Aaron Schaffer - ��Ӱ��

Thousands debate new name for Woodrow Wilson High School

Aaron Schaffer — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 15:37:56 +0000

The endorsements have been published. Thousands of votes have been cast so far. But nobody knows the eventual outcome in the fight to rename Woodrow Wilson High School, the District’s largest public high school.

Seniors don’t even know if the name will be on their diplomas.

“I’d love to graduate with the new name,” said Wilson senior Keyla Sejas, who said she’d “finally be happy at the school I attended.”

“I’m hoping that the class of 2022 can graduate with a new name,” Sejas said. “If it’s not me, hopefully, them.”

With or without Wilson?

Amid a nationwide reckoning over race and racial injustice after the killing of George Floyd this summer, Sejas said she organized a sit-in with a friend at Fort Reno Park.

The park is across the street from the high school and is the site of a Civil War-era fort that is the highest-elevation natural point in the District.

“It was really intense,” Sejas said. “We wanted to see change because it’s 2020. It’s about time.”

The DC Board of Education decided to name the school for Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president, in 1932. Wilson, who segregated the federal government, died in 1924. Only white students attended the school until the��.

In the past year, universities with schools named after Wilson — most notably��— have decided to rename them.

In Washington, activists have been��fighting��for the high school’s name to be changed for more than a year. In September, DCPS��that it supported the renaming.

Wilson Alumni Association President Damon Cordom told����Ӱ�� that the school’s alumni that he has heard from have been split on the name change, with graduates before 1960 largely advocating for the name to stay the same.

Since the DC Public Schools system unveiled a slate of seven new, possible names for the school on Nov. 19, there’s been a vocal response.

More than 5,200 people have voted in a DC Public Schools (DCPS) poll to gauge support for the new names. Leading the poll is August Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who has so far received 31% of the vote.

Dozens of voters wrote that they supported renaming the school after the playwright because of the ease and cost. But he’s notably the only person on the list who does not have a stated connection to the District, and his inclusion on the list has given some people pause.

“I feel like they went hunting for a Wilson to keep the same name,” said Wilson parent Elizabeth Tsehai. “And that that doesn’t take at all into consideration the harm.”

“And so to try to make this a money thing is also disingenuous because you cannot put a price on the toll this has taken on Black students.”

DCPS referred questions about how Wilson’s name was chosen to DC FACES, the District’s working group for renaming local spaces. DC FACES did not respond to a request for comment.

“It would be better to make a clean break with the [Woodrow Wilson] legacy,” one person wrote on the poll. “August Wilson is one of our great playwrights, and we should honor him. Just not in this way.”

“If you step back a minute and think, ‘what is the goal of a new name?’ Well, it has a lot of repair work to do,” said Tim Hannapel, a lawyer and Wilson graduate who is a leader of the DC History and Justice Collective. “My own view is that keeping Wilson as a means of convenience or nostalgia just doesn’t get there.”

One person, who commented on the poll put things more bluntly: “Why choose August Wilson? To save on stationery?”

A banner reading “Wilson Tigers” next to the school’s football field. More than 30% of poll participants have voted for the school to be renamed for August Wilson (Aaron Schaffer/��Ӱ��)

‘We are the ones who attend the school’

Sejas and Racquel Jones, a Wilson senior who is the president of the school’s Student Government Association, said they wanted to be heard — and that their voices should carry more weight because they’re the ones who have to attend the school every weekday.

“It’s just a little irritating that at the end of the process, when we’re finally like making a change, like, it’s alumni and other people, community members that weren’t even in the fight from the jump,” said Jones, that “their opinions have more value than a lot of students and people that were praying for this from the beginning.”

“I honestly think it should be the students because we are the ones who attend the school,” said Sejas. “We’re the ones who are going to the school. We’re the ones who are experiencing everything under the school.”

Noting that high school is supposed to be a time for self-discovery, Sejas said that “it’s really hard to do that when like you’re going to school named after a racist; someone who did not care about your well-being; someone who did things that were awful and did not help your people.”

According to Jones, compounding the challenge was difficulty communicating with students, especially amid the pandemic.

Jones said she felt that the process was more advertised to community members and alumni. She said she only learned about it after attending a Local School Advisory Team (LSAT) meeting, and had to take to social media to advertise it.

If she didn’t attend that meeting, Jones said, “nobody would have known at all.”

The DC Public Schools (DCPS) system says Friday, Dec. 11, will be the last day to��on a public poll on the seven nominees. After that, DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser will pick a name to recommend to D.C. Council, which will have the final say on a new name.

In a written statement provided to ��Ӱ����by a spokesperson, Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) said she is “most interested in seeing a further breakdown of the data; specifically, how votes are distributed among our students and the alumni community. This survey is not the final metric for selecting a new name, and the Council will need to independently evaluate whatever proposal the Mayor and Chancellor send to us for approval.”

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Town hall meeting turns contentious after neighborhood racism task force makes recommendations

Aaron Schaffer — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:06:49 +0000

Over six weeks this summer, Chevy Chase residents huddled, researched and wrote three reports designed to identify equity and justice issues and propose solutions.��

Dozens of proposals in the reports prompted little to no public opposition by neighbors who participated in a town hall meeting on Monday, including one for reporting racially-motivated incidents in the neighborhood and another supporting housing vouchers.

