A Changing Capital

Washington in the early 1970s was a city in flux, still grappling with the seismic shifts of the previous decade. Residents were reeling from the upheavals of the 1960s, which ranged from development and displacement in the city’s Southwest quadrant to the after-effects of the 1968 uprisings.Footnote ⁴ Washington, DC became a majority-Black city in 1957, and in 1975 would be immortalized by Parliament Funkadelic in their song “Chocolate City.” As white residents moved to the “vanilla suburbs,” the federal government stalled out on promised housing and failed to make repairs in the riot corridors in center city. Instead, it funded urban renewal and transportation projects aimed at new arrivals and suburbanites while displacing longtime Washingtonians.Footnote ⁵ In response, local activists in areas slated for redevelopment formed tenant organizations and focused on advocacy and self-determination. They fought against the highway projects and advocated for community centers, education, and housing. Many of them were eventually hired into paid positions through the Johnson administration’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and its local United Planning Organization (UPO), which they used to further organize their neighbors.Footnote ⁶

Along with material support from the federal government, these activists found solidarity from a host of recent arrivals also interested in making the federally controlled capital city a model for participatory democracy and self-determination. Since the Reconstruction era, Washington had been governed by three federally appointed commissioners with oversight from House and Senate committees, long controlled by Southern legislators. While there had been advocacy for representative governance throughout the city’s near-century of disenfranchisement, the calls for home rule were reenergized as Washington became a focal point in the Black freedom struggle. All through the 1960s, activists—many of them, like Stokely Carmichael and future DC mayor Marion Barry, veterans of the civil rights movement—flowed into the city. Barry arrived in 1964 with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and immediately threw himself into organizing, launching the Free DC Movement for home rule two years later. Others—like antipoverty activist Ed Guinan, the founder of the Community for Creative Nonviolence, consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader, and arts organizer Peggy Cooper—came to protest the Vietnam war, to launch countercultural newspapers and grassroots arts initiatives, or to form feminist collectives. Many of these socially conscious new arrivals worked in government offices and nonprofits that were part of the massive federal web of funding and initiatives—Jan Eichhorn moved to Washington and started a job in Congress but soon got involved in home rule advocacy, which continued to gain momentum in 1967 as the Johnson administration reorganized city governance by appointing a mayor and city council, with the understanding that it was an interim step towards full self-rule and representation. Anticipating policy opportunities that would open up with the shift toward local governance, James Gibson came to DC from Atlanta, where he had been the executive secretary of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In Washington, Gibson held positions with the UPO and the National Capital Planning Commission, then the Potomac Institute, a progressive think tank funded by the Taconic Foundation.Footnote ⁷

Unlike their spiritual predecessors—from the New Dealers who came to DC in the thirties, to the participants of the March on Washington—these newcomers were in it for the long haul: they committed to Washington as a site—maybe the site—at which to make significant change for the rest of the nation.Footnote ⁸ SNCC organizer Ivanhoe Donaldson, who would later become a close associate of Barry’s, was hired by the leftist think tank Institute for Policy Studies in 1967, commuting for a time between DC and his native New York, where he was also one of several co-chairs of the antiwar National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. But by the following year, Donaldson left New York and committed full time to Washington, writing in his resignation letter of the need to move from national mobilization and protest to local organizing for change. In his decision, Donaldson cited the potential in the capital, one that was perhaps best articulated by the local activist Willie Hardy: “Because of our unique place in this nation and in the world, we are obliged to make Washington work for its citizens; and because we are its citizens, we owe it to ourselves.”Footnote ⁹

