Hear From the Residents

“This is the story,” Martha Strayer wrote for the Washington Daily News in October 1941, “of how national defense is breaking up a community of 80 families and a country church which has existed for more than 100 years in Fairfax County.”

I came to Woodlawn interested in workers’ rights and justice, and the study of social progress more generally. How do we build change, and make that change last? 

Woodlawn’s history proves that progress is not linear – nor is it inevitable. To make things better, we must make them better.

My research brought me to the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, edging into the 1940s. Prior to that time, Woodlawn’s history follows a similar path as many former plantations around the U.S. First used by Native populations, George Washington’s half-brother purchased the land that became known as Mount Vernon in 1674. He transferred some of the land to George, who carved out Mount Vernon, and then George passed along some of the land to his favored step-granddaughter. This parcel is where the Woodlawn mansion now sits.

George and his wife, Martha, both owned slaves; so did the step-granddaughter. Eventually, poor farming conditions rendered the land unprofitable – even though it was effectively subsidized by slave labor. The Lewis family put the mansion and the land up for sale, and eventually Chalkley Gillingham, a white Quaker, purchased the land with some others.

The Quakers being staunchly anti-slavery, Gillingham and his investors intended to sell the land’s lumber and then turn the cleared land into plots to sell – with one major caveat written into the purchase agreements. The land would be worked by free labor only, to prove that slavery was not only morally reprehensible, but economically unnecessary. 

Chalkley’s vision proved successful: over the next 10 years, he had parceled out multiple plots of land from the original Mount Vernon estate. People, many of them Black, owned their own homes and worked the land without enslaved labor. Some of the people who owned their homes were themselves descendants of people Washington enslaved.

If we end the story here, where does your mind go? Left with the taste of success from Gillingham’s venture, you might think that the Black families who purchased land from him had been able to take one large leap forward. From enslavement under President Washington to owning their own homes on Washington’s former land, all within a few generations. It’s a nice picture – or as nice as one can be, given where it starts.

But the story doesn’t end there. 

Here’s what happens next – and where Martha Strayer of the Washington Daily News fits in. 

In the 1930s FDR is elected president to address the nation’s flailing economy. Around half of all Black men of working age were unemployed at the time.

I’ll speed up the rest of the story – my story – because this is the precise moment in time I focused on, and, well, I could go on and on.

Here’s the gist: to right the economy (for whom, exactly?) FDR institutes the New Deal, a wide-sweeping set of programs designed to create a stronger social safety net and use the tools of the federal government to return people to work.

In many ways, the stopgap works. It launches people back into the workforce, lining their pockets with money to spend and jumpstart the economy. Some of the programs benefit Black workers and families, some don’t, and others actively hurt Black workers. And in the case of the Woodlawn plantation-estate, there are some ripple effects beyond the scope of the initial programs.

In order to create jobs for people, the government used New Deal funds (from the WPA and PWA specifically) to purchase land – by force – from what was the Woodlawn estate. The government turned the land over to a nearby Army base (Fort Belvoir), and used the New Deal funds to improve the base, including adding in new (segregated) housing.

Part of the land that’s condemned is the land that the descendants of Washington’s enslaved population owned. Eighteen to 20 thriving families, most of whom were Black, were forced to move and most likely not given fair compensation for their land (the wife of a pastor whose predominantly Black church was condemned was quoted at the time as saying they didn’t even receive enough money to rebuild the church elsewhere – they had to borrow the money). The descendants of some of the white Quakers who originally purchased the land were also displaced.

Ending the story there paints a different picture of progress. It suggests that progress is not one smooth path forward but more a series of points on a scatter plot. You can try to find a general arc, but as time marches forward the plots refuse to form a straight line.

In a way, that might be dispiriting. Progress is already so slow. And the history of Woodlawn suggests that it’s liable to reverse itself, to undo all that has been done and then some. 

And yet, I take comfort in the lesson this history teaches, given the current moment. Right now, we live in an era where it appears many forms of progress are moving backwards instead of forwards. We’re undermining affirmative action and DEI initiatives instead of making them bolder and broader. We’re taking away the right to bodily autonomy instead of using advances in science and technology to create more freedom and more choice. 

The research I’ve done at Woodlawn tells me two things. Just because we’re going backwards today doesn’t mean we’ll go backwards tomorrow. And if we want to change directions, it’s in our hands. Because progress isn’t inevitable and history isn’t determinable. What we do matters – and what we don’t do matters too.

Of course, the story continues after the New Deal. But I only had a week at Woodlawn, so this is where my story ends.