A Black Family’s Home was Too Close to a White School. So D.C. Took it in 1931.

 

A documentary Diminished Returns: The Black Wealth Gap in Washington, D.C. has been released examining the travails of the Black Julien family and similar stories to explain the huge wealth gap between Black and White Washington. The film was written and directed by Dr. Sabiyha Prince and executive produced by Temi F. Bennett. The documentary, which debuted in the District in 2024, is a product of iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility. The documentary features District leaders such as D.C. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (I-At Large), historian G. Derek Musgrove, and anti-mass incarceration activist Tony Lewis Jr., talking about how the racial wealth gap negatively impacts Blacks economically, politically, and socially.

The Black Julien family - direct descendants of George and Martha Washington’s enslaved maid - had 0.38 acres of land and a house on Broad Branch Road in Northwest Washington. In the spot where it once stood is now a basketball court. It was taken from the family by the federal government’s D.C. Commission in 1931. Because they were Black. “The Presence of this house, with its colored occupants, so close to a white school is a source of possible friction that is thought desirable to remove,” Assistant Engineer Commissioner H.L. Robb explained in the Evening Star.  They were not evicted because the new School needed the space: the new all-White Lafayette School was nearly constructed when the family was told to leave, and it was made clear why. This was the end of Chevy Chase as a thriving Black neighborhood.

The filmmakers examine the way these forced evictions and continuing housing discrimination have left the District’s White households with 81 times the median savings and assets as its Black households, a 2016 report showed. “It’s happening all over the country,” said Prince. “It’s repeated, and it has devastating impacts on the economies of Black households and what they can hand down to their progeny moving forward, right? Because that’s a key way in which people accumulate wealth, through inheritances,” Prince said. History and data show that lack of consideration for equity over centuries created the wealth gap. 

The film makes the argument for giving reparations to families such as the Juliens in D.C. to right this wrong. And the filmmakers believe the nation’s capital is the best place to do this because there is a precedent. On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the “Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service or Labor within the District of Columbia.”  That paid former enslavers $300 for every person who was emancipated - 3,100 in total. That cost the U.S. government $930,000, almost $30 million today.

In total, the Julien family was forced out three times. In addition to the Broad Branch Road incident, Black homes part of “Freedman’s Village,” built for emancipated people to restart their lives in 1863, were seized in 1900 with the land incorporated into Arlington National Cemetery. Another was after Julien’s family moved to Irving Street in Northwest Washington but was displaced when a school was built there, Julien said in an oral history interview with the Historic Chevy Chase D.C. The historic society currently has an educational project "Black Land Loss: Chevy Chase DC in the Arc of American History: Tracing a Black Enclave from the 18th to the 21st Centuries."

When the Diminished Returns documentary was being made in 2023, the D.C. Council was getting ready to act on landmark legislation, the “Reparations Foundation Fund and Task Force Establishment Act,” that would create a group to study reparation proposals. Renamed the “Insurance Database Amendment Act,” it is not yet codified but projected to become effective on March 6, 2025.

Read the February 28, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the December 4, 2024 Washington Informer article.

Oregon Man Pleads Guilty in Swatting and Bomb Threats Scheme That Targeted Jewish Hospitals in New York City and Long Island

 

In federal court in Brooklyn, Domagoj Patkovic has pleaded guilty to conspiring to make threats concerning explosives and conveying false information concerning explosives.  The proceeding was held before U.S. District Judge Ramon E. Reyes.  When sentenced, Patkovic faces up to 15 years in prison.  Patkovic was charged in August 2024. 

“As he admitted today, the defendant intentionally targeted Jewish hospitals and care centers in our District with bomb threats.  In doing so, he needlessly endangered patients and staff and diverted critical law enforcement resources from their core mission of keeping our community safe,” stated U.S. Attorney Durham. “We will prosecute dangerous bomb threats and swatting schemes to the fullest extent of the law.” Swatting is a criminal harassment act of deceiving an emergency service into sending a police or emergency service response team to another person's address.

According to prosecutors, Patkovic was part of a crew of troublemakers who began making anonymous threatening calls to Jewish hospitals and facilities on Long Island among other targets throughout the country in May 2021 - and livestreamed the hoaxes on social media and electronic devices. As set forth in the indictment and in court filings, the defendant himself made threats in at least six separate calls to hospitals (when he told hospital staffer he wanted to kill all Jews, using an antisemitic slur, according to prosecutors) and on a call with local law enforcement who had responded to a 911 notification from one of the hospitals. On several occasions, local police responded to the scene and conducted bomb sweeps. On at least one occasion in September 2021, the hoax bomb threat resulted in a partial evacuation and lockdown of an entire hospital on Long Island. No explosive devices were ultimately found in any of the locations.