But activists, organizers, and government progressives were not the only ones with a vision for Washington. Local business and media elites—developers, publishers, retail and hospitality entrepreneurs—had long exercised considerable informal power and influence over the city, organizing themselves into civic groups with quasi-governmental names: the Board of Trade, the Federal City Council, the National Capital Downtown Committee.Footnote ¹⁰ These exclusive, majority-white organizations and their members enjoyed close ties with DC’s actual decision makers—the appointed commissioners and elected Senate and House District committee members, and District liaisons in the White House.Footnote ¹¹ These organizations and their leadership envisioned Washington as a showplace city for the rest of the world, where people could come and gaze upon the “best and the brightest” as they governed America and the rest of the world, in the meantime bestowing profit and prestige upon local boosters by patronizing their businesses and attending their social events. Focusing on visitors and onlookers who could appreciate the political power held by this segment of the city, they strove to engage Americans taking part in the rituals of civic education or foreigners doing business with the government. Hence, the boosters were most interested in projects that would benefit this network of people and ideas: convention centers, urban renewal, and federal development and beautification—especially in the areas between downtown and the White House.Footnote ¹² Not surprisingly, they shared this vision with federal interests from both political parties, who, across the three administrations through the 1960s and into the 1970s, supported and funded multiple projects in this vein. These projects included the John F. Kennedy–era transformation of Lafayette Square and the demolition of the very last of the unsightly “tempo” buildings on the National Mall, as well as costly efforts to renovate Union Station into a National Visitor Center and redevelop Pennsylvania Avenue and its environs, all measures intended to make the city more appealing to visitors.Footnote ¹³ This made DC unique: while other cities had their own development advocates, the ones in Washington had a shared interest with the federal government, and used the symbolic language of civil religion and patriotism in order to make their appeals.Footnote ¹⁴

Mr. Nixon Comes to Washington

By the end of the sixties, all of this activity was catalyzed into an intensified focus, by the Nixon administration, on the nation’s capital. Like his two immediate predecessors, Richard Nixon was a longtime Washingtonian; he had lived and worked in the city on and off since he first arrived in 1942 as a junior attorney in the Office of Price Administration. The president had observed the changes that the city had undergone over time and was keenly interested in—maybe even fixated upon—the capital, keeping up with local columnists in the Washington Post and speaking often of his early days in the city.Footnote ¹⁵ With the help of his advisor Pat Buchanan (who himself had grown up in Washington’s predominantly white Chevy Chase neighborhood), a dogwhistling Nixon made crime in DC the centerpiece of his 1968 presidential campaign, riffing on one of Lyndon Johnson’s signature programs and pledging to make the capital a “model city as far as law enforcement is concerned.”Footnote ¹⁶ The ideal for the Washington of Nixon’s and Buchanan’s imaginations was the Washington of the 1950s: middle class, bustling with federal development, and—white. Until 1953, DC had been segregated—Black people were not welcome at restaurants, hotels, and federal buildings downtown. In Nixon’s mind—and in the minds of his affiliates—Washington’s problems had begun with its new Black majority and culminated in the 1968 uprising that saw the National Guard protecting downtown Washington, streets lined with establishments, where, two decades prior, Black patrons would have been turned away.Footnote ¹⁷ Nixon was preoccupied with questions of Black governance: Chief of Staff Bob Halderman recounted, in his diary, a conversation in which the president “pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race for which this is true.” On another instance, Haldeman wrote that the president was “really mad that the DC school board had caved in and fired a white principal and put in a black.” Washington, for Nixon, needed to be taken back from its Black majority.Footnote ¹⁸

With his ascendance to office in January of 1969, the new president wasted no time in implementing his vision for the capital. After passing a raft of new crime legislation, Nixon appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan—the Kennedy and Johnson stalwart who was then supervising proposed renovations of Union Station and Pennsylvania Avenue—as an advisor.Footnote ¹⁹ Moynihan’s unique resume reflected the intersections of Nixon’s own interests in the city: since 1962, he had overseen federal architecture in Washington. And in 1965, he had authored the notorious “Moynihan Report,” which pathologized Black family and community life, specifically focusing on “urban ghettos” in majority-Black cities like Washington.Footnote ²⁰ In Moynihan’s eyes, DC’s rundown but bustling downtown was “abandoned” and “grubby.” Talking to reporters after walking with Nixon around Pennsylvania Avenue, Moynihan emphasized that both he and the president wanted to see “shops, hotels, restaurants” as well as “luxury housing.” Moynihan, for all of his liberal credentials, was Nixon’s man through and through. When, in 1969, a cadre of liberal white elites—the owners of the Redskins and the Washington Post, as well as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution—came to him to complain about the local response to crime in the city, Moynihan castigated them for working with “Black leaders who extol riots as rebellion” and told them that they should instead “gain support for crime measures from responsible Blacks” and publicly support Nixon’s interventions in DC.Footnote ²¹