Other recommendations, however, were more controversial, and��the��Task Force on Racism town hall turned contentious when the floor opened for questions.

Community members peppered the panelists with questions about housing proposals during a virtual town hall meeting. What started as laudatory became a war of words, with one resident saying that there would be an “uprising” if ANC3/4G didn’t take its time with the reports by the three working groups created by the ANC’s task force.

In particular, the — which critics say could change the neighborhood’s look and feel — has some residents worried.��

ANC3/4G and its Racism Task Force held a virtual town hall meeting on Nov. 16.

Reiterating their concern over a lack of community engagement — several dozen people attended the town hall meeting — members of the community even pressed the ANC to postpone a vote on the reports’ recommendations until 2021, when a new slate of ANC commissioners will be sworn in.

“Will the ANC agree not to vote as a lame duck? Why not allow the newly elected representatives to take their seats? What’s the hurry?” one resident, a lawyer, asked in a text comment over Zoom. “The desire to rush to vote really raises questions. It’s only January when the new ANC takes office.”

ANC3/4G Chairman Randy Speck said the ANC couldn’t make a decision on postponing the vote because a quorum wasn’t present at the meeting. However, Speck said there would be more opportunities for community input and suggested that another town hall could be scheduled soon.

Just two commissioners on the ANC will remain in their posts next year. One of them, Chris Fromboluti, that he’d vote against a recommendation for the ANC to urge the District to study how to expand multi-family housing in the neighborhood.��

That recommendation calls for the District to “examine how to permit familiar, modest home choices like duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes throughout our neighborhood while ensuring that those homes will be more affordable as well as compatible with the look and feel of the existing homes.”

“The one thing I’m dead against, though,” Fromboluti said, “this has to be modest and incremental change, as we said. And I think wiping out single-family zoning throughout Chevy Chase is going to cause a lot of upset in the neighborhood.”

Fromboluti, who noted that much of the area was set up through segregated housing, said his home had a covenant on it that would have restricted him from living there. However, Fromboluti said, “that doesn’t mean that you throw away the whole neighborhood.”

Fromboluti isn’t alone in his opposition to that recommendation. Another ANC commissioner, Jerry Malitz, told ��Ӱ�� that he plans to vote against the recommendation. Malitz, who did not run for reelection, said he’d received 30 emails from constituents about it.

“Last I knew, this was a representative democracy, and I represent my constituents. And I didn’t get one from anybody saying, ‘What a great idea to do this,’” Malitz recounted telling other ANC commissioners.��

A banner with a quote by former congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis is pictured in Chevy Chase on Nov. 12 (Aaron Schaffer/��Ӱ��)

Current housing conditions in northwest Washington reflect a history of deed restrictions, single-family zoning and expensive battles with developers, according to Christopher Ptomey, the executive director of the Terwilliger Center for Housing at the Urban Land Institute, a global nonprofit. Ptomey said that the way to change that is to “get some affordability into the area west of Rock Creek Park” by narrowing the gap between development costs and what renters can pay.

But, Ptomey noted, the affordability and access problem is so stark that policymakers need to look at all possible interventions “if you want to make an impact at the end of the day.”��

“And, if 20 years from now you want things a little better than they are today, you have to start addressing it with the things that are being built today.”

For all its detractors, the housing report also has supporters.

“I think that this report is a great read,” Cheryl Cort, policy director at the Coalition for Smarter Growth, told ��Ӱ��. “I really congratulate the [working group] for putting this together. It goes into good detail on how the consequences of racist policies and practices have led us to today to the disparities of today. And it then offers some very practical solutions about how changing our approach to housing availability is an important way to rectify the racist wrongs of our history and current practices.”

Meanwhile, a��by the education working group to reduce the gap in community funding for schools across the District also has backers.

Malitz says he wrote that recommendation — which calls for “equalizing community-driven school financing” by creating a mechanism “to reduce the gap in the overall additional community-driven funding per pupil for DCPS schools outside ANC3/4G boundaries” — as a member of the education working group.

Ruth Wattenberg, the president of the DC State Board of Education, told ��Ӱ�� that it was a “great idea.”��

“Depending on how you did it, it probably wouldn’t be very controversial,” Wattenberg said. “I mean, obviously how much there is and the extent to which people have choice would be relevant, but in general, I think people in schools where there are those dollars are generally pretty interested in steering some of them to schools that are in greater need.”

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Latino voters seem to rebuke Trump in Arizona as Cuban Americans back him in Florida

Aaron Schaffer — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 02:00:00 +0000

When Donald Trump won Florida — and its 29 electoral college votes — on Election Night, it came as a shock to the national Democratic establishment, which spent millions on its presence in the battleground state.

But Betina Cutaia Wilkinson, a political science professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, wasn’t surprised.

Wilkinson, who studies Latinx voters in the South, said that Cuban Americans have a history of voting for Republican candidates.

“These last few years though, we have seen more Cubans support Democratic candidates, especially among young Cubans in the Florida area,” Wilkinson said. “But it’s important to recognize that there are some Cubans who really were attracted to Trump because of his antisocialist messaging.”

