Ward 4 D.C. Council member and Democratic mayoral nominee Janeese Lewis George recently kicked off her month-long, citywide listening tour at Union Temple Baptist Church, a well-regarded house of worship located in one of the District’s most historically underserved communities.
Many of the Ward 8 residents, organizers, and affiliates who filled the pews and other rooms of Union Temple spent more than an hour pouring out their hearts about the current state of affairs and what they would like to see in what Lewis George is calling “The People’s Government.”
“For so long, low-income people [were] warehoused,” said longtime Ward 8 resident Rufaro Jenkins. “The city is developing, but the people are not being developed…That’s where we fail a lot [by] not giving the people….the necessities to survive.”
In the late 2000s, Jenkins and other tenants of Parkway Overlook Apartments on Robinson Place SE formed a tenant association to fight for their return to an affordable dwelling undergoing revitalization. One decade and two mayoral administrations later, many of Jenkins’ neighbors made their way back to Parkway Overlook Apartments.
Even with that victory, Jenkins says the fight continues to improve housing along other portions of Robinson Place SE, where tenants living under another management company are decrying subpar conditions.
“The landlord [in the middle of the block] put up these two brand-new buildings, and then the buildings looked terrible,” Jenkins recounted to The Informer. “When you’re taking people with vouchers…you get the city money, but you’re not keeping your properties together. The landlord should be held accountable for that.”
Jenkins counted among nearly 500 people who registered for the Sept. 1 listening session at Union Temple— the first of eight on Lewis George’s “Building the People’s Government” listening tour. While Jenkins and dozens of other attendees participated in a breakout session about housing, several other Ward 8 residents, spread out in groups throughout the basement and two levels of the church building, weighed in on the issues of: jobs, safe communities, schools and child care, health care, and transportation.
For Jenkins, the listening session affirmed what she respected about Lewis George, the two-term Ward 4 D.C. council member who she regards as a youth advocate. With some certainty of a Lewis George general election victory in a majority-Democratic city, Jenkins said she’s looking forward to a new era.
“It’s not going to take one year to get things back together,” Jenkins said. “I also know that we have a council that has to [give her] these seven votes. I’m aware of all that, but I feel like I’m willing to give her an opportunity and a chance to at least show me that she’s making every effort to fix what is wrong.”
‘The Last Shall Be the First, and the First Shall Be the Last!’
While speaking with The Informer, and later Ward 8 residents at the listening session, Lewis George made a reference to Matthew 20:16 to make it known that, from the get-go, she’s aimed to put Ward 8 residents first.
“What I heard when knocking doors and having meet-and-greets in Ward 8 is that Ward 8 has historically felt last in investment, last in basic government services working for them and responsiveness, last in just support across the board,” Lewis George told The Informer. “I wanted to be clear when I ran that I made a promise to Ward 8 that they would not be last and they would not be left behind and that I was going to be as intentional as I possibly could about making sure that the concerns of Ward 8 were a part of my larger agenda.”
On June 16, at the end of a tumultuous Democratic primary campaign season, Lewis George decisively defeated fellow frontrunner and former D.C. council member Kenyan McDuffie, taking every ward but Ward 3— the District’s most affluent jurisdiction located west of Rock Creek Park.
Ward 8, where Lewis George had nearly 51% of the vote compared to McDuffie’s 35.64%, is home to the second-highest concentration of Black residents among any ward in the District. According to Census data, nearly one in three residents live below the poverty line, and child poverty rates are approaching 50%. Residents in Wards 7 and 8 have a life expectancy 15 years lower than residents in Ward 3, while the National Institutes of Health shows a strong correlation between inequitable food access and significantly higher levels of chronic illness among Ward 8 residents.
For Lewis George, Ward 8’s maladies aren’t by happenstance, but an imbalance in investment that she’s aiming to rectify.
“I don’t think that equality and equity are the same thing,” Lewis George told The Informer. “Equity takes into account a history of…wrongdoings.”
Other stops on the “Building the People’s Government” listening tour include: All Souls Church Unitarian in Ward 1 (Sept. 2); East Washington Heights Baptist Church in Ward 7 (Sept. 3); People’s Congregational United Church of Christ in Ward 4 (Sept. 8); Union Wesley AME Zion Church in Ward 5 (Sept. 10); Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Ward 3 (Sept. 24); Luther Place Memorial Church in Ward 2 (Sept. 30); and Capitol Hill United Methodist Church in Ward 6 (Oct. 1).
As Lewis George explained on stage at Union Temple on Sept. 1, community members’ feedback, in tandem with survey data collected online and while canvassing this fall, will dictate five areas of focus for her mayoral administration. In speaking with The Informer earlier, Lewis George expressed a desire to place Ward 8 residents at the forefront of her vision.