For his willingness to impose crime legislation on the city, Nixon’s public ideas about governance and oversight were more complex and contingent—especially to our contemporary perspectives. In April of 1969, the president released a Special Message to the Congress on the District of Columbia. Nixon began by seemingly reiterating the Johnsonian vision for Washington, telling Congress, “at issue is whether … its government can truly represent its citizens and act upon their needs.”Footnote ²² Here, and elsewhere, the president expressed support for home rule and congressional representation. Describing the road to self-determination, Nixon also devoted considerable space to affirming support for a strengthened local government that would take on legislative authority that had previously been held by Congress.Footnote ²³ It is likely that when he actually imagined the Washingtonians who would be taking on these new responsibilities, Nixon envisioned the Federal City Council, and other business interests—the people whom he and his advisors talked to, conferred with, and occasionally dictated directives to.Footnote ²⁴ In short, he assumed that the people in DC who wanted to govern were those who had already been governing it and was thus leaving them to carry out the goals, like redeveloping Pennsylvania Avenue, or building a new convention center, shared by the federal government and local boosters.

Bicentennial Plans; and Bicentennial Plans, Redux

The city’s initial effort at bicentennial planning, which started that same year, reflected many of these assumptions. A longtime Nixon supporter, local media executive Mark Evans, was appointed by the White House as DC Bicentennial Commissioner, and with the help of the booster-led Federal City Council, spearheaded a proposal that fit seamlessly into the federally supported efforts already underway—a world’s fair that would use government funding to continue the redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue and Union Station, accompanied by the construction of a convention center and a stadium downtown, all ideas that, according to a local reporter, “smacked of making Washington the locus of a national white man’s birthday party in 1976.”Footnote ²⁵ But for all of the enthusiasm, backdoor maneuvering, and support by the Washington Post, the proposal lost out to a similar one from Philadelphia, where Nixon needed the support of Democratic Mayor Frank Rizzo and the state’s two powerful Republican senators.Footnote ²⁶ The DC plans, the White House seemed to reason, could continue anyway, independent of the imprimatur of an International Exposition, under the direct oversight of the White House. In the final declaration, Nixon threw the boosters a bone, proclaiming that a “renewed Nation’s Capital” would “play an important role” in the national effort, and pushing for a new government entity called the Federal City Center Bicentennial Development Corporation to spearhead the efforts on Pennsylvania Avenue and Union Station.Footnote ²⁷

But despite the Executive vote of confidence, all was not well with the Evans Commission. The booster-controlled bicentennial effort dropped off after the loss of the International Exposition, seemingly all out of ideas. Undeterred, Evans pushed along by himself, sending Robert Kunzig, then heading Nixon’s General Services Administration, a proposal for a DC bicentennial that included a “spine tingling dramatization” of sound and light to be projected on the East Front of the Capitol, taking over local performance venues with “the best foreign talent available,” and a religious pageant to be called “This Nation Under God.”Footnote ²⁸ In response to this vacuum, local activists, empowered and networked during the Johnson era, saw an opportunity to step in and advocate for their own interests. Using language that echoed that of movements like Barry’s Free DC, the Potomac Institute’s Jim Gibson told a Washington Post reporter that the current DC plan was “not a people’s plan,” and the Evans Commission were “absentee landlords” not vested in or representative of the community. Lawrence Stinchcomb, who had served with the Johnson-era National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty and was then Gibson’s colleague at the Metropolitan Washington Planning and Housing Association, wrote, “the whole concept of citizen participation in the Bicentennial completely escapes Mr. Evans.” In the same memo, sent to Gibson and DC activist Ralph Fertig, Stinchcomb worried that the Pennsylvania Avenue redevelopment plan would become a focus for the bicentennial, warning that this needed to be “averted at all costs.” Instead, he stressed, “we need to emphasize the needs and goals of each and every community.”Footnote ²⁹

After meeting with a coterie of DC organizers that included Gibson, Barry, DC delegate Walter Fauntroy, and a host of other city leaders, Commissioner–Mayor Walter Washington—a presidential appointee by both Johnson and Nixon who was looking to bolster his reputation with Washingtonians in advance of the coming promise of actual elections—announced a change of direction in late 1971.Footnote ³⁰ Jim Gibson, the most vocal critic of the Evans effort, was named chair of a newly reconstituted commission.Footnote ³¹ Unlike the roster of the previous commission, which had come straight off the rolls of the Federal City Council and its ilk, the diverse new membership reflected the rising tide of leaders in DC, and included prominent local figures like Topper Carew, founder of bookstore and art gallery The New Thing; Anacostia Community Museum founding director John Kinard; Margaret Reuss, a community leader and Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia) professor; civic leader and real estate agent and longtime activist Flaxie Pinkett (as an undergraduate at Howard in 1934, she had worn a noose and taken part in the silent “rope protest” for national anti-lynching legislation); and Marion Barry. There were a few representatives from the Federal City Council and the Board of Trade as well, but they were in the minority. The new commission’s first order of business was to issue a resolution, which made clear how their effort was to be different from the previous one: “The Bicentennial celebrates America’s commitment to the principles of social justice and opportunity as embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” The commission would make sure that these principles were extended to all of Washington’s residents.Footnote ³²