Jose Irastorza, 81, who is a Cuban American living in Atlanta, voted for Trump. “Not as much for Trump,” Irastorza said. “I really don’t care about Trump one way or the other.”

Irastorza, who is retired, voted with an absentee ballot. That’s how he’s voted for a few years; he has moved between Florida and Georgia and did not know where he would be located when voting.

He voted for Trump, he said, because he’s concerned about Biden’s health and the possibility that the people around Biden end up ruling the country.

Singers, socialists and a ‘caudillo’

Donald Trump spent the last four years crisscrossing Florida. Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago resort is in Palm Beach, is registered to vote in the state. He won Florida in 2016 by around 113,000 votes.

Democrats’ outreach this year was extensive and expensive, with former Vice President Joe Biden former President Barack Obama; Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; and singer Luis Fonsi, who was born in Puerto Rico, to the battleground state this week. Biden’s campaign even released Spanish-language in recent days.

But the Biden campaign’s efforts in the Sunshine State were for naught. The Trump campaign surged to victory with more than 5.6 million votes — nearly 400,000 more votes than Biden. Trump received ��and got 55% of the Cuban American vote.

Biden Miami-Dade County — the site of three-fourths of Trump’s net gains across the state — by just 7 percentage points, a disastrous performance compared to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. Clinton carried the county by 30 percentage points.

The Biden campaign evoked Trump “as a kind of Latin American dictator, or caudillo,” which failed to resonate as much with U.S.-born Latinos who “aren’t immigrants themselves who are more concerned about jobs or COVID,” said Bernard Fraga, an associate professor of political science at Emory University.

“Trump, on the other hand, tried to use the message of painting the Democrats as socialists: appealing to Cuban Americans who are heavily Republican already, compared to other Latino national origin groups,” Fraga said. “That was more effective, coupled with his messaging about law and order.”

Trump also tried to appeal to young Latino voters with glitzy music videos by bands like Los 3 de la Habana. In a for the group’s “Trump Song,” the band dances on a boat replete with Trump flags and a painted bald eagle. Trump used the song in a — complete with dancers, food and smiling families — that has been viewed by more than 370,000 people on YouTube.

The battle for the Grand Canyon State

While Republicans gained ground in Florida, Democrats made massive gains in Arizona, flipping a Senate seat belonging to Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz.

The state will likely turn blue for the first time since 1996.

Trump, who has campaigned for years to build a wall on the US-Mexico border and restrict legal and illegal immigration, is down in the Grand Canyon State by just over three percentage points, underperforming himself in 2016 when he beat Clinton by three-and-a-half percentage points.

Some 71% of Latino people in the state voted for Biden this time around, according to a report by , a Latino political opinion research firm.

“Arizona’s Latino community is 90% Mexican Americans,” Stephen Nuño-Perez, a senior analyst at the firm, said. “In Arizona, Latinos have largely been vilified, so working within the Republican Party is just not an option” for Latinos in the state.

Moreover, “in Arizona, restrictive immigration and immigrant laws are very much more salient and present in the mind of Latino voters,” Fraga, the political scientist, said.

A supporter holds a “Finish the Wall” sign at a Make America Great Again campaign rally for US President Donald Trump in Mesa, Arizona on Oct. 19, 2018 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

That contrasts with nationwide Latino sentiment, according to Wilkinson, the political scientist, in which the top issues are “jobs and the economy, health care —�� given the fact that many were overwhelmingly impacted by the pandemic — and systemic racism against black and brown individuals.”

Donovan Carr, the outreach coordinator at the Arizona Secretary of State’s office, said he interacts with Latino outreach organizations like and the through an advisory committee that meets monthly. He said the office made sure to be “prepared ahead of time” to stay in touch with the groups.

Outreach will be a monumental task going forward.

“The future is bright in terms of the power that the Latino community will have in shifting election results in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and other states in the South,” Wilkinson said.

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White, Henderson leading in DC Council at-large race

Aaron Schaffer — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 05:45:13 +0000

Incumbent Democratic DC councilmember Robert White and Christina Henderson, an independent, lead a 23-person field for two at-large seats on DC Council as of midnight on election night. Tabulations of ballots have not yet been completed.

White ran up a significant margin in the competitive race, receiving more than 25% of the vote (84,884 votes).��White, a former aide to aide to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-DC, has been on the council since 2016.

Former DC Council staffer Christina Henderson is currently in second in that race, with 14.81% of the vote. The at-large seat that Henderson is leading in the race for was previously held by David Grosso, a progressive independent (also, Henderson’s ) who has like universal paid family leave.

Only five at-large DC Council candidates have garnered more than 5% of the vote:

Robert White: 25.03% (84,884 votes)
Christina Henderson: 14.81% (50,239 votes)
Vincent Orange: 12.66% (42,957 votes)
Marcus Goodwin: 11.93% (40,454 votes)
Ed Lazere: 11.24% (38,124 votes)

Results via DCBOE; as of 12:01am on Nov. 4.

Spots on the 13-seat council are coveted. This year’s race was fierce and contentious, at times moving into tensions and open hostilities.

Former at-large DC councilmember Vincent Orange, who lost to White in 2016, is around 7,000 votes away from second place with 42,957 votes.

