Once in the Spring and once in the Fall, Cultural Tourism DC offers free walking tours of a dozen or more DC hotspots. I immediately noted the Black Georgetown tour in my calendar, begged my friend MJ to come along with me as just a few weeks prior to learning about the Black Georgetown tour we were having a conversation about Georgetown’s current residents and those of the past. MJ is quite smart and has a great capacity to store and process information and history and proceeded to tell me about the history of slaves and free blacks who once made up over 1/3 of the population of Georgetown (The 1800 census reported 5,120, which included 1,449 slaves and 227 free blacks. Today the number of African Americans living in Georgetown is less than .3%…you count on one hand).
Our conversation peeked my curiousity and I started research of my own. I’ve known of course that slave labor was used widely to construct the monuments and many of the buildings in the new capital of Washington, DC in addition to providing labor on the tobacco plantations in VA and MD. What I had not known was the history of slaves and blacks particularly in the Georgetown neighborhood (which was located in Maryland).
So I read and found many interesting things that peeked my interests even more and decided to join the walking tour. The tour led by our guide Noel, was a bit underwhelming as it was merely a ’stop and point out location/building tour’ and didn’t really weave together a story like I’d hoped or even touch on some of the more fascinating things I researched about. (I’m happy I researched on my own before going.) The highpoint of the tour was finding what is believed to have been a ’safe house’ (picture above) in the slave cementary owned and operated by Mount Zion United Methodist Church (the oldest black congregation (190 years old) in DC). The cementary speculated to have been a stop on the underground railroad offered free burials to blacks. I wanted to enter the safe house but of course the door was glued shut. Its difficult to see in the picture but the safe house was quite small with only one tiny hole or window on the right side. I speculate that from the position of the house (down a sloping hill) that it was once covered with debris and immersed in the forest (some of which is now carved out by a concrete jungle of a freeway).
I could go on and on about what I’ve learned but I hope you’ll take some time to dig deeper into the facade of gentrification and uncover the hidden, lost and buried histories of other American neighborhoods. I know I will operate in this greater conciousness when visiting cities. We never know where history lies……..
For more resources on Slavery and Emancipation in Washington, DC please click here. Otherwise, I strongly recommend you read the book Black Georgetown Remembered.