Bringing It to the People: Enter the Bicentennial Assembly

Alongside the commission, which was tasked with organizing the local bicentennial, city leaders announced the formation of a two hundred plus–member Bicentennial Assembly, a mixture of appointed and elected members from each of the city’s nine service areas (these would be replaced by the current ward system later in the decade), who would be responsible for holding community meetings, planning local events, and developing a list of funding priorities to be handed to the White House, as well as working on the grassroots level to help connect Washingtonians to their city and to the celebration. In planning the Assembly, Gibson and others were intentional about such factors as size of delegations, frequency of meetings, and specific charges, looking to recent War on Poverty–funded programming like the Model Cities Commission and the UPO for established best practices.Footnote ³³

What was not announced in any media report was that Gibson’s employer, the Potomac Institute (TPI), would be underwriting initial operating costs for the newly constituted Bicentennial Commission.Footnote ³⁴ While the role of right-wing think tanks during this period (The Heritage Foundation, for example, opened DC offices in 1973) is relatively well-documented, not enough scholarly attention has been paid to their progressive counterparts who were active during this period. At TPI, Gibson worked on a number of initiatives, ranging from advising Black mayors in cities like Gary, Indiana, and Newark, New Jersey, to putting together a roster of supporters for Black arts programming at the newly opened Kennedy Center in Washington. Gibson and his boss, Harold Fleming, saw the upcoming commemoration, with its stated goals of community involvement and the celebration of participatory democracy, as a vehicle for popularizing a slate of initiatives that would better the lives of Washingtonians.Footnote ³⁵ Accordingly, the goals of the new Commission and Assembly, as laid out across new promotional materials that included brochures, press kits, and a newsletter, were to envision a bicentennial that was of the people, for the people, and by the people.Footnote ³⁶

The two hundred–plus members of the Bicentennial Assembly, an integral feature of this plan, were appointed and elected by caucus, and began meeting during the summer of 1972, most often by service area delegation (this could be ten to twenty representatives), but also sometimes in larger town hall–style meetings.Footnote ³⁷ They were tenant organizers and policy workers, clergy members and activists, mostly lower profile than the appointed commissioners, who were deeply committed to being part of a diverse coalition of Washingtonians.Footnote ³⁸ They were, above all, joiners and community leaders—people like Polly Shackleton, a Cleveland Park resident and Democratic delegate who had been appointed by Johnson to DC’s first city council, Tony Sarmiento, home in DC on a break from college and working for the city organizing youth programming, and Vincent DeForrest, who, with his brother Robert, had started the Afro American Bicentennial Corporation and, with a grant from the Park Service, was leading a charge to identify and preserve sites connected to Black history in DC and elsewhere.Footnote ³⁹ Other delegates were Dick Jones, a Cardozo-based organizer who had led protests against the introduction of the first “no knock” warrants in the nation in DC, Dick Brown, an education activist and New Orleans native who had come to DC in 1959, and Willie Hardy, a housing and civil rights activist with the Black United Front who had led protests against the segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park in the 1960s (Figure 1). Still other assemblypeople were newer arrivals hoping to get more involved in the city—people like Vietnam veteran Stephen Hallmark, a management consultant living in gentrifying Capitol Hill who also freelanced for the U.S. Information Agency and worked as a Far East specialist at the Library of Congress, and John Wiebenson, a Harvard-trained architect who had helped build the Poor People’s Campaign’s Resurrection City encampment’s distinctive A-frame dwellings and had recently helped start the preservation advocacy group Don’t Tear it Down. The motivations of many assemblypeople could be summed up in a profile of Marilyn Kelly, who volunteered extensively for community events: “young, energetic, and concerned about her newly-adopted city.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The breadth of personnel and interests across the Assembly was its key strength. As Willie Drummond, a DC firefighter and Eastland Gardens Civic Association member who became the Bicentennial Assembly’s treasurer later put it to a reporter, “as long as the dashikis and the bicycle riders can stay together, it is our Bicentennial.”Footnote ⁴¹

Figure 1.

