decade.’ In different ways and with varying degrees of effectiveness, the D.C. Statehood Party and the Adams Morgan Organization (the subject of chapter three) each staked their futures on their ability to create alliances across longstanding lines of division. For the D.C. Statehood Party, the path from protest to electoral power was premised on bringing together dedicated participants of local Black liberation, antiwar, feminist, and gay and lesbian movements, including disaffected members of the federal workforce. Doing so inevitably precipitated conflict, with party members calling for it to confront the sexism within its own ranks and wrangling over what it meant to be both multiracial and intentionally Black-led. The presence of these conflicts and the persistence of the party through them, though, offers its own counter-testimony. Similarly, the Adams Morgan Organization’s goal of forming a community assembly equally representative of the neighborhood’s Black, Latinx, and white residents was an arduous process often marked by contention and contradiction, one that required compromise and the overcoming of suspicion. Efforts to work through conflicts rooted in race, class, and linguistic difference in its formative stage, however, endowed the group and its campaigns with an authority most community organizations lacked while ensuring it a staying power across the decade. Intellectually driven 26 On how thinking about scale and across scales reframes the political history of the 1970s more broadly, Suleiman Osman, “Glocal America: The Politics of Scale in the 1970s,” in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, eds. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 241-260. 18 histories that assert the New Left’s vanguard role in initiating an “age of fracture,” the project contends, obscure these on-the-ground attempts to construct culturally capacious left coalitions.27 Centering the New Left’s local offshoots demonstrates the significant gaps and analytical stumbling blocks that remain in social movement historiography, ones which in their silences and presuppositions perpetuate the myth of its swift dissolution. Little has been written about the bumper crop of state and local third parties formed by Black liberation, peace, and environmental activists in the 1970s as an alternative to the two-party politics of “lesser evilism” or the surprising inroads their candidates made at times. Neither have the creative responses put forward for the many problems faced by the era’s municipalities by the first generation of New Left activists to enter state and local office, many affiliated with the Conference on Alternative State & Local Public Policies, received recent scholarly attention. Part of these developments, uplifting the history of the D. C. Statehood Party confirms that much more work needs to be done to understand the multiple ways that activists responded to political setbacks on the national level, including by seeking to wield state power and craft local policy.28 The neighborhood movement of the 1970s, while representing a wide range of political and cultural impulses, formed one of the key trajectories taken up by New Left activists. These links have not always been highlighted, with contemporaneous social-scientific literature on the movement portraying neighborhood organizers primarily as the heirs of Alinsky, an interpretive lens that ignored both the more immediate source of politicization for many along with the wider 27 For versions of the splintering 1970s meta-narrative that cast New Left radicalism as a key source of the New Deal Order’s downfall and resurgence of political conservatism, see Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011); Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: Penn, 2008); and Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard, 2011). 28For an example of promising work along these lines, see: Keith Riley, “Cities of Solidarity: Left-Liberal Coalition and the Rise and Fall of Local-Level Foreign Policy,” diss., (Temple University, 2022). For an earlier study of New Left municipalism, see W. J. Conroy, Challenging the Boundaries of Reform: Socialism in Burlington (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). 19 dreams they attached to their local campaigns.29 More recently, historians have begun to explore what was variously cast as the ‘neighborhood revolt,’ ‘backyard revolution,’ or ‘new citizen’s movement’ and its relationship to the New Left. These studies have analyzed the intellectual origins of the neighborhood movement and its institutional ties to the Institute for Policy Studies and gauged how it reflected an increasingly popular scale of politics that was “militantly local” and “neither exclusively Left nor Right” in its objectives. 