by ©2020 Sarah Becker Colored Rosemont – A Black History Lesson In 1939 Winston Churchill described the Soviets as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma;” German authorities required Jews to wear the Star of David, and black American W.E.B. DuBois published Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. Germany invaded Poland; Columbia pictures released “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and Rochester, New York, started a food stamp program. In Alexandria—on June 19—musician and socialite; heiress and white realtor Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat Thomas, Mrs. Augustus Howell Thomas bought “real estate…bounded by Wythe, Payne, West and Pendleton Streets” as part of a privately-funded housing project known as colored Rosemont. “Housing affordability is an issue that disproportionately affects people of color,” Virginia Governor Ralph Northam affirmed in 2019. The U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson the racially divisive separate but equal Jim Crow Car Law in 1896. “To Colored People—Own your own home, 5 room houses…dollars down, balance like rent,” the Alexandria Gazette suggested in 1920. In segregated Alexandria most property deeds, most neighborhoods were racially restricted. The result: “[T]here is a scarcity of suitable housing for persons of average means,” American Construction council president Franklin D. Roosevelt told The New York Times in 1925. Mrs. Thomas’ good work predates the U.S. Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer. “The parties of the first part covenant with the [colored] parties of the second part that they have the right to convey this property to them; that there are no encumbrances [restrictive racial covenants], and that the [colored] parties of the second part shall have quiet and peaceable possession thereof,” the Thomas family Deeds of Bargain and Sale consistently recorded. “Virginia Wheat Thomas was an angel, an abolitionist-minded angel,” Stanley Greene said. …