This campaign poster for assemblyperson Dick Brown illustrates the civic involvement of many assemblymembers.

Source: Collection of Tony Sarmiento.

“A Kind of Civic Schizophrenia”

On the surface, the newly invigorated effort appeared to have the full support of the White House. In a February 1972 message to Congress that went over many of the redevelopment projects already underway in the city, the president again emphasized that DC had a “unique role to play” in the upcoming bicentennial. Naming both the Commission and the Assembly as part of a “bootstrap bicentennial” in which community members would make program proposals to the federal government, Nixon called them a “neighborhood, community-based impetus, with which I am delighted to associate this administration.”Footnote ⁴² Later that year, he pledged eighteen million dollars over the course of three years to “social action programs” in the city, to be determined by residents themselves.Footnote ⁴³

With this backing of community-based initiatives, Nixon was threading a needle: while he remained most invested in programs and projects that would benefit business interests, tourists, and visitors, he also needed the support—or at least the consent—of Washingtonians who had already successfully fought the highway plan and were now organizing against other aspects of the federal vision, most prominently, the redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue.Footnote ⁴⁴ With the election, as Congressional delegate, of civil rights activist Fauntroy, the acceleration of the home rule movement, and the continued ascent of local figures like Barry and school desegregation activist Julius Hobson, Nixon also had to understand that his administration’s hold over the District—in which he and his domestic advisors could compel appointed leaders like Walter Washington or Gilbert Hahn to introduce or support selected policy, or leave nongovernmental entities like Downtown Progress or the Federal City Council take the lead on development—was ending.Footnote ⁴⁵ The defeat of the Evans bicentennial plan, and the reinvigoration, that same year, of the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Corporation into the Federal Center City Bicentennial Corporation, were early signals that the president’s approach to DC was changing. Nixon, like other federal actors, wanted the version of DC that buoyed civic ideology, but without pushback from residents. He wanted to maintain federal control over the parts of Washington that were a fitting backdrop to his imperial presidency and cut loose the parts that were giving him grief.

And so, in the same February 1972 message to Congress, Nixon began to publicize a new vision of Washington that would seemingly allow him to have it both ways. For a while now, advocates for equity and antipoverty initiatives had been using a metaphorical formulation of “two cities” to describe the stark contrast in opportunities in American cities.Footnote ⁴⁶ Nixon picked up on this language and applied it to the conflict over bicentennial planning in Washington: “In choosing which Bicentennial projects to pursue among myriad worthy possibilities, an old question arises again and again: Washington for Washingtonians, or Washington for all Americans?” In the next segment, the president emphasized the city’s dual nature: “A kind of civic schizophrenia has troubled this city from the earliest days of its double existence as both a national capital and a community in its own right.” Nixon went on to say that the bicentennial would be an opportunity for the capital to achieve “dual excellence” by pursuing planning for both of these sides of the city.Footnote ⁴⁷ With this, Nixon could voice support for the self-determination of Washingtonians while putting resources into the parts of the city that were important to him: chiefly, the renovation of Federal Triangle.Footnote ⁴⁸ But most importantly, it started to map an ideological separation, which would soon become a physical one as well.

A Blueprint for Action

The Bicentennial Assembly, buoyed by Nixon’s verbal funding commitment, spent the summer of 1972 meeting, talking with each other, and generating a list that would be submitted to the federal government for consideration for funding out of the promised eighteen-million-dollar pot. They likely understood that Nixon’s proclamations about self-determining and empowered Washingtonians were not to be taken at face value but decided to run with the opportunity that he had handed them—that they had won with their public dissent. By August, the new Assembly had produced and ratified a “Blueprint for Action” that laid out the active and activist role they imagined for themselves, and began brainstorming measures.Footnote ⁴⁹ The list they eventually came up with reflected an amalgamation of ideas that were, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, rattling around various organizing spaces—from think tanks like the Potomac Institute, to tenants’ rights organizations like the River Terrace Association, to community arts spaces like The New Thing. They ranged from neighborhood arts centers to elder care and transportation, from youth employment to experimental childcare centers.Footnote ⁵⁰