30 Lending further complexity to this emergent scholarly picture, this study considers how the campaigns that DC’s localists undertook required them to work across multiple scales simultaneously and expressed commitments to broadly transformative and distinctly left-aligned goals well into the decade. The origins and organizing campaigns of the Adams Morgan Organization—which not only took part in the neighborhood movement but helped to coalesce it nationally—display the clear links between Black Power, a broader New Left that included white and Latinx activists, and the turn to local concerns many undertook in these years. Beginning with the blocks they walked each day, its members worked to address the problems that plagued cities in the period, from disinvestment and its deleterious environmental effects to the bursts of frenzied speculation it brought on. The solutions they proposed for these problems—such as taxing away the profits of ‘reverse blockbusting’ property developers almost entirely—often carried radical and wide-ranging implications. Further, in an era when trust in public institutions was abysmally low, the Adams Morgan Organization worked to revitalize and reimagine 29 Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Jeffrey R. Henig, Neighborhood Mobilization: Redevelopment and Response (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982); Michael R. Williams, Neighborhood Organizations: Seeds of a New Urban Life (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985). 30 Benjamin Looker, “Visions of Autonomy: The New Left and the Neighborhood Government Movement of the 1970s,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 3 (2012): 578-581; Suleiman Osman, “The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, eds. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge: Harvard, 2008), 106-127; Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). 20 democratic practice, forming structures for direct and participatory decision-making. Far from provincial, New Left localism sought to meet some of the era’s largest challenges. Reaching their peak in 1976-78, AMO’s campaigns to curb land speculation and prevent displacement demand a widening of New Left historiography’s aperture. So too do those of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, a countercultural Christian commune that formed during the war in Vietnam yet commanded headlines a decade later as a detractor of Reagan’s austerity regime. Remembered for their fierce advocacy and dedicated accompaniment of the homeless, the group consistently drew out the links between the growing number of people on the streets and the redirection of the social wage towards war and preparation for its instigation. In so doing, they revealed the continued purchase of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s analysis in “Beyond Vietnam” for the 1980s and the ongoing ways that people were striving, if stumbling, to realize his beloved community vision amidst rising revanchist tides.31 While the resurgence of political conservatism in the United States has captured the attention of a generation of historians, grassroots opposition to the Reagan agenda and its partial lineage in the New Left is a story just starting to be told.32 Urban Histories of the Neoliberal Policy Turn Historians have begun to trace how the 1970-80s formed a pivotal moment in the life of cities, as worsening political and economic circumstances and the withdrawal of federal support led to growing private sector involvement in urban governance.33 This scholarship joins an interdisciplinary urban studies literature on the rise of neoliberalism that is already rather extensive: critical geographers have charted how reinvestment in the built urban environment 31 Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break the Silence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (New York: Harper, 1986), 231-244. 32 Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013); Kauffman, Direct Action. 33Andrew J. Diamond and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar America (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Macmillan, 2017). 21 provided a ‘spatial fix’ for capital amid a global slump, sociologists have plotted how the consolidation of the financial sector’s power spawned an urban service economy whose benefits were sharply uneven in their distribution, and political scientists have considered the multiple paths through which urban policy was reshaped according to a market-driven entrepreneurialism, among other interventions.34 Complicating this wider portrait of the neoliberal turn, historians have questioned what an analytical emphasis on its novelty conceals, such as the ways in which racialized populations have always been subject to predatory market governance or how private sector outsourcing was already a key component of the archetypically ‘liberal’ War on Poverty.35 They have also sought to demonstrate how the recreation of the city in the late twentieth century was not simply the product of decisions made by financial and policy elites or the ascendance of conservative ideology, but rather a multifaceted process that involved many different actors and motivations. The neoliberal urban present, they contend, was also built from the ground up. Facing issues such as a dearth of housing, struggling schools, and abandoned blocks and parks, residents of 1970s cities experimented, finding creative ways to address these obstacles that often relied on the private sector, whether business, foundations, or the energy of dedicated volunteers. Following these “fixers,” to borrow Julia Rabig’s term, a range of recent studies have assessed their mixed legacy, at once ensuring access to essential resources in an era of declining state investment and helping facilitate the shift to private-public partnerships now central to neoliberal urban governance. 36 The range of initiatives they undertook was broad, from self-help 34 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”,” Antipode 34, no.3 (2002): 349-379. For a primer on the wider urban studies literature on neoliberalism, see Jason R. Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. 35 N. D. B. Connolly, “The Strange Career of American Liberalism,” in Shaped by the State, 62-95; Brent Cebul, Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century (Philadelphia: Penn, 2013). 36 Claire Dunning, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Brian D. Goldstein, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the 22 and homesteader housing projects to the nonprofit delivery of services such as tutoring and job training to all-volunteer park cleanups and street clinics. An embrace of these efforts at the local and national level helped to underwrite their institutionalization, with city funding and federal block grants spurring the growth of direct service organizations and community development corporations. As the nonprofit sector matured in its professional and technical capacity it also took on a greater share of municipal service provision, directing neighborhood redevelopment initiatives, piloting charter schools, and erecting citywide community health systems. Making an impact where they could, organizations often founded earlier on dreams of eradicating racialized urban inequality were instead conscripted into, or volunteered for, its everyday management. Activists with roots in the radical ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s took part in these transformations in complex ways. Detailing the processes of negotiation and pushback they engaged in, the project also considers how certain New Left tendencies were conducive to, or at the very least coincided with, the urban neoliberal shift. Chief among these were how emphases on autonomy converged at times with anti-statism and commitments to self-reliance paralleled the demands of austerity measures. The Adams Morgan Organization and its ‘Do It Yourself’ ethos, sweeping streets and tilling gardens, were held up as a model for citizen cooperation by the National Commission on Neighborhoods, an initiative that formed a key plank of the Carter administration’s decentralized and devolved vision for urban policy. In this sense, the group’s efforts form part of the wider seedbed of urban voluntarism in which neoliberal privatization blossomed.37 Its negotiations with Perpetual Bank, securing access to capital for affordable Struggle Over Harlem (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017); Benjamin Holtzman, The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021); Suleiman Osman, ““We’re Doing it Ourselves”: The Unexpected Origins of New York City’s Public–Private Parks during the 1970s Fiscal Crisis,” Journal of Planning History 16, no. 2 (2017): 162-174; Julia Rabig, The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 37 Tracy Neumann, “Privatization, Devolution, and Jimmy Carter’s National Urban Policy,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 2 (2014): 283-300; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Carter’s Urban Policy Crisis,” in The Carter Presidency: 23 housing redevelopment, helped create the template for community reinvestment in the years that followed. Preserving a foothold for lower-income residents in rapidly changing neighborhoods, such strategies at the same time often contributed to their gentrification.38 Similarly, the Community for Creative Non-Violence’s decentralized provision of direct services for society’s most marginalized was undertaken in a spirit of resistance to the Reagan austerity regime. Finding ways to shelter the homeless and feed hungry people on a threadbare budget, though, was from another angle fully consistent with the rolling back of the welfare state. With the passage of the McKinney Act, a bill authorizing federal funding streams for emergency shelter programs that the group helped push through, these dilemmas weren’t so much addressed as institutionalized.39 Further, the predominantly white activist group’s criticisms of the Barry administration and its handling of the homelessness crisis, while raising legitimate concerns about shelter conditions and improper spending, contributed to a wider media atmosphere that questioned both the power of government to solve problems and the capacity of Black municipal leadership. The expansion of the nonprofit sector ‘shadow state’ its volunteer efforts exemplified often affected a reassertion of white control over social services and their distribution, limiting the agency and imperiling the jobs Black women had only recently gained in the public sector. 40 Not all of these contradictions were lost on the city’s activists in their own time, and the project accompanies them as they confront the limits of a politics centered on self-assertion and Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era, eds. Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 137-157. 38 Rebecca K. Marchiel, After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (Chicago: Chicago, 2020); James DeFillipis, “Community Control and Development: The Long View,” in The Community Development Reader, eds. James DeFillipis and Susan Saegert (London: Routledge, 2012), 30-37. 39 Craig Willse, The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2015). 40 Jane Berger, “‘There Is Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs:’ Privatization and the Urban Crisis in Baltimore,” International Labor and Working-Class History 71 (Spring 2007): 29-49; Claire Dunning, “New Careers for the Poor: Human Service and the Post-Industrial City,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 4 (2018): 669-690. 