Goodwin, a real estate developer, is in fourth place with just over 40,000 votes. In��January, he said he would prioritize the District’s rising violent crime rate, and he was by ��Ӱ��ington Post’s editorial board along with Henderson, who pledged to focus on education, healthcare, and housing.

Ed Lazere, the longtime leader of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, has for his supporters’ aggressive protests outside the home of DC Councilmember Anita Bonds, who supported Marcus Goodwin, another DC Council candidate.

Lazere, currently in fifth place with just over 38,000 votes, was endorsed by liberal groups, including . Nearly all of the candidates in the field were challengers to White, the incumbent who��has been on the council since 2016. White was previously an aide to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C.

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DC news outlets adapt as they gear up for ‘unprecedented’ election

Aaron Schaffer — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 18:27:48 +0000

Local reporters say they’re focused on educating their audiences on the upcoming election — and being honest about the information they do not have.

“This is something that’s kind of unprecedented,” NBC4 assistant news director Matt Glassman said, referring to the potential of not knowing the results soon after Election Day. “We’ve never had to deal with this.”

“We know people are coming to us to find out the information, so the best thing that we can do as a local news station is provide the context and the perspective of what’s happening,” Glassman said.��

NBC4 can’t rush the results of the election, he said, so the station is going to work to say “here’s why it’s taking so long, here’s what’s happening, here’s what they’re saying, here’s what this means, here’s what could happen because of this.”

He’s not alone in stressing the need to communicate uncertainty. Local journalists are trying to explain complex voting systems across the District, Maryland and Virginia.

“I think more than ever before, people are asking questions about how, when and where to vote,” WAMU reporter and editor Martin Austermuhle said, “whereas in years past that was kind of taken for granted.”

Austermuhle said a lot of coverage rests on explaining what the new voting ecosystem looks like: “what the new rules are, what the expectations are, and kind of guessing ahead of time what voters are going to need to know the most or what sorts of questions they’re going to be asking and putting that information out ahead of time, so you’re not getting it after the metaphorical s— has hit the fan.”

Other journalists have stressed the need to explain key issues voters will face at the polls.��

“Now is the time we really, really want to drill it into our listeners that these are things that they’re going to have to think about, and we want to provide them with the best information possible so that they can make the appropriate decisions that they feel are,” said Alicia Abelson, the evening broadcast producer at WTOP.

For journalists like Washington City Paper reporter Mitch Ryals, that means “focusing almost exclusively” on the hotly contested Washington, D.C., council race with nearly two dozen candidates. But the District’s mail-in ballot scheme has changed his schedule.��

Ryals says he is trying to finish his stories about the election by the time people decide who to vote for.��

“A lot of people have already voted, so it has heightened my sense for how quickly I need to get these stories out,” Ryals said.

The pandemic, too, is changing on-the-ground reporting realities for reporters.

Austermuhle, the WAMU reporter, said that one thing to remember is that “if you approach a polling place and see that there’s a really long line, it doesn’t necessarily mean that something went wrong.” Austermuhle said, “It could literally [be] that voters are standing six feet away from each other and only certain numbers of voters can be in the polling place at any one time.

“And obviously, when you’re talking to voters, just respect their space.”

TV reporters have to be “more creative and more strategic” when talking to sources, socially distancing and wearing a mask, said Jonathan Franklin, a digital multimedia journalist at WUSA9.

“It’s a little bit difficult” to get all of the elements of television stories, Franklin said. “You’re having to rely more heavily on sources or past reporting to get the specific answers that you need to make your story.”

Franklin said that WUSA9 would rely on the Associated Press and CBS network to call many national races.

Note: Glassman is also an adjunct professor at American University, and WAMU is licensed by AU. Graduate journalism students at AU’s School of Communication publish ��Ӱ��.

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Woodrow Wilson High School is getting a new name. It’s about time, local activists and students say.

Aaron Schaffer — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 01:29:47 +0000

For years, a debate over the name of Woodrow Wilson High School has gripped the surrounding community in northwest Washington. This year, things changed.

The DC Public Schools (DCPS) system on Sept. 15 that it supports the renaming of the school, and DCPS in October collected nominations for new names.

In recent months, ��Ӱ��ington Post has run letters to the editor lobbying for the school to be named after or .

The renaming won’t come cheap. A DCPS representative told the DC Council in September that the cost of the renaming will likely surpass $1 million because of the spaces, buildings and insignia that will need to be changed. DCPS that a decision on the new name will be made in December.

The decision to rename the school came amid a nationwide reckoning over race. Many institutions that have named buildings or schools after Wilson — such as — have announced that they will be renamed.

In recent years, the debate over Woodrow Wilson’s legacy has been brought to the fore. Activists say Wilson’s name — which for some recalls the segregation and marginalization of Black people in early 20th century America — should have no place in the public sphere.

A dispersed community

Woodrow Wilson High School is located across the street from Fort Reno, the site of a fort used during the Civil War that is the highest-elevation natural point in the District.

Embedded in the neighborhood’s history is a then-predominantly African American community that lived at Reno and was eventually forced to disperse, Neil Flanagan, an architectural designer and writer who has about that community, told ��Ӱ��.

