Session Abstract

Recently, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., opened an ongoing exhibition entitled "Symbol and City."  By highlighting the "tension" between "the desire for a national symbol, and the hopes and needs of an evolving city," this architectural exhibition highlights a theme of urgent interest to historians of American race relations and of the nation's capital.  For over two hundred years, racial struggles in Washington simultaneously reflected the city's distinct history and its strategic significance in national politics.  From antebellum conflicts over political power to twentieth-century civil rights struggles, local residents and national leaders alike attempted to align life in Washington with their conflicting visions of democracy.  While political historians frequently link the actions of the federal government to the lives of the nation's citizens, fewer take seriously the connection between the workings of the city itself and Americans' ideas about race and democracy. In each of the eras discussed by our panelists, Washington represented both a distinct American place and a "model" for the nation.  For many, Washington served as a laboratory for race relations and a crystal ball for America's racial future. Perhaps more than any other American place, the nation's capital reveals how local struggles take on broader historical significance and explanatory power.  Furthermore, the ideas and images that Americans projected onto their capital and "model city" profoundly influenced ongoing national debates over race and place. Washington's duality provides a fascinating and instructive challenge for scholars balancing singularity and synecdoche.  Indeed, the historians on this panel contend that knowing a place and its people well is essential to telling stories that are ambitious in scope.  Like the panel's unifying theme, the panelists themselves embody Washington's dual role as urban space and national symbol—two represent D.C. universities and four more come from various corners of the country.  The first presenter, Chris Myers Asch, explores how D.C. residents, white and black, responded to the massive influx of working-class Irish immigrants in the 1850s and how those immigrants altered the balance of power in the city.  Shifting focus to the federal government, Samuel Schaffer examines the impact of the Wilson administration's pro-segregation policies on black Washingtonians and the "trickle-down discrimination" that spread outward from the nation's capital.  Jason Morgan Ward follows that story to Jim Crow's last days, when white supremacists and black activists alike invoked Washington's "southern" racial order in the civil rights battles of the 1940s and 1950s.  Like Woodrow Wilson, A. Phillip Randolph believed that the battle over Jim Crow in the nation's capital would determine segregation's fate nationwide.  Finally, George Derek Musgrove explores the lost opportunity of Jesse Jackson’s five-year term as D.C. Shadow Senator (1991-6).  A committed group of local and national activists had created the position in 1990 in the hopes that it would become a powerful bully pulpit for advocates of D.C. statehood.  Instead, through neglect and congressional hostility it has become a powerless and insignificant position.  Taken together, these papers reveal the ongoing tension between local struggle and national politics in Washington.