24 consider how state power might be reorganized in service to collective empowerment. After working to build independent neighborhood power as an organizer with the Adams Morgan Organization, Marie Nahikian took a position with the District government where she helped to develop its tenant purchase program, an initiative which facilitated the conversion of thousands of rental units to cooperative ownership. Aware their efforts to shelter the homelessness were largely a palliative, the Community for Creative Non-Violence led the formation of the Housing Now! coalition, demanding a restoration of affordable housing funding slashed by the Reagan administration. Each organization also led campaigns seeking to prevent displacement and homelessness by changing policies at the municipal level. In other words, while certain of their actions contributed to the refashioning of urban and social policy along increasingly privatized lines, organizers with New Left origins also decried the restrictions of market-based solutions and championed robust state investment as a precondition for resolving the crises faced by cities. The transition to urban neoliberalism, the study contends, was neither smooth nor unbroken, with local conditions reflecting sustained impasse more often than complete triumph. Organizing for Racial and Urban Justice in the Nation’s Capital A resurgence of scholarship on Washington, DC over the past two decades has begun to counteract the city’s under-representation in the existing urban history literature, with both its unique status as a federal city and lack of an industrial base previously leading scholars to bypass it as a site of research. Shifting the focus beyond the federal enclave, these studies have detailed how the District’s Black residents fought to secure racial justice, housing rights, and democratic representation. In the process, scholars have demonstrated how these local battles both reflected and shaped wider national debates over the fates of cities and boundaries of US citizenship. 25 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove’s 2017 Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital has quickly become the authoritative one-volume text on Washington’s history. A sweeping 400-year survey that begins with English colonists’ violent efforts to wrest control of the territory from the Nacostines, it narrates the planning and growth of the federal city, its role as an abolitionist battleground, and the dismantling of the political and civil rights briefly implemented under Reconstruction. Paying sustained attention to the era of desegregation, white suburban flight, and civil rights activism, it charts the midcentury rise of the city’s Black statistical majority and efforts to establish home rule and further local control. Asch and Musgrove also situate contemporary displacement processes reshaping the city within a wider history, showing how the private revitalization of Georgetown, federally-backed clearance of Southwest DC, and gentrification of Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle prefigured the developments of past two decades. Race, they argue, has been the most salient factor shaping inequality across the city’s long growth and development—including up to the present with the ongoing denial of political self-determination.41 Chocolate City’s extensive history of the District builds on the foundation of numerous monographs, including works examining Reconstruction Era Washington and the struggles of the formerly enslaved to secure meaningful citizenship. These studies chart the significant changes that were implemented in the wake of the Civil War, from Black male enfranchisement to the banning discrimination in office holding and jury service, and how African Americans laid claim to them while pushing for further social and economic reforms. Such measures, however, were rolled back within little more than a decade as part of the federal retreat from Reconstruction. 41 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 26 Placing the District under the control of unelected commissioners in 1874, Congress ended local sovereignty while signaling its acquiescence to segregation nationwide.42 More recently, a wave of monographs have analyzed African American activism in Jim Crow era Washington, demonstrating segregation’s deep entrenchment in the city and how the militant challenges residents offered to it laid the foundation for the modern civil rights movement.43 The central role of Black women’s leadership in these and other campaigns, from social reform and self-help efforts in the 1920-30s to battles to end police brutality and secure employment rights during the 1940-50s, has been the subject of multiple studies.44 Scholars have also traced the shifting circumstances of Black workers in the federal service from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, considering both how the conditions they faced indexed national racial politics and how their efforts to achieve equal treatment in the workplace transformed the city more broadly.45 Everyday life in the city for African Americans in this period, both for those who formed its small but influential Black elite and the recent migrants from the South who comprised the core of its laboring classes, has further been recounted.46 42 Robert Harrison, Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction: Race and Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). On Black women’s efforts to secure freedom in the Antebellum period, see Tamika Y. Nunley, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). 