Developers, government officials, and newly arrived White residents forged a new exclusionary landscape built to promote the suburban American Dream for themselves and those who looked like them. In the post-World War II era, Fairfax County like other localities across the U.S. was a place where the majority of White Americans, who defined themselves as middle-class, became homeowners in newly developed suburbia. From one end of Fairfax to the other, their bulldozers demolished physical reminders of Black life and Black communities, replacing Black geographies with White geographies.

An examination of public records reveals that what development boosters have called a modern “struggle for a great American county” was founded in fact on what this report views as a “culture of clearance.” This culture altered the face of Fairfax County. Bulldozers as the symbol of “destruct[ive] . . . progress,” razed established Black communities to make way for new modern middle-class suburbs. A U.S. invention born of the industrialized farming industry of which Fairfax had been a part, the bulldozer represented U.S. ingenuity. Relied on extensively in both World Wars, it could clear entire landscapes, removing all visual reminders of what had been before. In Fairfax, it did exactly that.