These policy measures were of their moment, generated at the grassroots; many of them found articulation and federal support across various Great Society programs. As the historians Bell Clement and Anne Valk have documented, DC in the 1960s—one of Johnson’s “Model Cities”—had received a significant chunk of federal funding from Johnson for programs like Barry’s youth employment corps (Pride, Inc.), neighborhood community centers funded by the UPO, and Walter Fauntroy’s Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO). It is difficult to overestimate the impact of these federal monies on Washington at the moment. They reflected a vision that was shared by a wide coalition of activists—in other words, they envisioned a city that had space for the dashiki-wearers, the bicycle-riders, and everyone in between, together, who had voted and endorsed these in the Bicentennial Assembly, and who had made space for themselves in the city’s commemorative planning. Above all, the ideas that the Assembly was putting forth embodied the politics of self-determination that had started at the grassroots with SNCC and the Black Panther Party, a diluted version (self-empowerment rather than self-determination) of which had been incorporated into Johnson’s War on Poverty.Footnote ⁵¹

The ideas generated by the Bicentennial Assembly, an advisory body made up of people whose lives were connected, in one way or another, to the federal government and federal funding, imagined a commemoration in which funds would flow from the state to the people. To see and experience Washington, as well as to live there, would be to benefit from the most utopian possibilities of equity legislation. It was, in short, a model for a commemoration and for a city that could only be created by people who understood and believed in the potential for good governance and federal support, and who had experience with a wide variety of organizations and initiatives that had already been shaped, in some way, by an interventionist welfare state. If the bicentennial vision that Nixon had articulated imagined two cities running on separate tracks, the Washington that the Assembly proposed was one where the promise of America was articulated in justice policies and initiatives across schools, streets, and homes. In communicating their ideas, planners echoed and extended this ideal: “It is the policy of the DC Bicentennial Commission that all Bicentennial projects must benefit the people of Washington, that the Bicentennial will have true meaning only if the nation’s capital is improved to the point where it is a model city and benefits its role as national and world capital.”Footnote ⁵²

Over the next year, even as the Nixon administration began instating cuts to the Great Society–era domestic funding programs (primarily from the OEO; the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and the Department of Housing and Urban Development) bicentennial organizers in DC continued to anticipate the promised federal funding, fiercely advocating for support for their priorities as opposed to the more tourist-oriented Union Station Visitor Center, Convention Center, and Pennsylvania Avenue plans taking up the lion’s share of federal attention.Footnote ⁵³ Alongside this advocacy, they built community, hoping to extend the ideals shared by the Bicentennial Assembly to every Washingtonian. Local planners staged community picnics, talks and performances, and a City Celebration, a kind of local-edition Smithsonian Folklife Festival that highlighted local artisans and performers (Figure 2).Footnote ⁵⁴

Figure 2.

Posters for the 1973 city celebration capture something of Washington as local planners envisioned it.

Source: Collection of Tony Sarmiento.

Because commissioners and assemblymembers believed strongly that an engaged citizenry had to be an informed one, they regularly put out a free bilingual community newspaper, the Sentry Post, that reported on grassroots efforts, explained local issues, and profiled assemblymembers and other leaders in the city.Footnote ⁵⁵ They sponsored, staffed, and help publicize youth programs, community history initiatives, and civic education.Footnote ⁵⁶ Through the DC government, they wrote grants and budgets for community services that ranged from elder transportation to youth jobs programs, from infrastructure repairs to neighborhood heritage projects.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Washingtonian magazine put it, the Assembly “organized grassroots support so successfully that it has become one of the city’s few truly democratic institutions.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Federal Against Local

All the while, local bicentennial planners pressed the White House for the missing funding—and the White House continued to string them along.Footnote ⁵⁹ In reality, the White House had designated its own coordinator for Washington, DC, a Nixon loyalist named Bill Hart, and was using the time not only to push federal commemorative projects, but also to actively undermine home rule.Footnote ⁶⁰ In December of 1972, an aide wrote to Nixon: “In view of your private misgivings, we have attempted, behind the scenes, to divert major efforts at home rule legislation with the understanding that in the event we could not sidetrack it, we would work with the conservative Republican leadership to get as conservative and limited a bill as possible.”Footnote ⁶¹ We do not know exactly what Nixon’s “private misgivings” were (although we can guess, based on the conversations documented by Haldeman and others), but we do know that the “compromise” version of home rule that ultimately passed—one that kept intact paternalistic Congressional oversight and veto power over local legislation—was, as one frustrated Washingtonian, a HUD employee buttonholed by a Washington Post reporter on a downtown bus, described it: “a charade.” Self-determination by halves was not self-determination at all.Footnote ⁶²