43 Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 44 Treva B. Lindsey, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy, Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Alison M. Parker, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 45 Eric Steven Yellin, Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Frederick Gooding, Jr., American Dream Deferred: Black Federal Workers in Washington, D.C 1941-1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). 46 Paula C. Austin, Coming of Age in New Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Every Life (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Valerie Melissa Babb, Carroll R Gibbs, and Kathleen M Lesko, Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of the "Town of George" in 1751 to the Present Day (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1991); James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian, 1994); Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s 27 Chocolate City and several unpublished dissertations offer the strongest treatments available on civil rights activism in Washington and the rise of the Black majority following segregation’s collapse and the corresponding white flight to the suburbs.47 These studies—and Lauren Pearlman’s Democracy’s Capital: Black Political Power in Washington, D.C. 19602- 1970s especially—narrate how emboldened organizing in the city led often by veterans of the Southern freedom struggle created a groundswell for home rule and formed an infrastructure for Black electoral power upon its arrival.48 Pearlman’s work and others, however, also consider how the Nixon administration’s turn towards law and order politics curtailed their possibilities, crowding out hopes for the city’s more equitable rebuilding in the wake of the 1968 riots.49 Histories of Black Power organizing in the city have begun to be explored over the past decade as part of the era’s wider reappraisal. Digital humanities projects such as Musgrove’s Black Power in Washington, D.C. 1961-1998 story map and the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles each offer indispensable overviews of the period, providing brief descriptions of key organizations and events and oral history interviews and written remembrances from activists, respectively.50 More extensive assessments have been written on initiatives undertaken by SNCC veterans that relocated to the city, such as their roles founding the Center for Black Capital, 1880-1920 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999); Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murphy and the Store of a Forgotten Era (New York: Amistad, 2017). 47 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 285-389; Gregory M. Borchardt, “Making D.C. Democracy’s Capital: Local Activism, the ‘Federal State’, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.,” diss., (George Washington University, 2013); Selah Johnson, ““Free D.C.:” The Struggle for Civil, Political, and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., 1965-1979,” diss., (University of California, Los Angeles, 2015). 48 Pearlman, Democracy's Capital. 49 Kyla Sommers, “I Believe in the City: The Black Freedom Struggle and the 1968 Civil Disturbances in Washington, D.C.,” diss., (George Washington University, 2019). 50 George Derek Musgrove, Black Power in Washington, D.C. 1961-1998, 2021, https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/5e17e7d1c4a8406b9eaf26a4eae77103/; The SNCC Legacy Project, Black Power Chronicles, 2020, https://blackpowerchronicles.org/. 28 Education and Drum and Spear Bookstore and coordinating the Sixth Pan-African Congress.51 The brief and embattled life of the Black Panther Party’s DC chapter has also been chronicled.52 Other studies have assessed how the lineage of Black Power organizing informed the creation of Pan-Africanist educational institutions or student organizing at Howard University.53 Given the incredible upsurge of Black nationalist political and cultural projects across the District in these years, many historiographic gaps persist. The relationships between anti-poverty, civil rights, and Black Power activism and the emergence of the radical feminist movement are treated in Anne Valk’s study Radical Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. Often vexed, the histories of these distinct organizing traditions were also deeply entangled, as Valk demonstrates.54 Other studies have analyzed the intimate connections and matters of contention between DC’s Black, LGBTQ, and Black LGBTQ communities and how the city formed an epicenter for Black gay cultural expression from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. 55 The rise of the region’s largest immigrant community in these same years—and the relationships of Salvadorans to the city’s pre-existing multinational Latinx population, Central American and white activists involved in the solidarity movement, and DC’s Black majority—is also an area of growing examination.56 51 Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Markle, Motorcycle on Hell Run. 52John Preusser, “Exceptional Headwinds: The Black Panthers in D.C.,” in The Black Panther Part in a City Near You, ed. Judson L. Jeffries (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 52-88. 