The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

AT A dinner party on a June evening of 1790 in New York City, a historic bargain was struck. Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, argued over the table at President George Washington’s residence that the new Union could be preserved only if the federal government assumed the separate and heavy debts of the states. Jefferson later wrote that “it was observed that this pill would be peculiarly bitter to the Southern states and that some concomitant measure should be adopted, to sweeten it a little to them.” The sweetener was a decision to locate the national capital on the Potomac near Georgetown rather than on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania.

The Founding Fathers, in this “compromise to save the Union,” gave the Congress the power of “exclusive legislation” for the District of Columbia, though their expectation was that its municipal affairs would be run by a locally elected council. But local government was abolished by Congress in the 1870s, and ever since the Senate and the House of Representatives have performed all the city’s legislative functions, with presidentially appointed commissioners serving as the executive.

Today the city of Washington, ninth largest in the nation, like every other great American city suffers from hardening of the municipal arteries. Schools, highways, zoning, public welfare, and all the other familiar problems are also Washington problems. But because Washington is not just an agglomeration of nearly 800,000 people but the national capital and the capital of the free world, to which 106 diplomatic missions are accredited, its problems are unique.

The city’s problems are complicated by its ever-increasing Negro population. Washington, by the 1960 census, had the largest proportion of Negroes of any city in the nation — 53.9 percent, compared with 14 percent in New York City, for example, and the national average of 10.5 percent. Furthermore, the public school population is now 83.4 percent Negro. Even counting the predominantly white parochial schools and white private schools, the city’s student population is well over half Negro. And the figure will increase, for the bulk of the city’s population of childbearing age is Negro.

In the post-war years, the whites in the same age bracket have streamed to the suburbs of Washington much as they have elsewhere. The Negro cannot follow even if he can afford it, as a few can, because housing in most of the Maryland and Virginia suburbs is denied Negroes through one device or another. Racial bars in schools have been significantly dropped in nearby Maryland, but only in a token way in nearby Virginia. As the District’s school superintendent has put it: “The Negro population is remaining fairly restricted to the District’s boundary lines, while the white population has more flexibility and is moving beyond these lines. This situation increases the amount of de facto segregation. The Negroes coming into the area must come to downtown neighborhoods for available private housing.”

Job discrimination

The federal government is the Capital’s biggest employer, and the Kennedy Administration has tried hard, and with considerable success, to move more Negroes into the higher job categories. Civil service agents have toured the Negro colleges encouraging students to apply for federal jobs. But this is a long process, and, indeed, many who have taken the civil service exams have proved to be inadequately educated despite their degrees.

Private business in the District has been prodded to increase Negro employment. There has been pushing by Administration officials and others interested in civil rights, and by Negro groups, who have on occasion successfully threatened boycotts. Yet, only recently the staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission declared that six leading private business schools in Washington either refuse to admit Negroes, or segregate them. These schools, he commented, “are the significant avenues through which a person can secure a job in Government and private business, since they have working relationships with the major personnel offices, public and private.” Negroes miss out on opportunities to learn typing and businessmachine and stenotype operation and do not get executive secretarial training — all skills for which there is a constant demand in the Capital.

A recent study of unemployment in the Capital showed that seven of every ten out of a job were Negroes. Further, the average nonwhite family earns but 56 cents for every dollar earned by the average white family, despite the fact that many Negro families have two breadwinners. Last year, what was widely viewed as a welfare scandal, investigated by a Senate subcommittee, showed what everybody knew: that thousands of Negro women were living with men to whom they were not legally married, and that hundreds of them were drawing welfare aid for their children, despite a legal requirement barring such aid when there is a man in the house.

This problem was solved in the best bureaucratic manner by cutting the children off the aid roll. One result was to jam-pack with such children the city’s Junior Village, where, ironically, it costs far more to maintain a child. At Junior Village, 712 children recently were living in quarters for 320, with 80 attendants in charge.

Crime and juvenile delinquency are on the increase in Washington, as in many other places. The Negro is more than ever involved, and a number of recent attacks on congressional secretaries, as well as other forms of violence, have made many sections of the city — and not just predominantly Negro neighborhoods — seem unsafe places for the average citizen to venture even in daylight, let alone at night. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who had made a federal venture into the delinquency problem, has tried to give a hand to the Capital. This has helped to highlight the problem but not to solve it.

The situation of Negroes in Washington has been complicated by the arrival of many blackskinned diplomats from Africa. Cases of discrimination in housing and restaurants have had wide publicity both here and abroad, to the detriment of American foreign relations. The State Department has made valiant efforts to meet the housing problem for such diplomats, but custom and prejudice often cannot be altered by either persuasion or executive fiat. The concern of the government to help visiting Negroes, however, has an unfavorable effect on the resident American Negro. As a Howard University sociologist put it, Washington Negroes are “forced to stand apart from others — even other colored people.” Their bitterness increases.

Thanksgiving Day race riot

All of the facts described here form the backdrop for what took place in Washington’s new and magnificent D. C. Stadium last Thanksgiving Day. A crowd of 50,000 jammed the stadium for the annual citywide high school football play-off, between Eastern High, a predominantly Negro public school, and St. John’s, a predominantly white Catholic school. At game’s end, some 2000 spectators rushed onto the field, most of them Negroes, and created the most serious race riot in Washington’s history since World War I days.