As 1973 turned into 1974 and it became more and more apparent that the community bicentennial had sunk to the bottom of federal priorities for the city, the rhetoric put forth by Gibson and other bicentennial planners—in interviews, and in the pages of the Sentry Post—underwent a subtle change: rather than insisting on a vision of Washington that was an “example for all the land,” they began to mimic Nixon’s own formulation: that of a DC in which federal and local ran on two opposite—and opposing—tracks. New features compared federal and local priorities, or profiled lagging federal projects while advocating for local ones.Footnote ⁶³ Frustrated with the lack of local media attention to upcoming referenda on home rule, the Assembly disseminated information (for example, commissioning a videotape that was regularly screened at local libraries) and organized home rule events to introduce Washingtonians to the issues and mobilize them to vote.Footnote ⁶⁴

In May of 1974, as Washingtonians prepared to elect their first local government, the Bicentennial Assembly adopted a series of resolutions, later circulated to local policymakers as a report called “Building Our City.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In it, assemblymembers laid out a new role for the body—as opposed to representatives to the federal government, the Assembly was repositioned as a kind of conduit between Washingtonians and local government—demanding transparency, information, and engagement. “Citizens throughout this city,” went the leading resolution, “need increased information on and input into District Government planning and operational programs.” Several bicentennial commissioners and assemblymembers also entered the first home rule elections, some running for City Council and Board of Education positions, others for Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners (ANCs), a hyper-local form of representation partially modeled on the Bicentennial Assembly itself.Footnote ⁶⁶ The ANCs in particular, were viewed as critical to the ongoing effort—as Dick Clark, an active assemblymember wrote, “through these neighborhood councils we can shape the whole future of this city, which is the Bicentennial in the broadest sense.”Footnote ⁶⁷

But another reason that local bicentennial planners were shifting their focus to political representation is that by the time Washingtonians were voting for their first local government in fall of 1974, it had become clear that the eighteen million dollars in block funding promised by the Nixon administration was not coming. In interviews, Gibson and others blamed the distraction of Watergate and the pall it brought upon the city. Almost every other aspect of the federal government’s bicentennial plans or plans for DC were stalling too, due to mismanagement, lack of direction, or both.Footnote ⁶⁸ Both Metro and the Union Station Visitor Center were over budget and behind schedule, and another formerly high-profile plan, a Lawrence Halprin–designed “Children’s National Island” on the Anacostia River, had recently been transferred from National Park Service to the DC Bicentennial Commission for local fundraising.Footnote ⁶⁹ By that time, Nixon had resigned and was replaced by Gerald Ford, who, during his time in Congress, had repeatedly opposed self-determination for DC, even, as House Minority Leader, advocating for the replacement, in legislation and policy writing, of the phrase “home rule” with the more limited and condescending “self-government.” Gibson resigned from the Bicentennial Commission in summer of 1975, telling the Washington Post that he was “angry, frustrated, disillusioned, outraged, hurt, mad” about the entire experience.Footnote ⁷⁰

Tourism and pageantry—exactly what the bicentennial planners had been hoping to avoid—became the focus of DC Bicentennial.Footnote ⁷¹ The final two issues of the Sentry Post,the community newspaper that had formerly been filled with local stories, advocacy, and other content for Washingtonians, told the story of this switch: there were foldout maps of tour bus routes along the National Mall, accompanied by listings for events of interest to tourists.Footnote ⁷² The only program from the Gibson era that survived was a local youth tour guide employment program—likely because legislators thought that jobs would deter young people from delinquency—and years later, disgruntled youth guides told to the Washington Post that they never got paid.Footnote ⁷³

The Meanings of Commemoration

So why should we care about the DC bicentennial effort? For historians of Washington, DC, it is an important, and mostly ignored, node in the story of home rule: probably the fullest documentation of the assembled coalition of the disparate political and activist energy around the city, and, in their resolutions and concerns, and some of the best evidence of the larger forces (funding, grassroots) and assumptions (self-determination, federal assistance) that governed their priorities and praxes. For many of the people who were involved, it was a political awakening, a transition point from community or civil rights activism (usually both) into more formal political power—if you Google all two hundred members, as I have, it is striking how many of them moved into more formal roles in local politics, consulting, nonprofits, or all three. Two Assembly representatives, Polly Shackleton and Willie Hardy, served on the first elected City Council, and many more served as ANCs, held leadership roles in community organizations, or continued work in local and federal politics. In that, it is also a lesson on the limits of the activism of sixties and seventies, and how many projects—like people—who moved from the grassroots into the government apparatus, were subject to the whims of funding and policy in ways that truly limited the work they were able to do.Footnote ⁷⁴