Flanagan said that the community at Reno was a small farming community until 1890, when suburbs began to grow in the area and the community grew with African Americans moving to the area.��

“We know that there was community interest as early as 1899 to clear Reno,” Flanagan said. Residents were finally pushed out through the 1930s after the National Capital Park and Planning Commission (NCPPC) bought up property and evicted residents, Flanagan’s research shows.

‘Imposing order’

In 1932, the DC Board of Education decided to name the new school in northwest Washington after Woodrow Wilson, who was president from 1913 to 1921. It was just eight years after his death.

The legacy of Wilson, whose big-government administration created the Federal Reserve and a federal income tax, is mixed. Wilson also segregated the federal government.

At the time, progressivism and its proponents — like Wilson — were defined by the philosophy that “the world could be made better through human action and government action,” Eric Yellin, an Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Richmond, said.

Yellin called segregation an “impulse” for progressives like Wilson because “segregation and a legal structure in which African Americans were denied the right to vote or denied the right to public accommodations was a way of imposing order.”

“For southern Democrats — who were mainstream progressives — who would end up in Wilson’s administration, their search for order involved instituting segregation deeply and broadly,” Adriane Lentz-Smith, an associate professor of history at Duke University, said.

John Milton Cooper, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ��Ӱ�� that Wilson was “always nervous about support in the South” and agreed to segregate federal workplaces after pressure from Southerners in his cabinet.

Cooper, a Wilson biographer, called Wilson’s record on segregation “not pretty” but said in a recent interview that Wilson was “not the worst sinner and he was not a particularly unusual sinner in that.”

Yellin, who has about Wilson’s segregationist policies, goes further.

“What makes Wilson different from other white progressives who embraced segregation: it’s his presidency, right?” Yellin said. “It’s the way in which his administration fundamentally changed an American institution — the federal government — and how it treated African Americans.”

To Lentz-Smith, who wrote “Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I,” what makes Wilson’s segregationism noteworthy is “how programmatic and committed he was.”

“Washington was different after Wilson’s presidency from what it had been before Wilson’s presidency,” Lentz-Smith said, “because [the people in Wilson’s administration] decided to make Jim Crow broad and systematic.”

Woodrow Wilson High School had not yet been integrated in 1943, when these photographs were taken (photos courtesy of Library of Congress)

‘White complacency’

At the time of its founding — and for years afterward — only white teenagers attended Wilson. The school began integrating after a 1967 court decision, according to Wilson’s .

Tim Hannapel, a lawyer at the National Treasury Employees Union, graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1977. Hannapel and Wilson parent Judith Ingram met at a talk about Reno, where Hannapel says he suggested changing the name of the high school.

Their fledgling group had its first meeting in June 2018 and called itself the DC History and Justice Collective. It held a in February 2019 — in which Flanagan, Yellin and Cooper spoke — and created an that has received nearly 23,000 signatures.

Cooper described the conversation at the time of the event: “It wasn’t ‘we’ll discuss this,’ but it’s ‘[here’s] how we’re going to do it.’”

Hannapel maintains that the name needs to be changed as soon as possible, and has said that he has advocated for the school not to “issue any more diplomas bearing this guy’s name.”

“There’s this complacency, it’s a white complacency,” Hannapel said.

‘That’s just not right’

In a recent interview, Hannapel said that it took six months for the group of activists to organize.

“It’s incredibly important for us to let people know [about Wilson] in a way that was not condescending, that was not pandering, that was not beating them over the head,” Hannapel said.

Cooper, a 1957 graduate of the high school, has been among the most vocal opponents in the high school name change debate.

“It’s been a grand old school and I wish it well,” Cooper said, “but it’s not going to be the same to me without that name.”

A ripped flyer advocating to “keep the name” is pictured on a sign in front of Woodrow Wilson High School on Oct. 17 (Aaron Schaffer / ��Ӱ��)

Students have vocally protested the school’s current name as well, including by near the school, amid the pandemic.

Racquel Jones, a Wilson senior who is the president of the school’s Student Government Association, told ��Ӱ�� that students started looking towards Instagram and activism after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this year.

“A lot of students started realizing, ‘Hey, Wilson’s named after this racist man; why hasn’t the name been changed yet?’” Jones said. “‘It’s 2020, why do we still have Woodrow Wilson as the name of our high school?’”

“And it’s made up of a diverse community, there’s plenty of people of color, and plenty of black students there, so that’s just not right, that’s not fitting at all,” Jones said of Wilson. Some 29% of the school’s 1,900 students last year were Black, according to District .

“So, a lot of students were thinking, this needs to be like this name needs to be changed immediately. And not just to another white person, but it should be named after a person of color.” Jones also said that she was trying to get “a lot more student involvement” in suggesting new names for the school.

Meanwhile, Hannapel, the activist, acknowledges that there’s still work to do.

He noted that DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson earlier this month that Wilson was a “great president,” outlining his achievements as a progressive Democrat before detailing his racist policies.

The report, which from Mendelson’s fellow DC councilmembers, has since been and no longer calls Wilson “great.”

“It just reflected that there’s more work that needs to be done there,” Hannapel said. “That’s why I say the new name has 85 years of repair work to do.”

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‘Sudden’ and ‘ruthless’ murders roil Tenleytown, Friendship Heights

Aaron Schaffer — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 16:38:44 +0000

Officials plan to unveil a “comprehensive plan” in the coming weeks to address a surge in deadly gun violence across the District, including in Ward Three.

