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.

 Book Review

The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--and How We Can Fix It 

by Dorothy A. Brown. Crown, 2021. 288 pages. $27.00, hardcover.

This book is a powerful - and very influential - exposé of racism in the American taxation system. Named as one of the best books of the year by NPR and Fortune, it is by a tax lawyer and Georgetown University Law Center professor.

“Important reading for those who want to understand how inequality is built into the bedrock of American society, and what a more equitable future might look like.”—Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist.

The author uses evidence from her long decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that U.S. tax law isn’t color-blind. This book includes the personal stories of white and black cross-income Atlanta families, to demonstrate how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of whites while pushing black people further behind. In essence, tax policies build and protect intergenerational white wealth and exacerbate the racial wealth gap by subsidizing activities and personal choices that disproportionately benefit white taxpayers. Brown's data shows institutional tax disparities in education, workplace subsidies, and wealth building - among several other slices of the economy.

For instance, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, white median wealth ($188,200) was approximately eight times the wealth of the typical Black family ($24,100). The racial wealth gap has almost not changed since the 1950s and 1960s, has continued as U.S. overall household wealth increased, and currently persists because of the huge share of white wealth.

Brown advocates the following changes:

• Publish tax data by race.
• Maintain a progressive income tax system but with no exclusions; a single deduction; and no preferential rates, such as on capital gains.
• Establish a tax credit to compensate for historical racism.

Proposals for using wealth to impose tax policy are nothing new. Prominent politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have promoted a wealth tax on high-wealth Americans. However, Brown’s wealth-based tax credit would avoid many of the pitfalls of wealth taxes.

*****

Sources: 

Read the March 2021 Michigan Law School book review.

Read the April, 2021 Appalachian Journal of Law article.