Right after slavery ended in the United States, thousands of Black people, formerly enslaved by white slave holders in the South, flooded Washington, DC. They breathed new life into the city, previously known for its literally stinking swamps. Black people were drawn to the ample amount of employment available in DC. Between Reconstruction and the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson segregated federal employment and purged DC of its Black employees . This is the playbook DOGE cribbed from, whose efforts disproportionately fired Black federal workers. The federal government has always offered a pathway into the middle class for Black people. That is the reason conservatives have historically hated government employees so much. In DC in particular, the public schools also offered employment and a organizing staging ground for a growing Black educated class. DC public schools in particular were known as an employment safe haven for Black queer people at this time—look deeply into the biographies of any of the “race women” of that era (the term our communities used for Black activists), and you almost always find a fierce, dedicated teacher living alongside her “friend.” DC meant freedom to determine Black life, Black art, Black intellect, Black sexuality. It’s been a target ever since.
One of my favorite authors, maybe the best short story writer this country has ever produced, Edward P Jones, traces this whole history in his story “In the Blink of God’s Eye” in the collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children. The story begins, “That 1901 winter when the wife and her husband were still new to Washington, there came to the wife like a scent carried on the wind some word that wolves roamed the streets and roads of the city after sundown.” We watch as a young couple moves to a burgeoning DC, trying to make sense of this new world. There’s a throwaway line, about how a character wants a pearl necklace the emperor of Haiti brought to DC. Imagine my surprise, as an archival nerd, to recognize this was a real object–when I was researching my own novel about Haiti in the 1880s and 90s, I came across long cold gossip about Black DC elite vying with each other of who would host Haitian dignitaries on the country’s official diplomatic mission to a post-Civil War US, society biddies marveling at the emperor’s pearls. A plot point I wish The Gilded Age would consider covering. But then, that would require that show to acknowledge the complexity of Black thought and also a Black elite who were interested in Blackness. But I digress. This essay is not about strays for HBO.