53Michelle Coghill Chatman, “Beyond Kente Cloth and Kwanzaa: Interrogating African-Centered Identity in Washington, D.C.,” diss., (American University, 2013); Myers, We Are Worth Fighting For. 54 Valk, Radical Sisters. 55 Genny Beemyn, A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, D.C. (New York: Routledge, 2015); Darius Bost, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Kwame Holmes, “Chocolate City to Rainbow City: The Dialectics of Black and Gay Community Formation in Washington, D.C., 1946-1978,” diss., (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011). 56 Patrick Scallen, “The Bombs that Drop in El Salvador Explode in Mount Pleasant: From Cold War Conflagration to Immigrant Struggles in Washington, DC 1970-1995.” diss., (Georgetown University, 2019); Gabriella Gahlia Modan, Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place (Malden: Blackwell, 2007); Ana Patricia 29 Washington’s status as the nation’s capital and economic basis in the federal government have in the past led urbanists to treat it as an outlier whose history and development are external to that of other cities. This has begun to shift, with multiple works considering the District’s role as a forerunner for national urban policy and the postindustrial transformation of cities broadly.57 The displacement of nearly 23,000 residents in Southwest DC as part of a massive urban renewal project offered a harbinger of what was to come for other targeted neighborhoods in the US; the more participatory forms of urban redevelopment promised by the Model Cities program nearly two decades later were first piloted in Shaw.58 The redeployment of fair housing and integration rhetoric, pursuit of historic preservation status, and selective appropriation of Black expressive culture to facilitate gentrification and displacement in the District also prefigured their adoption elsewhere.59 Subject to federal imposition and real estate industry predation, Washingtonians have powerfully asserted their right to the city, not only protesting racialized dispossession but forging creative alternatives to it while generating ripple effects far beyond the capital.60 The city, these projects contend, can no longer be ignored in discussions of the urban past or future. Rodriguez, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009): 167-194. These studies build on a previous generation of scholarship on the rise of a multi-national Latinx community in the Washington region. See Olivia Cadaval, Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation's Capital: The Latino Festival (London: Routledge, 1998); Terry A. Repak, Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation's Capital (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 57 Derek S. Hyra, Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Derek S. Hyra and Sabiyha Prince, eds. Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington DC (New York: Routledge, 2016). 58 Howard Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 59 Rosemary Ndubuizu, “In the State’s Shadow of Fair Housing: D.C. (White) Business Leaders and their Revanchist Desires,” Urban Affairs Review 57, no.6 (2021), 1558-1589; Cameron Logan, Historic Capital: Preservation, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 2017); Brandi Thompson Summers, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 60 Meghelli, A Right the City; Amanda Huron, Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperative in Washington, D.C. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Amanda Huron, “Struggling for Housing, from DC to Johannesburg: Washington Inner City Self Help Goes to South Africa,” in Capital Dilemma, 86-106. 30 This project contributes to and advances the growing conversation on Washington, DC’s history in several respects. Through offering detailed portraits of the Black Land Movement and the D.C. Statehood Party, the study expands our understanding of the multiple ways organizers in the District envisioned self-determination in the Black Power era and the range of strategies they undertook to pursue it. In the process, it assesses how the city’s sizeable Black population, distinct status, and oversight from federal agencies and legislators shaped activists’ perceptions of Black Power and its aims. MICCO’s attempts to infuse citizen participation in the urban renewal process in Shaw have been the subject of several studies.61 Neither its critics nor the alternative proposals they put forward for the neighborhood’s rebuilding in the wake of the 1968 uprising have been given a closer look, however, obscuring the diverse and at times contrasting ways that Black activists sought to wield the tools of urban planning. There are several reasons for this, from the limited reach of the Black Land Movement in realizing its plans for the surrounding area to the lack of a readily identifiable and easily accessible archive related to the organization. Sitting with the evidence that is available, however, illuminates how Black Power cadre in the nation’s capital advanced bold visions of territorial autonomy not unlike those then emerging in Detroit, Harlem, or Newark at the time, this despite being just blocks from the White House. It further illustrates the longer lineage of grassroots development activism in the city and how federally-backed redevelopment plans have been refused, renegotiated, and reimagined by Black residents. Even as Julius Hobson’s