With a projected 2030 completion, the redevelopment of the historic Barry Farm neighborhood is steadily progressing alongside concerns of what it means to preserve a community once among D.C.’s most prosperous.
Amid a multiphase expansion promising more than 1,000 new units, Northeast D.C., native Patricia Thomas was among those sounding off on a deeper call after the screening of LMSvoice Productions’ “Barry Farm: A Conversation Across Generations” on Saturday, Feb. 21.
“I did not see the Barry Farm that it became years later. The thing that I liked about growing up in D.C., and I think it’s true of most urban areas during that time, was that we really did have a community — the neighbors looked out for neighbors…there was a sense of everybody looking out for each other,” Thomas, 79, told The Informer following the event. “The future has to be with educating and sharing that same kind of experience with young people.”
Thomas was joined by dozens of attendees, including Empower DC housing organizer and staff historian Corey Shaw Jr., at the DC History Center in Northwest D.C., all of whom reflected on the breadth of the neighborhood that once stood as a beacon of African American advancement.
Reflecting on its 1867 origins as Barry Farm-Hillsdale, to later transformations that include a newly renamed public housing unit (Barry Farms Dwellings), Shaw said what once topped 375 acres of Anacostia is now a museum of untold truths obliterated by cultural erasure, and there’s something to be learned.
“When we talk about Southeast pride, [D.C.] pride, really, this is all that we have left. Wards 5, 7 and 8 is all we have left as Black folk in the city, and that’s by design,” he told The Informer. “The Barry Farm ReDevelopment is moving differently than it was, which is good, but…we have to get back to this notion of what community development looks like. What does it mean to have community at the table?”
A Legacy Renewed, a Past Undone
By the time the relocation process hit in 2019, a collective effort to safeguard what’s left of the original site was well underway and not at a total loss, Shaw explained.
In partnership with humanity scholars, historians, and the Barry Farm Tenants and Allies Association, Empower DC led the charge to the neighborhood’s official historic nomination, and with it came the preservation of five buildings donning a generational call of Black leadership in D.C.
Of the five preserved sites, the historian notes the residences of some formidable figures that emerged out of the area, such as: community organizer Etta Horn, lead singer of Grammy-nominated band The Anacostia, and the Jennings sisters, whose pivotal stance in Bolling v. Sharpe led to the desegregation of D.C. public schools — carrying the torch of what Southeast D.C. has to offer.
“One of the first Black women to get a Ph.D. lived in Barry Farm. Junkyard Band is from [there], and they took go-go music international,” Shaw emphasized. “The influence of [Frederick] Douglass kind of reverberates through history. That’s the caliber of folk that come out of Barry Farm.”
An emerging leader of the originally established Barry Farm-Hillsdale, Douglass spent his time challenging racial inequity politically — from fair teacher wages to the suffrage of African American men — while helping launch an independent press.
Further, while literacy societies, entrepreneurship and religious sanctuaries, including the historic African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, blossomed in the days of Hillsdale, Barry Farm Dwellings’ reclaimed era of the 1950s and 60s laid the backdrop for emerging civic rights activism.
In fact, when Barry Farm parents were leading the charge of Bolling v. Sharpe in 1954, Thomas was an elementary schooler frequenting Southeast D.C.’s Saint Cyprian Catholic Church, right across the street from the former Hine Junior High School, one of the first public schools to be integrated in Washington.
“This is why I get so defensive when people talk about the generational violence that came out of Barry Farm,” Shaw added, “it neglects the broader history of the folk that actually worked to do a thing – the folks that worked to make sure that the community did feel safe for [residents]; it neglects how Junkyard used to come out to Barry Farm every weekend and play a show.”
On the cusp of what’s to come for the historic Southeast neighborhood, Shaw said the work is in the hands of its beneficiaries.
“Barry Farm was a segregated public housing project when it was built, and it gets disinvested in, and the community still found a way,” said the historian. “We really have to sort of center community voices in the development process, because if we don’t… we’re going to get to a place where the folks that have been in place for 10,15, 20,30, years, they will be gone, and there won’t be much of anything.”