Scores were hurt, some were hospitalized, all were the victims of an upwelling of racial bitterness which alarmed the community and so frightened school officials that further games were canceled. The public schools named President Eisenhower’s former youth-fitness director, Shane McCarthy, to head a citizens’ panel to look into the causes and find a cure. He had been at the game himself, and on the way out a 14-year-old niece with him was slapped by a woman.

The Negro’s best weapon

All across the nation the American Negro, by one means or another, has been increasingly active these past few years in fighting for what he considers his rights. And the federal government, as evidenced by the troops sent to the University of Mississippi in the James Meredith case and by the suits to enforce voting rights in many states, as well as by further moves in school desegregation, is increasingly active. But more and more the feeling in the Capital is that the best weapon the Negro citizen has is the vote. Where he has it, he has political power to force a better deal for members of his race in many fields.

The local franchise in the District of Columbia existed until 1871, and thousands of Negroes newly arrived from the South in the wake of the Civil War were allowed to vote. This naturally engendered opposition, and it helped lead to a territorial plan of government in 1871-1874, and finally, in 1874, to total disenfranchisement, which has existed to this day.

There is a rudimentary franchise every four years, when those who admit to membership in either the Democratic or Republican Party do vote on delegates to their national conventions and local political officials. But most civil servants either vote in their home states by absentee ballot or avoid party affiliation altogether.

In 1964, under the latest amendment ratified in the federal Constitution, the District of Columbia will for the first time participate in a presidential election. The city will have three electoral votes, and in a close election, at least, they could be meaningful. Already the local party politicians have begun to stir themselves, with both sides realizing that the Negro, if he does vote, will be critical to the outcome.

The coming of a presidential vote will give the Negro community in the Capital a sense of power; of that there is no doubt, though it may take a while to get enough of them to register and cast ballots. But the Negro problem, the bread-and-butter problem, is centered in the municipal area, and here Lhe prospects are dim. Schools in the District were quickly desegregated after the Supreme Court’s historic ruling; restaurants were desegregated by some clever legal work induced by private citizens; and other steps to progress have been taken.

But in the end any issue generally comes back to a question of what the “city council” will do in terms of money for schools, welfare, playgrounds, the police department, and other services. And Washington’s “city council” is the Congress of the United States, which is busy with weightier questions.

Who runs the capital city?

The city’s business on Capitol Hill is controlled through the Senate and House District Committees. The Senate committee, whose current chairman is sympathetic Senator Alan Bible of Nevada and whose conscience is liberal Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, has by and large tried to do right by the city and its Negro citizens.

But in the House of Representatives, the chairman long has been Representative John McMillan of South Carolina, ably backed by a combination of fellow Southerners and Republicans like Congressman Joel Broyhill, who represents the adjacent areas of Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington.

The two appropriation committees, which hold the city’s purse strings, generally lean more to the McMillan view than to the Bible view, though they have granted some recent increases in the federal payment the Congress votes to the city’s budget in lieu of taxes on the vast amounts of government nontaxable property. In addition, the tax base is constantly whittled away by congressional grants of tax-free status to more and more so-called nonprofit organizations with headquarters in the national capital.

McMillan and others like him, including the powerful chairman of the House Rules Committee, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, balked all attempts to grant home rule to the District. They based their arguments on the principle of the federal interest, but the root of their objection was the enfranchisement of the Negro. Now that the Negro population has swollen so in the city, and now that the Republicans in the South are trying to be more segregationist than the Democrats, the resistance is likely to be even harder, if that is possible.

The need for home rule

On several occasions the Senate has passed local home-rule bills for the city, but the bills have never even emerged from the House District Committee; usually they do not even get a hearing. Probably now the argument will be to wait and see how the voting turns out in the presidential election. Insofar as the Southerners and conservative whites were concerned, the constitutional amendment to let the District’s residents vote for President was passed as a substitute for home rule, as the lesser of two evils.

Yet it is more and more obvious that the situation is getting too ugly; the Negro leadership was shocked at the rioting on Thanksgiving Day and is trying to take stock of itself, but that is not likely to halt the militants or to lessen the amount of unemployment, the number of school dropouts, and the high rate of delinquency among Negroes. An explosion of even worse proportions can be expected if matters continue to drift.

The problem of the American Negro is increasingly on the conscience ol the nation’s white majority. But in the national capital, where the Negro feels so hemmed in, and indeed is, only Congress can relieve the pressures. Long ago Lincoln Steffens wrote his famous Shame of the Cities. Washington is a prime example of a modern-day version of municipal shame.

Mood of the Capital

As the New Year opened, Washington was in a cheerier mood than it had been since the first years of post-World War II euphoria. No one was saying that what once was called “the American century” had finally arrived. But there was a feeling that the Cuban affair had marked a turning point in East-West relationships.

The Soviet backdown, coupled with internal Communist bloc troubles and the increasing strain on Russian resources, at least gave government officials a feeling that the tide has turned. No longer do Soviet diplomats around the world — not to mention the satellite diplomats — appear so certain that MarxismLeninism has all the answers and that Communism is inevitably the wave of the future.

Against this backdrop of an improved psychological atmosphere, however, there remain all the world’s troubles and the continuing arms race. Cuba, of course, solved none of these problems. But it did give the President and his associates a sense of renewal as they set out to tackle the problems of 1963.