Durham expressed his appreciation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office, the New York City Police Department, Nassau County Police Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon for their assistance on the case.

Read the February 19, 2025 DOJ article.

After Neo-Nazis Targeted a Majority-Black Town. Locals Launched an Armed Watch

 

On February 7th, a U haul van full of neo-Nazis gathered in the predominantly Black Cincinnati suburb of Lincoln Heights, which boasts a modest population of 3,144 people. They wore masks and carried guns as they called residents racist slurs. The group of white supremacists also waved flags with red swastikas on a highway overpass. The town originated as a self-governing Black community for laborers blocked from Cincinnati and surrounding towns because of their race, and is the oldest north of the Mason-Dixon Line, it proclaims on its website. The neo-Nazis also marched that same day in Evendale, a nearby village. 

Two weeks after that disturbing incident, someone - presumably another white supremacist - spread racist pamphlets from the Ku Klux Klan all over Lincoln Heights. Disappointed by local law enforcement officials who did not spring into action to protect them, Black residents have now taken things into their own hands.

Lincoln Heights' police department was disbanded in 2014; the area is served by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Following the February 7th demonstration, residents - alongside Hamilton County Commissioner Alicia Reece - questioned why police made no arrests or citations after the neo-Nazis intimidated residents and threatened racist violence. Evendale police also released body-camera footage showing officers being cordial with the masked group. 

As a result, the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program was formed. Black men now are carrying rifles to guard the roads that lead directly into Lincoln Heights, questioning anyone trying to enter. Ohio is an open-carry state and folks are taking advantage of that, according to spokesperson Daronce Daniels, a spokesman for Program, which coordinates the guards who serves as guards for Lincoln Heights. The program directs members to report suspicious activity to the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office.“ An American individual protecting his homeland with a firearm - I thought that was the most American thing that we [could] do,” he said.

The Hamilton County prosecuting attorney’s office is reviewing the neo-Nazi rally to determine if it will make criminal charges but said it would take time to complete a thorough assessment given the volume of evidence.

Daniels said the Lincoln Heights guards will continue patrolling their village for the foreseeable future. They feel they are still under threat. 

The Village of Lincoln Heights and members of the Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church have initiated a public boycott of Evendale after their frustration with the Evendale Police Department (EPD) and Evendale leaders regarding the neo-Nazi demonstration that occurred February 7th. The Rev. Dr. Julian Cook, pastor of the Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church, said at a February. 24  press conference at the church that no arrests or citations have been made by the EPD in connection with the incident. However, he expressed appreciation for  Evendale officials’ decision to hire a third-party team to evaluate their handling of the demonstration.

Read the February 27, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the February 25, 2025 NBC News article.

Read the February 27, 2025 Cincinnati Herald article.

Obituary: L. Clifford Davis, Civil Rights Lawyer & Judge, 100

 

Davis was a civil rights lawyer in the 1950s who helped integrate Texas public schools that had resisted the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the principle of “separate but equal.” He recalled assisting Thurgood Marshall, then the chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, with the legal work supporting Brown v. Board of Education, which ended with a unanimous 1954 US Supreme Court decision in which the justices ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

After graduating from Howard University School of Law in 1949, Davis practiced civil rights law in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, one of nine Black lawyers in the entire state. Seeing a greater need for his services in Texas, where racial segregation was more prevalent, he moved to Texas. He became licensed in Texas in 1953, and in 1954, moved to Fort Worth, where he was one of only two Black lawyers in the city.

In 1955, Davis was the lead attorney in a lawsuit, Jackson v. Rawdon, seeking the admission of several Black students to public schools in Mansfield, a Fort Worth suburb that was then a farming community. A federal appeals court judge ordered that the schools integrate. Despite that ruling, and despite the US Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Brown, segregationists in the district fiercely opposed the mandate.

As the new school year began in 1956, mobs tried to prevent Black students from entering the local high school. A Black student was hung in effigy from a noose downtown. Other effigies were hung at the school entrance and from a flagpole. Gov. Allan Shivers, a Democrat who had denounced the Brown decision, dispatched the Texas Rangers. At one point, according to an account in the New York Times, an Episcopal minister attempted to quell the mob, remarking that it was difficult to “put the Bible’s ‘love thy neighbor’ together with this crowd.” “This ain’t a ‘love thy neighbor’ crowd!” one of the White resisters yelled back. Davis conceded it was simply too dangerous to send Black students into Mansfield High School. “All we were asking them to do was to just follow the law,” he told the Dallas Morning News in 2003. “That’s all. The appeals court ordered the [trial] judge to follow the law, that’s all. He entered the integration order, but we couldn’t go into the schools. It would have been totally unsafe for us to go.”

