Learn more about neighborhood history, gentrification and activism at your Library

For Immediate Release

May 9, 2019

Media Contact: George Williams, Media Relations Manager

Learn more about neighborhood history, gentrification and activism at your Library

(Washington, D.C.) – As the District continues to change and grow, the DC Public Library is collecting and sharing stories about gentrification and activism in the city’s neighborhoods.

This summer, the Library is relaunching its People’s University seminar series and has begun archiving tweets related to the growing #dontmutedc movement.

“The Library’s local history collections offer a rich variety of resources for District residents,” said Richard Reyes-Gavilan, executive director of the DC Public Library. “Our programming centered on neighborhood change helps more members of the DC community understand what shaped our neighborhoods, how they continue to change and how community action continues to evolve.”

So far, 10,000 #dontmutedc tweets have been collected. The tweets will be anonymized and viewable as a spreadsheet on DigDC, the Library’s web portal for digitized and born-digital collections. This project isn’t the first time the Library has collected tweets related to a local issue. In 2018, the Library archived tweets associated with Initiative 77, a ballot measure related to tipped wages.

The Library’s People’s University seminar series includes events exploring DC neighborhood history, gentrification and activism. The series is developed in partnership with the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum’s signature 50th-anniversary exhibition, “A Right to The City,” based on the Adams Morgan, Anacostia, Brookland and Shaw neighborhoods.

The “A Right to The City” satellite exhibits are currently on view during regular library hours at the following locations:  Mount Pleasant, 3160 16th St. NW; Anacostia, 1800 Good Hope Road SE; Woodridge, 1801 Hamlin St. NE; and Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Library, 1630 7th St. NW. To learn more about the Library’s “A Right to the City” events, visit https://www.dclibrary.org/righttothecity

### 

People’s University Events

Mapping Segregation
Wednesday, May 15; 6 p.m.
Woodridge Library
1801 Hamlin Street NE
Mara Cherkasky and Sarah Shoenfeld of the District-based company Prologue DC believe that understanding the District’s past helps us appreciate its unique 21st-century culture. Explore the long history of displacement, race and real estate in D.C. Learn how dismantling the practices of real estate developers and white citizens groups, who used covenants to prevent the sale of property to African-Americans and other groups in certain District neighborhoods, led to residential patterns that persist today. PROLOGUE DC believes that understanding the District’s past helps us appreciate its unique 21st-century culture.

Holding on to Reno
Tuesday, May 28; 6:30 p.m.
Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Library
1630 7th St. NW
Neil Flanagan, author of the 2017 Washington City Paper article “The Battle of Fort Reno,” leads a seminar exploring one community’s struggle to fight displacement.

Residents of the mixed-race Reno neighborhood in Tenleytown did not make their eviction easy. As white neighbors and developers campaigned for the demolition of their homes, the community worked with elite African-Americans like Howard University trained lawyer James Lincoln Neill to stop the effort for decades. They skillfully used what political leverage they had to expose a plan which, even in the 1920s, was understood to be corrupt and racist. While the efforts were unsuccessful in the face of overwhelming political power and were forgotten, archival records show what resistance looked like in the increasingly segregated D.C. of the 1920s.

Bus Tour of Historic Barry Farm and Hillsdale
Saturday, June 8; 10 a.m.
Parklands-Turner Library
1547 Alabama Ave., SE
Anacostia Community Museum curator and author Alcione M. Amos will lead this informative bus tour of these historically significant areas of Southeast Washington, DC. Tracing the neighborhood’s beginnings as a post-Civil War settlement for African Americans and the following 100 years of its history, the tour includes stops at Fort Stanton/Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church, Elvans Road, Barry Farm Dwellings, the corner of Sheridan Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, and the Anacostia pool.

Participants should board the tour bus at the Parklands Turner Library, 1547 Alabama Ave, SE. You will be returned to this location at the end of the tour. This program is funded in part by the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in partnership with DC Public Library.

Memory Lab Pop-up
Saturday, June 15; 1 p.m.
Woodridge Library
1801 Hamlin St. NE
Learn how to preserve and archive your photos, slides, personal papers and home movies. The Library’s Memory Lab staff will talk about the ways that to digitize personal archive. Highly trained archivists and librarians will also be able to assist with scanning materials, to assess the condition of materials, to answer questions and to provide one-on-one guidance in digital preservation, home movie preservation and creating oral histories.

Hola Cultura Walking Tour
Saturday, June 22; 10:30 a.m.
Mount Pleasant Library
3160 16th St. NW
Hola Cultura will lead a free 60-minute guided tour focused on the rich history of Latinos in D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood. The hour-long walking tour will focus on the history of activism and gentrification in Adams Morgan. The landmarks visited will include the former locations of Ontario Theatre, the GALA Hispanic Theatre, and Zodiac Records, as well as two of the oldest street murals still standing in the District: the 1982 Unity Mural and “Un Pueblo sin murales es un pueblo desmuralizado” (A people without murals is a demoralized people), which was painted in the late 1970s.

History of Tenant Organizing
Tuesday, June 25; 6:30 p.m.
Mount Pleasant Library
3160 16th St. NW
Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. This seminar and discussion on the history of tenant organizing and housing co-operative formation will be led by Amanda Huron, professor at the University of the District of Columbia and author of “Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.“