Black Food Geographies

Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in the Nation's Capital

Ashanté M. Reese

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469651514
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Ashante M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members' stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.

CHAPTER ONE

Come to Think of It, We Were Pretty Self-Sufficient

Race, Segregation, and Food Access in Historical Context

When I began fieldwork, D.C. residents and visitors alike asked, “Where is Deanwood?” Located in upper northeast Washington, D.C., Deanwood is tucked along Division and Eastern Avenues, dividing lines between the District and Prince George’s County, Maryland. Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue and the Anacostia Freeway complete the official boundaries used for census purposes, though these boundaries expand or contract, depending on who you ask and their social or historical ties to the neighborhood.1 The small-town feel struck me almost immediately on my first visit. Single-family brick and wood-framed homes, sizeable front and back yards, and the protectiveness of residents toward their neighborhood reminded me of rural East Texas where I grew up.

The main street that runs through the heart of the neighborhood had all the features typically associated with an unhealthy food environment: two small corner stores less than a half mile from each other, a liquor store, a carryout, and an old, abandoned soul food restaurant. People—mostly women—got on and off buses with plastic Safeway bags as they traveled to and from the closest supermarket, on Minnesota Avenue. Signs of urban disinvestment, the systematic loss of grocery stores, and middle-class flight were visible. These are what my eyes were trained to look for as a food systems researcher. They told stories I had become familiar with and would become even more so: stories of a struggling food environment that needed new life breathed into it. When I began conducting formal interviews, I usually asked residents to begin wherever they liked. Some began with memories. Others began with their shopping practices. Many, however, paused before beginning with a narrative that is all too familiar—one in which “nothingness” is evoked as a definitive, unchanging truth about the neighborhood. Beyond the surface, though, were other stories to be heard. While the neighborhood’s immediately visible physical condition hardly painted a picture of a self-reliant community that once met most of residents’ needs, residents’ memories, stories, and the archives said otherwise. Despite the pervasive “nothingness” that many residents used as a starting point in their interviews, very few ended there as past, present, and future intertwined to reveal nuances in how residents witnessed, remembered, or experienced the changing food system.

This chapter begins with an examination of how Deanwood became a “self-reliant” community, emphasizing food’s role in connecting residents to the South, to each other, and to various strategies used to build and maintain community, despite persisting racial inequities. I go on to examine the displacement of small grocery stores in the neighborhood—many of which were Jewish-owned—during the shift toward supermarkets as preferred food retailers. Lastly, I end with where many narratives begin, with an examination of how the systematic decline of supermarkets shaped the food landscape of Deanwood and Washington, D.C.

The Early Makings of a Self-Reliant Community

What is now known as Deanwood was once farmland worked by enslaved Black people. Ninian Beall, a white farmer, initially acquired it as part of a land grant in 1703.2 Ownership changed hands multiple times, but by 1833 Levi Sheriff, another white farmer, purchased it. When he died, Sheriff’s three daughters subdivided the land in 1871 after realizing that the decline the family farm underwent during the Civil War was likely irreversible.3

When the sisters developed these subdivisions, it is likely they assumed that white families would be attracted to the newly built homes, the expansive landscape, and the railway that ran through Deanwood from Bladensburg, Maryland, to a Potomac River wharf. By 1873, however, only two plots of land had sold, for a total of $50.4 In 1874, the next buyer purchased one of the subdivisions, offering the sisters two plots in the city center in exchange. Reverend John H. W. Burley, who purchased the subdivision, was the first African American on record to purchase land in the Deanwood area, setting a precedent for Black landownership in the community.

Archival records between 1874 and the turn of the twentieth century are unclear concerning how African Americans heard of Deanwood or why they chose to move there. It is likely that word of mouth traveled routes similar to those followed by the people who made up what we call the Great Migration—throngs of Black people looking for opportunities in urban centers around the country. What is clear, however, is that Black residents established institutions that were key to community sustainability. Between 1880 and 1886, residents built Contee African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Burrville School, the first to serve African American students in the greater Deanwood community. In 1909, Nannie Helen Burroughs opened the National Training School for Women and Girls. The school operated on three principles: Bible, bath, and broom. In its first twenty-five years, the National Training School for Women and Girls matriculated over 2,000 girls and women from across the United States, the Caribbean, and African nations.5 By 1926, at least six additional churches were built, several along the main thoroughfare that would later be named Sheriff Road after one of the white slaveholding farmers who originally owned land where Deanwood sits.

