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. …
by ©2019 Sarah Becker Woman’s Suffrage Amendment When the enslaved rebelled against their master[s] they struggled. To struggle, as defined by The Oxford American Dictionary: (1) make forceful or violent efforts to get free of restraint. (2) try hard under difficulties. (3) contend, fight. (4) make one’s way with difficulty. (5) have difficulty gaining recognition or a living. Do men really believe that woman’s suffrage, the passage of the 1919 Woman’s Suffrage Amendment was not a struggle? “Susan B. Anthony’s self-imposed task, for almost half a century, has been to secure equal rights for her crusade women—social, civil and political,” Ida Hasted Harper penned in 1906. “When she began her crusade woman in social life was ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confined to an extent which can scarcely be conceived. In law she was but little better than a slave; in politics a mere cipher…Is there an example in all history of either man or woman who devoted half a century of the hardest, most persistent labor for one reform?” “We little dreamed…that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the [voting rights] battle to another generation of women,” Anthony wrote in 1902. Susan B. Anthony met cohort Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851; the same year former slave Sojourner Truth delivered her Ain’t I a Woman speech. Women earned the right to vote only 100 years ago, 24 days before the June 28, 1919, Paris Peace Conference concluded. It took a world war, not a civil war for women to achieve parity. In some World War I industries, such as aircraft, the employment of women rose from negligible proportions in 1914 to 19% in 1918. The percentage of women working in other war related industries was higher, almost double. “We have made partners of the…
Prostitution laws of Virginia 18.2.347: Keeping, residing in or frequenting a bawdy place. As used in this Code, “bawdy place” shall mean any place within or without any building or structure which is used or is to be used for lewdness, assignation or prostitution. Prostitution was a prosperous Alexandria business, from the Civil War until the 1980s. “Bawdy place” defined: “It shall be unlawful for any person to keep any bawdy place, or to reside in or at or visit, for immoral purposes, any such bawdy place. Each and every day such bawdy place shall be kept, resided in or visited, shall constitute a separate offense. In a prosecution under this section the general reputation of the place may be proved.” During the Civil War Alexandria’s Gadsby’s Tavern, then known as the City Hotel, was proven a bawdy place. (Commonwealth v. R.M. McClure, Proprietor of the City Hotel, 1864) “During the Civil War,” the Virginia Department of Historic Resources explained, “the Tavern buildings were considered a ‘tourist attraction’ for their association with George Washington.” “We did Patriot duty in the city of Alexandria until April 1863,” Union Army Lt. Charles E. Grisson wrote. “There were about seventy-five houses of ill fame in that [occupied] city and of course duty compelled us officers to visit them to see that everything was quiet, etc. The girls would do anything for us in order to keep on [our] right side for if we chose we could clean them out without ceremony—Suffice I never had so much fun!” On July 22, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln approved an order to dismiss Union Army Capt. Hugh Harkins for his involvement in a pickpocketing incident in a bawdy place located at 301 King Street. Harkins, then drunk, was terminated despite his service record. In 1993 Alexandria city…