In 1959, Davis filed Flax, et al. v. Potts, another federal civil rights suit, which led to the desegregation of the Fort Worth Independent School District. He was lead attorney on many noteworthy cases over his career, including the race discrimination class action suit against General Dynamics, In the 1960s he became one of the first Black lawyers to join the Tarrant County Bar Association and in 1983, he was first appointed and then elected to the Texas Criminal District Court No. 2 district court bench, becoming one of the first Black state district judges in Tarrant County, where he served on the bench until 1988.

Davis received numerous awards from other social organizations. He was recognized by his peers in 1997 when he received the Tarrant County Bar Association's highest award and was inducted into the National Bar Association Hall of Fame. He was also recognized by the NAACP and awarded the “William Robert Ming Award” for his efforts with their legal affairs.

Read the February 21, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the obituary by the L. Clifford Davis Legal Association.

102-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor is Vogue Germany’s Cover Star

A 102-year-old Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered at Auschwitz is the cover star for the July/August edition of Vogue Germany. Margot Friedländer, née Bendheim, was born in Berlin in 1921. According to a brief bio on the website of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Friedländer spent the early part of the war with her mother and younger brother Ralph after her parents separated. They had plans to flee the country but in 1943 her brother was arrested by the Gestapo. Their mother confronted the Gestapo, which led to her being deported to Auschwitz with her son, where they were both murdered. But before leaving, she left behind a message for her daughter that read: “Try to make your life.” Friedländer, then just 21 years old, went into hiding but was ultimately betrayed by “catchers” and was sent to Theresienstadt camp in the then-Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia in 1944, according to the museum.

Kerstin Weng, head of editorial content at the magazine, said that the theme of the issue was love, featuring their “favorite pieces, favorite people.” The front of the collector’s issue includes the word “love” written by Friedländer, as well as her signature. The multi-page piece, which includes numerous shots of Friedländer, covers a range of topics, from growing up in Nazi Germany to her commitment as a Holocaust survivor today. The collector's issue of Vogue Germany is available on newsstands from June 22.

Friedländer met her future husband, Adolf, while in the Nazi concentration camp, and married him soon after liberation. The pair emigrated to the US in 1946 and lived in New York for more than six decades. But in 2010, following her husband’s death aged 88, Friedländer moved back to Berlin. Ever since, she has been campaigning as a Holocaust educator. Her tireless efforts have earnt her numerous awards, including the Federal Cross of Merit First Class.

Friedländer told Vogue Germany that she was “appalled” by the growth of right-wing populism and the rise of antisemitic attacks. When addressing the issue of society becoming more polarized, she said: “Look not toward what separates us. Look towards what bring us together. Be People. Be sensible.” Grateful for the opportunity to pass on her message, she said: “You will carry my story onward. That this never comes to happen again.”

Read the June 20, 2024 CNN.com article.

Book Review: "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" by Dylan C. Penningroth

 

In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth shows that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” they made Black rights usual. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself.

Free Black people participated extensively in credit, debt and contracts in the decades before the Civil War. According to Penningroth, by 1860, there were over 16,000 free Black property owners in the South who held property worth nearly $8.8 billion in today’s dollars. Freedom meant that they could ask local judges to protect their rights, and they went to court in cases involving farms, cows and myriad other types of property. Black homeownership rose from 43,000 families in 1870 to over 500,000 families in 1910 (about 1 in 4 Black families nationwide). Black farmers owned more than 15 million acres and $208 billion in farm property (in today’s dollars). Lynchings also rose sharply in these years, and not coincidentally. 

"Penningroth's conclusions emerge from an epic research agenda.... Before the Movement presents an original and provocative account of how civil law was experienced by Black citizens and how their 'legal lives' changed over time . . . [an] ambitious, stimulating, and provocative book." - Eric Foner, New York Review of Books.

The author is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. The book, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of the author's own family. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life.

Read the September 26, 2023 Washington Post article.

US Antisemitic Incidents Surge to Record High

Reports of antisemitic incidents in the US have reached a record high since last year's Hamas attack in Israel, according to a preliminary report from the Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism (ADL). The group found over10,000 incidents from 7 October 2023 to 24 September of this year, more than a 200% increase compared to the same period last year. It is the highest ever since the ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979.