“It was important for me to start here, and to start organizing here, and to start building the framework for what will be a people-first government,” Lewis George said. “It was absolutely intentional that I started east of the river and that these voices would be the voices that I heard from first, so that we could start getting to work and having Ward 8 feel that real impact as early as possible for my administration to make people feel heard and seen.”
On Sept. 1, Lewis George kept her remarks brief before an audience that included: students from Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys; D.C. Councilmember Trayon White (D-Ward 8); D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE) Representatives Dr. LaJoy Johnson-Law (Ward 8) and Dr. Jacque Patterson (At-large); and Ward 8 Democrats Chair Troy Donte Prestwood.
Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Jamila White and former Ward 8 SBOE representative Markus Batchelor fulfilled their duties as master facilitators. Curtis Powers-Watson III, an eighth grader at Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys, also provided remarks on behalf of the youth. Earlier in the program, The Rev. Dr. Anika Wilson-Brown, executive pastor of Union Temple, spoke in support of Lewis George, who, general election notwithstanding, she had already crowned as the city executive.
“This is our mayor-elect’s church home,” Wilson-Brown said. “Her mama is a deacon here. This is just going to be a very fruitful night where we get to hear your voices, and we get to bring your energy. We want you to bring your vision, your thoughts into the room.”
Weeks prior, McDuffie and other members of D.C.’s Democratic Party rallied around Lewis George during a unity brunch. Batchelor, who counted among those in that number, gave full-throated support of the Democratic nominee, telling community members at Union Temple that their input would ensure a “decisive victory” in the fall.
Later, in speaking with The Informer, Batchelor reiterated that point. “She’s not yet the mayor-elect, and so there’s clearly an election to win in November,” he said.
Batchelor went on to describe the “Building the People’s Government” listening tour as part of an effort to further consolidate support and ensure that Lewis George starts on the right foot, with as much resident buy-in as possible.
“We know that there’s going to be political battles that she’s going to have to fight with a Congress that we hope is Democratic after November, with a president who’s already declared war on her,” Batchelor told The Informer. “It was important that we show up in numbers on Nov. 3 to show that it wasn’t just her working to achieve these goals that we were setting forth… and it wasn’t just a fraction of the Democratic Party that wanted to see her succeed, but that a whole city was backing up this vision.”
Many Voices, One Goal
April Goggans, a 20-year Anacostia resident and longtime fixture in the police accountability space, said the “Building the People’s Government” listening tour differed from community forums of the past. For more than an hour, she sat around a table with her neighbors as they, from what she recalled, confronted their biases about crime and yielded to empirical data rather than emotion.
“Some of my role could be [addressing] some of the things that people thought like the government wasn’t doing or weren’t out there [by saying] ‘Hey, here’s this thing that actually already happened,’” said Goggans, a participant in the safe communities breakout session. “People could stop and think about the foundations of their arguments and then check in with how they feel, so that we’re talking to make the distinction between what are our feelings and our anecdotal references to start thinking about systems and the goals of those systems.”
Goggans credited breakout session facilitators with creating what she called the spirit of diversity and collaboration at Union Temple. She said such energy allowed for various viewpoints that added nuance to a conversation about public safety in Ward 8.
“People who were being pretty hateful in their comments about people they perceive to be sex workers or just guys on the street …were then confronted with neighbors that could be who you were talking about,” Goggans told The Informer. “In the past I felt [an attitude] of ‘being more worried about me and the people I actually like,’ but I think the intersections of all the different people made a difference.”
During the forum, Kunta Bedney, a Ward 8 resident and organized labor representative, touted job attainment as a necessity for people living east of the Anacostia River, especially with the construction of Commanders Stadium starting next spring.
“People get real, true chances to change their lives through these opportunities and I know all about it,” said Bedney, business representative for the Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters. “I had my break at the Convention Center, Nationals Park, and helped build the African American Museum. These structures and these jobs are really life-changing for D.C. residents.”
On Sept. 1, Bedney facilitated the breakout session about employment. Moments before making his contribution, he saluted Lewis George for aiming to keep Ward 8 at the forefront of her policy agenda.
“That’s a true testament of her staying true to what she wanted to do on her economic talking points on helping people get to the middle class,” Bedney told The Informer. “Once…you can see the good that’s coming out of Ward 8 and it’s a thriving ward, I think the rest of the city will buy into what she believes in and what she’s trying to do.”
For some people, like Teresa Smith, federal intrusion, above all else, remains at the top issue. As President Donald J. Trump, nearly five miles away from Union Temple at the White House, weaponizes the National Guard, Smith said she wants Lewis George to practice temperance in her engagement with the overtly fascist figure— lest D.C. experiences another Control Board Era.
“That’s my biggest concern because it’s happened before,” Smith, a senior advocate and Ward 8 resident of 60 years, told The Informer. “For a period of time, we had no power. The new body that comes in will learn to compromise because it’s the citizens that will hurt, especially those that are not affluent.”
