Chocolate City A history of race and democracy in the nation's capital

As a city, Washington, D.C. is an anomaly. It is an urban area and a federal district inspired by the founders' planning, yet subjected to the vicissitudes of federal government. For long periods, Washington citizens were denied the basic rights of citizenship. That is important. Also important is the story of the African American population in the nation's capital, which was also in the majority. This book is the story of a vibrant free black community that coexisted with slavery; it is an important expression of political rights during Reconstruction; it both confronts and deals with the segregationist impulses of the Wilson progressives; it finds a voice for the African American community in the Depression years and beyond, a voice that attempted to address housing, poverty, urban redevelopment, drugs, or crime, often with Congressional interference, for good or not. The story of this book is well documented through multiple sources; the authors are to be commended for bringing it to life. The book is often disjointed through too much attention given to personalities and not enough to substance. In that, it may be a reflection of African American life in the District of Columbia. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Professionals. --Thomas F. Armstrong, formerly, Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, UAE

Asch (The Senator and the Sharecropper), who teaches history at Colby College, and Musgrove, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, embrace the funk band Parliament's moniker for the District of Columbia and deliver a narrative as grand as the city itself. The authors show how disenfranchisement has been the game in D.C. ever since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton made a deal to move the U.S. capital to the slaveholding South. Washington, straddling the divide between Southern bondage and its own comparatively relaxed racial norms, became a mecca for enslaved and free African-Americans alike. Political machinations ensured that Congress, rather than Washington's white elite, held the real reins of power; even after black men got the right to vote in 1867, they were unable to make inroads. Black and white residents wrestled for decades over segregated housing and schools until the post-WWII era. The authors' exceptional storytelling shines in their accounts of black inhabitants' long drive for home rule (local, rather than Congressional, control over the city's affairs), which was finally and triumphantly achieved in 1973, and the new racial and political fault lines that emerged thereafter. This enriching journey showcases the underappreciated saga of African-American success in the face of adversity. Agency: Garamond Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.