Residential segregation isn’t just the work of homeowners, real estate agents, and bankers. Local, state, and federal government governments have also played a major roles in enforcing segregated housing. This history was documented on an intimate scale by scholar Mara Cherkasky and family descendant Athena V. Scott, who detail how the Scotts of Washington, DC, lost five homes to eminent domain between 1912 and 1948 while the government enabled white gentrification and maintained segregated schools in the nation’s capital.
Eminent domain is one of government’s most potent tools. This legal process allows the taking of private property for public use. Under the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, government can do so as long it pays just compensation. In theory, the government can force the sale of property against any homeowner. In practice, Black homeowners in the District of Columbia were more likely targets. As Cherkasky notes,
The Scotts’ story illustrates how buying a house was an uncertain gamble for many twentieth-century African American Washingtonians in a city whose official priories did not include their welfare or recognize the sanctity of their homes and communities.
Lucy Scott, born in 1835, and Lawrence Scott, born about 1837, moved to Washington, DC, in the early 1850s. Free Blacks, the Scotts and their children worked in the District as laundresses, barbers, teamsters, and railroad peters. One even toured Alaskan waters as a Navy steward.
In 1884, Lucy Scott’s son Edmond, employed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, paid $565 for a two-story wood-frame house on Meridian Hill, a thriving community started by free Blacks during the Civil War. In 1910, Congress appropriated money to purchase land for the creation of Meridian Hill Park, the special project of Mary Foote Henderson, wife of a Missouri Senator.
The Hendersons were the area’s largest homeowners. A “park intended to complement the gracious mansions and apartment buildings rising along 15th and 16th Streets NW,” meant the end of the modest two-story row houses on Euclid Street. Edmond Scott, amongst other local homeowners, fought the condemnation, but he ultimately had to take the $3,673.33 the Scott home was appraised for in 1912. The Scotts were one of forty families bought out, all Black except for the Russian Jewish family who ran the corner store.
A public park is undoubtedly a public use—if you can use it. It’s also a good way to increase property values, so that today’s enforced “just compensation” is tomorrow’s missed wealth. The new neighborhoods developed around Meridian Park had racial covenants to keep out non-white residents.