In that area, one of the District’s most northwestern wards, two deadly shootings have been recorded in the past month, with at least one nonfatal shooting also recorded.

“The District, like other large cities across the country, has witnessed an increase in gun-related violence,” Interim Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Roger Mitchell told ��Ӱ�� in a statement. “Over the coming weeks, we look forward to presenting a comprehensive plan to meet this challenge head-on with a network of resources and services to our most vulnerable communities impacted by gun violence.”

The spate of shootings has rocked the area, and MPD 2nd District Commander Duncan Bedlion has spoken at two community meetings in recent weeks to assure Ward Three residents that MPD detectives, who Bedlion says have a 68% homicide case closure rate, are actively investigating the cases.

District police blocked off 45th Avenue NW, near a fatal shooting, on Sept. 24 (Aaron Schaffer/��Ӱ��).

“Hopefully, we will be able to piece this together and be able to announce something soon to the public,” Bedlion said at an Oct. 15 ANC3E meeting. “What’s very disturbing about these particular crimes is they appear to be sudden, and they were ruthless.”

“There are promising leads,” Bedlion said, “but in terms of video, there is nothing that we can share with the public at this time.” An MPD spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of the shootings or investigations, citing their ongoing nature.

According to Sarah Bever, the vice-chair of the local police district’s community advisory council, the increased deadly shootings in Ward Three have unnerved local residents.

“People do seem alarmed by the recent violent crime because that’s not usual for this neighborhood,” Bever said.

ANC3E chair Jon Bender told ��Ӱ�� that the recent murders in Ward Three are “of great concern.” But, he said, “it’s a concern that goes well beyond our neighborhood. And although we need to take any reasonable steps to protect our neighborhood, in a way, we’re doing better than lots of parts of this town and lots of parts of the country.”

It’s been an especially deadly 2020 for the District and . There have been 141 fatal shootings across the district this year — more than last year’s final tally of 129 such shootings.

The rise in deadly shootings in the District comes amid a nationwide reckoning over racism and police brutality. In the District, lawmakers are currently whether to make permanent a sweeping package of police reforms. And Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has come in recent months by local activists seeking to defund MPD in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and related protests.

At the ANC3F meeting last week, Bedlion, the police commander, encouraged residents to report suspicious behavior to the police.

That didn’t sit well with James Tandaric, a local teacher.

“On a personal note, as a person of color, when he was saying how ‘if you see something suspicious, call the police’ … to me that that’s very racially loaded,” Tandaric told ��Ӱ��.

Tandaric said that the four or five people who wrote in the meeting’s Zoom chat that they agreed with him was “huge progress.”

“If this was like, a year or two ago, there might not be any” agreement over Tandaric’s statement, he admitted. “I think like when I made that comment, people were like, ‘okay, oh yeah, that’s true. I’m learning that right now.’”

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Bicyclists disappointed by American University’s 10-year plan

Aaron Schaffer — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 18:32:26 +0000

Bicycle boulevards. A new Capital Bikeshare station. Expansions to the two existing bike-share stations near campus.

Local bicyclists say that a doesn’t adequately serve the thousands of students, faculty and staff who commute to American University — and the neighborhoods around the university.

Although the university says that bike-share stations near AU’s main campus that are a part of Capital Bikeshare are “well-used” by students, staff and faculty, students are left under-served by the plan to build just one new station near campus and expand the others, according to Tom Quinn, an ANC3E commissioner.

‘Virtually no protected infrastructure’

The neighborhoods around the university aren’t especially bike-friendly, bike advocates say, and AU — with its considerable voice — could be pushing for more.

“At the pace we’re going, my daughter — who’s in third grade right now — is still not going to have a safe route to bike to the middle school that she would go to throughout her time there,” Ward Three Bicycle Advocates founder Josh Rising said. “So, within six years, [the District Department of Transportation] is not on pace to implement a safe way for kids to bike to a neighborhood middle school.”

“Unfortunately, this part of the city has virtually no protected infrastructure that has been built for bicycles,” Rising also said. “So that means people who do want to bike either need to bike on the sidewalk, where there may be some conflicts with pedestrians, or they’re forced to bike in the road and mix with traffic.”

A year ago, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) to triple the number of protected bike lanes in the District by adding 20 miles of bike lanes by 2022.

“The city has laid out plans previously and not executed on them,” Rising said. “So, this is certainly better than what exists right now. But even after adding those 20 miles, that’s not going to be sufficient infrastructure.”

Rising said that adding bike infrastructure in Ward Three, where American University is located, has “really been a challenge.”

“It’s clear that AU has been a real leader in trying to think about sustainability and the role of the university in addressing issues such as climate change,” Rising said. “And this [plan] is a very important way for the university to continue engaging on that.”

Bike advocates say that bicyclists have to choose between biking on the street and on sidewalks near Tenleytown (Aaron Schaffer/��Ӱ��)

But Rising says that the transportation report, which AU unveiled nearly a month ago, doesn’t do enough.

“Once somebody steps foot off the AU campus, if they’re living in the greater Tenleytown area, they have to take other roads in order to get to American University,” he said. Rising said that a more comprehensive plan could have mapped out the most densely populated areas of commuters to determine where more bike infrastructure should be implemented.

