To many Black individuals in Anacostia, these high-rises throughout the newly glowed-up river are harmful alerts. Rents and taxes are creeping up whereas the proportion of Black house patrons within the space is drifting down. Many residents will inform you that Anacostia has its challenges, and extra funding in the neighborhood may assist. Good parks and better-funded colleges are broadly appreciated. However the encroaching luxurious buildings and long-promised bridge park may also carry displacement, because it has elsewhere within the metropolis over the previous a number of years.
Throughout our time in Anacostia, we seemed for examples of majority-Black communities with thriving economies — thriving Black-owned companies, excessive Black homeownership charges, excessive Black wealth accumulation and different indicators of progress towards financial fairness for Black People. Our exploration introduced us again to the neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Okla., as soon as the monetary middle of the African American group, which was torn aside 102 years in the past by white individuals within the Tulsa Race Bloodbath. Victor Luckerson, who carried out greater than 200 interviews for his not too long ago revealed ebook about Tulsa, wrote for Headway about how the idea of group economics — Black People supporting an area Black economic system — fueled entrepreneurial success in Greenwood, framing a query: Are there modern-day exemplars for what a principally Black group may be in the US?
That is the place to begin of an exploration we’re calling Progress, Revisited. We’re wanting again at historic moments of progress towards racial fairness for Black People for the reason that starting of the twentieth century, and searching ahead to their classes and legacies within the current day. We’re following trails left of students commissioned by Columbia College’s Ira A. Lipman Middle for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights to discover the persistence of racial inequality in 5 core features of life within the U.S. — economics, training, well being care, felony justice and housing. In every of those areas, we’re on the lookout for moments when Black communities made notable developments towards racial fairness, and asking how we’re constructing on or studying from these advances at present. In my introduction to the collection, I included a quiz to check your data of how far we have now and haven’t come towards bettering measures of financial fairness for Black People.