If you want to see the segregation, just hit the area south of the Bolling airbase. Look on the map. You'll see Martin Luther King Ave, so just follow it around.
drive back to the airbase and notice that the MLK Blvd intersects with Malcolm X Drive. Yes. And it extends to the Airbase and takes you to the Defense Intelligence Agency on the base. Get the fuck out, right?
At 04:52 PM 7/13/2013, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>Chuck once described his experiences in DC as Southern in an
>>ugly way, but my search-fu is no match for the post I'm thinking of. Chuck,
>>would you care to comment?
>>
>>Andy
>
>--------------
>
>I think I remember the post you're talking about. I went back to DC as an
>assistant to the director of a student services program under HEW, part of
>the Office of Education, Special Services. It was originally an OEO
>program that was in the process of getting dismantled under Nixon's
>regionalization scheme with Donald Rumsfeld. The chief of the division was
>originally a civil rights lawyer who got a lucky appointment in the
>Johnson administration.
>
>In any event, it was the spring of 1972 and the first time I'd ever been
>to Washington. The physical impression was governed partly by the black
>project directors, part by the program, and part by the actual existing
>city. Our rental car got towed because it was still on a downtown street
>during the morning commute. I had to go find the damned thing, pay the
>fine and get it back.
>
>I had to go to a nearby police station that was crowded with the city down
>and out, much of it black. A little kid in front of me had his bike taken
>because he didn't have a license tag. The big bull behind the counter gave
>him the cold treatment in a southern drawl as if this was a newsreel from
>Mississippi. Kiddo took it patiently, and left to go get the money to get
>his bike back. Meanwhile I was watching a high order officier of somekind
>with fancy coat come in and get the arrest books for some previous year
>and start going over them with another guy in a suit. I got the address
>and phone number of the tow yard.
>
>The tow yard was literally a yard, like a hometown junkyard and everybody
>was black. They were gruff, smoked cigars, like all the towyards in the
>world and I got the damned car for some heavy fine and drove back out of
>the black neighborhood. I thought later about the police official and the
>suit going over arrest books. These must have been from some big mass
>arrest protest from the late 1960s.
>
>It was an almost entirely segregated city and from my pansy ass west coast
>view, a stink hole of real live racism like I'd never really seen in the
>flesh. It was a wonder there was any civil rights legislation at all.
>
>When I got back to the meetings and program reviews, I had an entirely
>different take on what our program was really supposed to be
>about...supporting minority and otherwise disadvantage students in higher
>education---a project that should have started with an armed rebellion in
>DC. The Civil War was still there. The `founding' fathers made a bad real
>estate deal with the pigsty south by locating the capital in plantation
>swampland. What the fuck were they thinking?
>
>Sometime around 1980 I went to DC again on another federal project about
>technology and disability put on by the RSA and found an almost different
>city. Looking back, then it was undergoing somekind of yuppification. I
>almost missed the in your face race and class trip of yore. Even the soft
>smarmy Virginia accents were gone as well as those low life, looky here,
>boy .. stuff.
>
>The last time around 2002 was on a law suit junket as an `expert'
>counsultant and I didn't have much time or money to go around. The cabbies
>were mostly Cuban or South Asia something and no help at all in trying to
>gauge the state of the city. I was staying somewhere around Dupont Circle
>near the law firm. The firm was trying to get a hot name for itself and
>had copies of news stories about them in a nice folder in the waiting
>area. Class A ambulance chasers on the make. It was during the invasion of
>Iraq in March which was the only thing worth watching on tv, so I ate my
>steak, drank my fancy red wine and thought about the change in DC drinking
>habits. Used to be scotch and martinis, now it was wine. The wine was an
>overpriced New York something, which was surpisingly drinkable. The wine
>was there for multiple reasons, partly to signify class, which was funny,
>because French and California wines are just better. The news was all
>that celebration stuff of the early embedded reporter `on the scene' ... farce.
>
>Getting back to the point, I have no doubt at all that part of the
>`success' of Johnson's War on Poverty was a big increase in black
>employment in government civil services and it must have been a nation
>wide development. ...
>
>CG
>
>
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