“We do know that many students live in…multiple apartment buildings along Mass. Ave. but I do not believe that we mapped where all students, faculty and staff live,” Ed Fisher, AU’s assistant vice president for community and government relations, told ��Ӱ�� in an email.

Pushing for Capital Bikeshare

Quinn told ��Ӱ�� that he has advocated for AU to push for two additional bike share stations on campus, so students don’t have to walk across campus to pick up bikes.

“As noted in the [transportation review], the university is working with DDOT and the members of the community to explore expanding Capital Bikeshare near campus,” Fisher told ��Ӱ�� in an email.

“The [transportation review] was developed in close coordination with the AU Neighborhood Partnership Transportation and Parking Working group, and as a result, has been shaped by significant community input gathered over the past several months through AU’s collaborative planning process,” Fisher wrote.

American University’s geography is not irrelevant in the conversation about bicycle infrastructure. The university’s main campus is located near Tenleytown and Fort Reno, the highest point in Washington. That presents challenges for bicyclists using traditional bikes, according to Capital Bikeshare.

“Riders are more likely to travel from uphill neighborhoods like Woodley Park and Columbia Heights to downhill neighborhoods like Dupont or Logan Circle than the reverse,” a Capital Bikeshare released earlier this year noted. “The introduction of electric-assist bicycles could lessen this imbalance by making uphill trips easier on riders.”

Capital Bikeshare from 2016 show that the development of a Capital Bikeshare station at 48th St. NW and Massachusetts Ave. NW was “scheduled to be installed in FY2016, or as soon as site-specific issues are addressed.” However, that station has not yet been built.

Capital Bikeshare and the DDOT did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the network’s Ward Three expansion plans and the Capital Bikeshare station at 48th St. NW and Massachusetts Ave. NW.

Replacing a garden with buildings

Transportation aside, there are other components of American University’s Campus Plan that are controversial.

The plan an “athletic, residential, and campus life village” tucked away in the northwest corner of campus currently made up of tennis courts, basketball courts and a community garden.

Jerri Husch, an adjunct professorial lecturer in AU’s sociology department who tends to the garden and incorporates it into her classes, told ��Ӱ�� that she understands the rationale for replacing the garden with the buildings.

“I’m over getting upset,” Husch told ��Ӱ��. Emphasizing that she is focused on experiential education, Husch said that she hopes that members of the AU community “can see their relationship to the planet” as she continues to use spaces on campus to teach.

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Chevy Chase residents want racist senator’s name erased from fountain

Aaron Schaffer — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:14:51 +0000

When retired lawyer Edward Sisson in 2008 changing the name of the Francis Griffith Newlands Memorial Fountain in Chevy Chase Circle, he thought it would be a quick process.��

After all, Sisson told ��Ӱ��, Newlands was a “really vicious racist.”��

But the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly.��

An Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3/4G resolution pushing for the fountain to be renamed, stalled in 2014, and was not re-introduced until this year, after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

In Chevy Chase, a Washington suburb, the fountain has become a bellwether issue amid a nationwide reckoning over race.

‘Extreme views’

Before becoming a member of Congress, Newlands was a developer who founded the Chevy Chase Land Company, which has been a dominant force in northwest Washington for over a century. Newlands also was a founder of the Chevy Chase neighborhood.

Francis Newlands is pictured in 1916, four years after he proposed stripping the right to vote from African-American men. (Courtesy of Library of Congress / Harris & Ewing photograph collection)��

“He basically created the concept of an all-white Northwest Washington,” Gary Thompson, a lawyer and former ANC 3/4G commissioner, told ��Ӱ��.

Newlands, who later represented Nevada in the House of Representatives and then the Senate,��“really didn’t believe in a multiracial democracy,” William Rowley, a Newlands biographer and retired history professor at the University of Nevada Reno, said.

Newlands’ “white plank” for the Democratic platform in 1912 made a case for the repeal of the 15th amendment — which gave African-American men the right to vote — and an immigration ban on people not “of the white race.”

“I believe this should be a white man’s country,” Newlands , “and that we should frankly express our determination that it shall be.”

“He definitely did have extreme views for a Democrat outside of the South,” according to Rowley, and the plank was not adopted.

Newlands died in 1917. Fifteen years later, Congress authorized a memorial fountain in Chevy Chase, which still stands today.

The resolution authorizing the fountain in Chevy Chase Circle became law in 1932. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

The National Park Service manages the fountain, though it stands entirely within the District.

Reckoning with a founder’s legacy

Five years after Sisson, the retired lawyer, sent his letter to ANC 3/4G, Thompson took a look.

Thompson, then an ANC commissioner, says he was “shocked and appalled and disturbed” by Newlands’ past and brought it up with his fellow commissioners.

“The feeling at the time was, ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t think we want to get into that. Nobody even goes inside that circle anyway,’” Thompson said.

So he set the paper aside.

Thompson says he was looking through his files as his term ended in late 2014 and rediscovered the paper. So he introduced a resolution calling for the fountain to be renamed.

It was met with . Sisson, who proposed the name change, recalled the debate.

“I was getting arguments about [how] we can’t destroy our historical past and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah,” Sisson told ��Ӱ��. “And I was just amazed.”

