My favorite books about how DC became the most gentrified city in the country

Read this book if you want to understand the nuances of blackness in the nation’s capital.

Brandi Thompson Summers argues in her book, Black in Place, that gentrification along the H Street Corridor in DC has involved the embracing of blackness as an aesthetic alongside the displacement of actual Black people. Summers explains how blackness came to be valued as a prized aesthetic at the same time that Black people experienced the heavy policing, predatory lending, and displacement that both make possible and accompany the gentrification of Black neighborhoods.

This is a great book if you want to understand how some expressions of blackness can be valued while Black people are being displaced.

Derek Hyra describes gentrification and racial change in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, DC – which went from 90 percent Black in 1970 to 30 percent Black by 2010. Shaw’s status as the cultural epicenter of the Black community in the early twentieth century has become a selling point: many of the new establishments highlight this Black history, with odes to Marvin Gaye, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington in their names and featured artwork.

Hyra argues many of the White newcomers to Shaw embrace its Black history while ignoring the needs and preferences of contemporary Black residents. Thus, Black residents are experiencing both political and cultural displacement as they have lost political and economic power in the neighborhood.

This book offers insight into how Black DC residents think about their changing city.

For many Black long-term residents, DC has long been a “Chocolate city,” a city where Black people held both the demographic and political majority, and where Black people created their own spaces of belonging, pride, and self-reliance.

This book draws from oral histories and ethnographic data with long-term African-American residents of DC to explain both how gentrification has enhanced the vulnerability of low-income residents and how Black residents of DC are reclaiming spaces in their city.

To understand how a majority-Black city became the epicenter for the War on Drugs, destroying Black communities in the process, read this book. Although Washington, DC has long had Black leadership, it remained subject to the whims of majority-White federal authorities and thus to a governing body that has long been anti-Black.

James Forman, Jr. explains in his book, Locking Up Our Own, that the city’s Black leadership fully supported the coercive anti-crime policies implemented beginning in the 1980s. And, while some members of the Black community requested improved schools, drug rehabilitation clinics, and better city services, the federal government responded to these pleas by funding more policing and prisons.

Despite Black leadership, Black police officers, Black judges, and Black teachers, the city remains embedded in a broader context of White supremacy and anti-Blackness that have stymied efforts to support Black people in meaningful ways.

Chocolate City covers the last few centuries of history in DC.

This tome provides an in-depth overview of the history of race in Washington, DC from its founding to the present. It traces the history of race and democracy in the nation’s capital – from its days as a trading post for enslaved persons to its emergence as a booming metropolis.

By putting racial dynamics, tensions, and demographics at the center of the narrative, the authors develop a cohesive narrative that helps us to understand the multiple and consistent ways that Black DC residents have been disenfranchised and dispossessed.