As importantly, many of the key ideas generated by the Bicentennial Assembly (or, more precisely, aggregated into the Bicentennial Assembly from the community organizations, think tanks, and government offices where they originated), are still around in one form or another—most notably in the prism of self-determination that unites disparate areas of advocacy: from housing to education. But so is what turned out to be the DC bicentennial’s key contradiction: the “civic schizophrenia” that Nixon had introduced and, perhaps, stoked. This seems naturalized now, the conventional shorthand of federal “Washington” and local “DC,” but in the 1970s, it was a new—and strategic—formulation, meant to carve off a symbolic core for federal interests, and leave everything else as an object of criticism. For local activists, it became a language with which to articulate federal disinvestment, and in the contemporary it remains somewhere between the two. But nationally, “Washington” is represented, over and over again: as shorthand for the political and media class, as a tourist destination for all Americans. When “DC” appears, it is in the terms described by journalist Mark Leibovich in his 2011 bestseller This Town, which, along with Politico magazine and The West Wing, helped usher this myth into the present: “To be sure, the ‘real’ city of Washington has an actual elected mayor: black guy, deals with our city problems. But that’s just the DC where people live.” But the acknowledgment section in the book tells a different story: in it, Leibovich thanks the “Oyster-Adams comunidad”—the multicultural community at his children’s public elementary school in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, far away from Capitol Hill—an example, ironically, of the way “Washington” and “DC” intersect.Footnote ⁷⁵ The idea that federal DC and local DC are diametrically separated and have conflicting, and never-meeting, interests was wrong then and remains wrong now.

In general, commemorations, especially “official” ones that are mandated, legislated, and planned by local and federal governing bodies—in the ways that they capture attention, assemble coalitions, and bring funding and concrete material resources—are often clarifying: they aggregate, accelerate, and make visible ideas and efforts that are nascent. In DC’s case, commemorative planning started out with one vision of Washington, the Johnsonian “model city” for federal funding, but ended with another; what Nixon characterized as “civic schizophrenia” is still very much with us—the idea that federal “Washington” and local “DC” existed, and should be administered, on two separate planes. But the Bicentennial Assembly itself was a repudiation of this idea and offered a different model for the promise of democracy enshrined in the founding moment—a deeply participatory mode of shared governance, as opposed to a symbolic one. The majority of its members were deeply connected to both sides of DC—from Commissioner Franklin W. Proctor, a lifelong State Department employee who was also active in the Northwest Boundary Civic Association, to Lawrence Stinchcomb, whose professional work began at HUD in the early 1960s, was followed by a stint at the think tank Urban America, Inc, and continued to the Community Foundation of Greater Washington. Tony Sarmiento, went from organizing youth programs for the Bicentennial Commission to working in the DC Department of Labor to a career with the AFL-CIO’s education department, all the while volunteering with a host of local organizations, ranging from local public radio to the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center Advisory Committee.Footnote ⁷⁶

The commemorative programming that the Assembly and DC Bicentennial Commission initially envisioned put forth an image of Washington that showcased the fullest potential of federal support as it could radiate outward and proposed civic-mindedness as a part of engaged citizenship. As a slogan reproduced as a full page in the Sentry Post read: “Washington: a self-determining city, and a capital city for all Americans.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In the present day, Washington, DC, continues to contend with federal incursions into all aspects of its governance. That it does so is a direct legacy of decisions made and actions taken during the bicentennial era. But the growing statehood movement—now so institutionalized that the city’s official license plates read “Taxation Without Representation”—is another legacy, as is the network of activists supporting it. Planning for the upcoming Semiquincentennial has been subdued on the local level; and its messaging has overwhelmingly focused on potential revenue from tourism, a goal that is shared by federal planners. But on the city’s official 250 website, amid images of museums, memorials, and well-appointed hotel rooms, is a slogan that, when read against the grain, is a faint echo of the promise of the Bicentennial Assembly: “There’s Only One DC.”Footnote ⁷⁸