Though he thought he had secured the four votes necessary to pass the resolution, the resolution died after a motion to table it was introduced and supported by four ANC commissioners, Thompson said.

“The pitch at the time was, ‘Gosh, there’s just so much to think about here, we should table this and consider it at a later time,’” Thompson said.��

Thompson recalls being told that “we’re not going to table this forever.”

‘A first step in healing’

Lisa Oakley, a Chevy Chase psychotherapist, told ��Ӱ�� that she did not know about Newlands or the fountain until Thompson’s push to pass his resolution in 2014.

Oakley said that she and a group of Chevy Chase residents formed a group called and to sign a petition and ANC 3/4G commissioners about changing the fountain’s name.

More than 2,000 people have signed the petition as of this week.

Chanda Tuck-Garfield, the ANC 3/4G commissioner who represents the same district Thompson represented, said she “worked with the commission to update and modify” Thompson’s resolution with historical information and other research. That took the form of a calling for the National Park Service to remove Newlands’ name from the plaque on the fountain and create a historical exhibit about Newlands and discrimination.��

It was��unanimously approved on July 27.

Tuck-Garfield told ��Ӱ�� that the resolution was a “first step in healing our historical past.” But she’s also focused on the future, pointing to a neighborhood that is set to unveil its recommendations next month.

The ANC’s neighbors in Maryland echoed the ANC’s position on the fountain just two weeks ago when the Board of Managers of Chevy Chase Village also voted to the National Park Service to remove Newlands’ name from the fountain.

A topographic drawing of the fountain from 2016. The fountain lies completely within Washington, DC. (Courtesy of National Park Service)

Months earlier, the Newlands-founded Chevy Chase Land Company wrote in a that “should the community vote to rename the fountain, we wholeheartedly support their decision and commit to supporting the necessary steps required to make the change.” The announcement came at the peak of protests against George Floyd’s killing.

“It seems pretty straightforward,” Oakley said, “in that nobody really wants it there and it doesn’t really represent what our community is about. And I think there’s sort of, like, a consensus on that. But the actual process of getting rid of it is what seems so cumbersome.”

In recent months, residents put up a sign with a quote by John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman who died in July, and made a memorial for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the supreme court justice and liberal icon who died Sept. 18.

Chevy Chase residents created a memorial for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18, at the fountain (Aaron Schaffer / ��Ӱ��)

NPS has stated in the past that it is committed to telling the complete story of Newlands. Rock Creek Park superintendent Julia Washburn said during a July 27 ANC that “We have made the decision that we do want to proceed” to create explaining the history of Newlands and the fountain.��

In the meantime, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., have introduced a in the House of Representatives that, if it were to become law, would order Bernhardt to remove the plaque and concrete parts of the fountain with Newlands’ name.

Sharon Nichols, a spokeswoman for Holmes Norton, told ��Ӱ�� in an email that she expects to see support in Congress for the resolution “because it’s pretty simple: Newlands, the man being honored with the plaque, was a segregationist.”��

“Most House Democrats will be on board,” Nichols wrote.

��Ӱ�� reached out to the National Park Service on Sept. 21 to request an interview with a spokesperson to discuss the fountain. After ��Ӱ�� sent specific questions on Sept. 27, the spokesperson said they would not be able to respond before Tuesday’s deadline.

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One man dead, one injured after shooting in Friendship Heights

Aaron Schaffer — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 04:06:41 +0000

One man is dead after a shooting in the northwest Washington neighborhood of Friendship Heights, police said Thursday evening. Police him on Friday as Tavon Brown, 20-year-old from Baltimore.

District police responded to the area, at Western Ave. and 45th Ave. NW, just after 7:30 p.m. on Thursday.

A Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) spokesman told ��Ӱ�� that a second victim is in the hospital. That injured man was found just across the District’s border with Maryland, according to District police.

An MPD helicopter circled the residential neighborhood dozens of times as police searched the area with flashlights and K-9 units. Local residents walking outside stopped and stared at the commotion, which cut through the restive neighborhood.

Nearby homes were lit by the glow of flashing police vehicles, which lined up outside along Western and 45th.

The helicopter flew over the area for about half an hour, departing at around 8:35 p.m., according to .

In neighboring Montgomery County, Md., police blocked off part of Harrison Street, which is about a quarter of a mile from D.C.’s initial homicide scene. A K-9 unit from Montgomery County was also present.

Much of 45th Avenue was blocked off by police tape as police investigated.

“It’s been many years since I can recall a shooting [in the neighborhood],” ANC 3E Chairman Jon Bender told The��Wash. He later added, “I should have qualified my remark about the shooting to specify it has been many years since there was a non-domestic shooting. Sadly, a husband in the midst of a contentious divorce shot his wife and himself within the last year or two.”

Police have not yet located a suspect in the shootings, but used social media to alert residents to be on the lookout for a man in his 20s or 30s.

Washington police are a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.

Alert: Shooting Investigation in the 4500 block Western Avenue N.W.. Lookout for Black, Male wearing all black, 20'3-30's.
Have info? Call (202) 727-9099/text 50411

— DC Police Department (@DCPoliceDept)

This article was updated on September 25.

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Aaron Schaffer - ��������Ӱ��