activism and its effective fusion of publicity-grabbing stunts and reams of statistical research have been amply recounted in recent scholarship, the D.C. Statehood Party he co-led over the last portion of his life has not, consigned to a few paragraphs or passing 61 Gillette, From Justice to Beauty; Sommers, “I Believe in the City”; Holmes, “Chocolate City to Rainbow City.” 31 mention in accounts of early home rule era politics or the wider quest for DC statehood.62 As a result, how statehood’s early advocates positioned it as part of a much longer struggle for social reconstruction has been sidelined. For Hobson and other party leaders such as Josephine Butler and Hilda Mason, political self-determination for the predominantly Black city was the first step towards building a democratic and socialist District that offered a robust municipal alternative to the rising national politics of white backlash. Too easily dismissed as a marginal political force, narrating the party’s daily efforts and the transformative agenda that anchored them conveys a clearer picture of how activists sought to take advantage of the opportunities home rule provided even as they contested its limits. It also draws out the distinctions between the Democratic Party and its incremental approach to improving the city’s status and more fundamental assertions of the right to self-governance which situate it as an unfinished goal of the Black freedom struggle. The Adams Morgan Organization and Community for Creative Non-Violence’s respective campaigns to challenge gentrification and create shelters have each been the subject of articles and dissertations.63 Extending from this research and exploring under-addressed themes within the existing literature, the approach taken here offers a representative overview of each 62 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City; Pearlman, Democracy’s Capital; George Derek Musgrove, ““Statehood is Far More Difficult”: The Struggle for D.C. Self-Determination, 1980–2017,” Washington History 29, no.2 (2017): 3-17. 63 On aspects of the Adams Morgan Organization’s campaigns, see: Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, “We are Headed for Some Bad Trouble: Gentrification and Displacement in Washington, DC, 1920-2014,” in Capital Dilemma, 107-135; Amanda Huron, “Creating a Commons in the Capital: The Emergence of Limited Equity Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.,” Washington History 26, no. 2 (2014): 56-67; Amanda Huron, “Caring in Public: The Struggle for Community Park West,” Washington History 33, no. 1 (2021): 26-34; James Lloyd, “Fighting Redlining and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.: The Adams-Morgan Organization and Tenant Right to Purchase,” The Journal of Urban History 42, no. 6 (2016): 1091-1109; Katie J. Wells, “A Housing Crisis, a Failed Law, and a Property Conflict: The US Urban Speculation Tax,” Antipode 47, no. 4 (2015): 1043-1061. On aspects of the Community for Creative Non-Violence’s campaigns, see: Christine Elwell, “From Political Protest to Bureaucratic Service: The Transformation of Homeless Advocacy in the Nation’s Capital and the Eclipse of Political Discourse,” diss. (American University, 2008); Nicole M. Gipson, “Making the Third Ghetto: Race, Gender, and Family Homelessness in Washington, DC, 1977-1989,” Journal of American Studies 56, no. 5 (2022): 699-728; Katie. J. Wells, “Policy-failing: a repealed right to shelter,” Urban Geography 41, no. 9 (2020): 1139- 1157. CCNV has also been the subject of a recent digital and community-based humanities project. See Dan Kerr, curator, Resistance and Revolution: The Struggle to End Homelessness in the Nation’s Capital, The Humanities Truck, American University, https://humanitiestruck.com/allexhibits/resistance-revolution/. 32 group’s history that considers its ideological groundings alongside the campaigns it undertook and multiple issues it sought to address. The project also situates each organization in relation to three broader dynamics. First, it relays the New Left matrix of activism and cultural production in which they emerged and how that shaped their analyses and objectives. Second, it locates their multi-racial and predominantly white organizing bases, respectively, within the wider context of a majority-Black city and the shifting processes of racial formation. Third, it considers how their proximity to federal policymakers affected the course of urban and social policy nationally. Surveying the Adams Morgan Organization over the course of its dozen years elucidates several underexplored aspects of the city’s history. Amid its stark absence, citizens of the District sought out multiple ways to express democracy. Often emerging from a radical milieu—such as the New Left countercultures that permeated Adams Morgan—these participatory experiments in turn shaped the expectations that residents brought to home rule, including their support for the establishment of advisory neighborhood commissions.64 The group’s battle against gentrification and displacement in their racially and economically heterogenous neighborhood highlights how the city developed unevenly, with real estate capital flooding into certain blocks even as broad swaths of the District were starved for investment, and how these speculative patterns were structured by anti-Blackness. Further, following their campaigns demonstrates how the city’s residents were not only on the receiving end of federal u