The mass exodus of African Americans from southern cities during the Great Migration left its mark on D.C. generally and Deanwood specifically. In 1920, Washington, D.C.’s Black population was 110,000.6 Ten years later, that number had grown to 132,000, with a great majority of new Washingtonians hailing from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, where the agricultural system had begun to decline after World War I.7 These migration trends were consistent in Deanwood. Among the residents included in an oral history project conducted by D.C. historian Ruth Ann Overbeck, eight out of twenty participants or their families had migrated to Deanwood from other southern states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Others moved there from other parts of the city and did not detail if they had origins elsewhere.8 Their reasons for choosing Deanwood varied. Some families sought Deanwood at the encouragement of friends or relatives who already lived there. Others came in search of educational opportunities for their children and thought Deanwood would provide a better environment. Still others were seeking more progressive racial and economic climates than what they experienced in their home states. Though migrants could not escape the anti-Blackness that created little or no access to schooling and a sharecropping system in the South that amounted to another form of bondage, urban centers like Washington, D.C.—combined with the talents they brought with them—gave them hope for creating better futures for themselves and their children.

While there were variations in economic stability, many early Deanwood residents built or purchased homes, which they saw as integral to upward mobility. Ninety percent of those interviewed by Overbeck in 1987 owned their homes, which they acquired through a direct purchase, receivership from parents, transfer from grandparents or other relatives, or marriage. Homeownership was one outcome of a larger commitment to creating model, sustainable communities. In the pursuit of homeownership, early Deanwood residents brought a desire for better lives that was steeped in self-reliance and resilience. Racial uplift ideologies through which residents created community cohesion and navigated the physical, social, and economic constraints of racism were integral to the development of Black neighborhoods across the United States. Kevin Gaines argued that meanings of racial uplift primarily fell into two categories: (1) emphasizing education as key to liberation, and (2) elevating “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth” as mechanisms through which to develop well-rounded people and create safe, stable communities that would push back against the belief that African Americans were inferior to whites.9 Commonly referred to as respectability politics, these ideologies and the practices that resulted from them were not simply about creating healthy, safe communities. Nonwhite and immigrant communities in the United States often responded to white supremacy by performing behaviors that were associated with being cultured, well-mannered, and educated. While they often very well knew and recognized that anti-Blackness influenced and structured their neighborhoods and access to resources, many early twentieth-century nonwhite and immigrant communities chose to not openly agitate white people or the structures they created as a strategy for survival, even as others fought openly and fiercely for equality and justice.

In D.C., communities that formed reflected Black people’s commitments to surviving in spite of white supremacy. Compared to a neighborhood like Shaw, which had emerged as a center of Black culture and intellectual life in D.C.,10 Deanwood seemed like the backwoods. Established by freedmen on the outskirts of Washington City in the nineteenth century, Shaw was home to several prominent African Americans and to some of the most prestigious African American institutions: Howard University, the Whitlaw Hotel, Industrial Savings Bank, and Freedmen’s Hospital.11 Though it had the only amusement park for Black residents in the early twentieth century and was well connected to railways, Deanwood neither looked nor felt as developed as its counterpart. Deanwood, east of the Anacostia River, was considered by other Washingtonians as distinct from “the city” of Washington because of its relative physical and social isolation from the African American epicenters.12 City services were slower. Roads were not paved until well into the 1950s, and even then, some residents still did not have indoor plumbing. A hand-drawn map from 1948 described Deanwood as “mainly a Negro residential area” that, in spite of nicely kept homes, displayed “the usual characteristics of a Negro neighborhood in the outlying sections of Washington, such as a lack of adequate shopping facilities and a poorly planned and poorly paved street system.”13 The map and the language used to describe the area illustrate the racial segregation that, by the time the map was drawn, was an expected and normal part of residential—and to some extent commercial—life for those who lived in Deanwood (see figure 1).

FIGURE 1 John P. Wymer’s hand-drawn map of Deanwood in 1948. WY 0397M.08, John P. Wymer Photograph Collection, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

Yet, it should not be assumed that people were less industrious than their counterparts in parts of D.C. that had better infrastructure. Indeed, they were creating community and making lives. The combination of people who settled there—migrants from the South, skilled craftsmen, and entrepreneurs—worked to create a community that met most of residents’ needs, despite the challenges presented by racism, physical isolation, and vastly undeveloped tracts of land.

Growing Food

Owning land and homes provided the space for farming and gardening, which were integral to the growth and development of Deanwood in the first half of the twentieth century. For example, Vincent Bunch reported that around 1923, his parents sold the land they owned in South Carolina, packed up their lives, and moved to the nation’s capital. Although they had owned their land in South Carolina, they were still hoping D.C. was a great place to raise children, to make more money, and to not have to farm. Vincent’s father had been an industrial education teacher after he finished college but sought other employment when they moved to D.C., because “back in those days Pullman [porters] seem[ed] like they made a little bit more money. He could make more money being a Pullman than he could teaching school in little southern schools.”14 When they arrived, Vincent’s parents and their firstborn son lived with family until they were able to purchase the materials needed to build their home in Deanwood:

Yes, I was born in Deanwood. My parents came from another state, but when they first came, my dad … t...