I was somewhat surprised to learn that Alexandria’s neighborhoods were so often racially mixed, and that the renewal and public housing programs Moon described were actually the mechanism for installing a greater degree of segregation. As a colonial historian, I know that racial boundaries were unclear and often permeable in the early 17th century, and that it was later laws and activities that hardened those lines and essentially disciplined both white and black colonists into upholding racial categories—in other words, colonists lacking elite status had to be taught to uphold racial hierarchies they didn’t naturally/inherently observe. This seems like a similar condition found in early 20th century working class residents of Alexandria, and again with desegregation where the accounts we heard in the PBS film repeated that theme that children had to learn that race mattered and then sometimes found that real interactions across racial lines thwarted their expectations. I wonder what advantages middle- and working-class whites saw in cooperating, if any; racial privilege may have been a piece, but perhaps sometimes it was simply a matter of pragmatism and they weren’t particularly conscious of their experience diverging from that of their Black neighbors. I also keep returning to the question of intent in these discussions of city redevelopment, which often depended on policies that at least appear to have been adopted with good intent—who wouldn’t want to improve housing standards or environmental conditions or protect public health?—but clearly disproportionately affected people of color, often because they were marginalized in the political discussions that produced those policies. One example of just how insensitive these actions were was the ARHA plans to condemn “blighted” neighborhoods to build public housing in 1962 Alexandria, which would have obliterated Black neighborhoods (where Black Americans working to create upward mobility for themselves had acquired private property, supposedly one of the steps in that) to construct public housing, the only housing open to and affordable for those Black citizens whose property had been condemned. That process would essentially transform private property into public property to hold the very people whose private property was taken away from them—any hope of upward mobility gone, that “public good” was only necessary because their private efforts had been negated. Since I’ve raised that question of justice before in class, I wonder what examples like this leave us in terms of action. Certainly Perry made the case that in terms of simple property values, East Arlington residents were compensated, but her story made very clear that some lost value is less tangible—what happens then?