The report is days after the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement warning of possible violent threats amid the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East. Since last October’s Hamas attack on Israel which saw around 1,200 people killed "Jewish Americans haven’t had a single moment of respite,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Instead, we’ve faced a shocking number of antisemitic threats and experienced calls for more violence against Israelis and Jews everywhere.”

The antisemitism episodes reported by the ADL included about 8,015 incidents of verbal or written harassment, 1,840 incidents of vandalism, and 150 incidents of physical assault. The states with the highest number of recorded cases were California, with 1,266 incidents, New York 1,218, New Jersey  830, and Florida 463. The ADL expects its preliminary numbers to increase as it receives more data. The final report for 2024 will be published in the spring of 2025.

Part of the overall increase comes from a change in methodology to include "expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism", the ADL said. The ADL's preliminary report counted over 3,000 of incidents during anti-Israel rallies "which featured regular explicit expressions of support for terrorist groups", including Hamas and Hezbollah. Excluding these incidents, the ADL counted 7,523 episodes of antisemitism, a 103% increase from 2022.

The continued violence in the Middle East region has led to a surge in anti-Muslim and Islamophobic incidents across the US. Anti-Muslim incidents were 8,061 in 2023, according to a report from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released this April. This was the highest level since CAIR began tallying almost 30 years ago, with nearly half coming after the 7 October attack.

Read the October 6, 2024 BBC News article.

Police investigate antisemitic graffiti found at Bethesda school

Montgomery County police are investigating antisemitic graffiti discovered at Bethesda Elementary School on August 11th. The school’s marquee sign was defaced with a statement: “Israel rapes men, women and children,” in red spray paint. The nearby crosswalk and sidewalk also were painted with similar statements and “Free Gaza,” as was a nearby building in the 4900 block of Del Ray Avenue. Authorities were investigating the incident as a bias-related crime.

Several families with young children saw the graffiti while going to the market located there on Sundays, said Guila Franklin Siegel, associate director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. Siegel said the farmers market is owned by a Jewish person and located in a neighborhood with several synagogues nearby. A few families with young children, and the Bethesda Urban Partnership helped to clean up the vandalism.

Thomas Taylor, superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, called the incident horrifying, adding that he was grateful for the volunteers who cleaned up the vandalism. He said that the school district is partnering with organizations to train staff on how to address hate and bias in the classroom, which he said “will ultimately have a ripple effect in the community and spread to our community.”

Read the August 12, 2024 Washington Post article.

Ben Stern, Holocaust survivor who challenged neo-Nazis, 102

Stern, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, nine Nazi concentration camps, and two death marches, helped rally opposition to a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in Skokie, Illinois, in the 1970s. He also spoke to hundreds of audiences about Antisemitism and prejudice. Stern, a Polish-born Jew, lost his parents, his sister, and six of his seven brothers in the Holocaust. He evaded the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other Nazi camps and was marched for weeks before his liberation in 1945.

In the US, Stern established a chain of laundromats across Chicago and settled with his family in the suburb of Skokie, home to a large Jewish community and an estimated 6,000 Holocaust survivors.

In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America, a small group of neo-Nazis led by Frank Collin, announced plans for a rally in Skokie. In a legal battle that ultimately landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, Stern joined other activists to try to stop them.

The neo-Nazis were represented in court by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose principal lawyer faced death threats for arguing that even speech as abhorrent as that of neo-Nazis must be defended if the First Amendment protection of free speech is to last. The neo-Nazis won their legal proceedings because their speech was rules to be protected under the First Amendment. But they canceled their rally in Skokie, partially because they were faced with a massive counter-demonstration organized by Jewish groups and activists including Stern, who had written letters to the editor, appeared on television, gathered petitions, and rallied people to the cause.

Stern later spoke to hundreds of audiences about his experience in the Holocaust. He also protested anti-Muslim bigotry in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Trump administration policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border.

Stern once talked with Ira Glasser, who, after becoming executive director of the ACLU in 1978, had strongly defended its representation of the neo-Nazis in their petition to gather in Skokie. Scheduled to speak together on a panel in California, Stern and Glasser met at the airport and Stern extended to him a hand and said, “We’re not going to agree, but we’re going to be friends.” “There was no meeting of the minds,” Glasser later commented. “His agony was too imprinted on his soul by what happened to him. And I remember thinking that if I were in his [place], I would probably be taking the same position.” Stern’s defiance, Glasser said, had been “heroic.”

Stern and his daughter wrote his 2022 memoir, Near Normal Man: Survival with Courage, Kindness and Hope (Redwood Publishing). She also produced a documentary based on the book, which is available on YouTube. 

*****

Read the March 12, 2024 Washington Post article.

Read the February 5, 2023 Berkeleyside article.