Economically disadvantaged people in Fairfax, Black and White, were subjected to decades of structural neglect. Among several attempts by the Board of Supervisors to address this decades-long problem, a sanitation campaign empowered county officers to inspect for and penalize perceived health risks. However well meaning in its aspirations, the campaign in effect activated a surveillance machine with deleterious repercussions for the wealth and domestic stability of vulnerable Black residents.

A series of ongoing sanitation campaigns emerged in the 1930s in response to increasing water contamination in a rapidly growing county. One particularly alarming 1930 report to Supervisors by County Sanitation Officer Robert J. White notes that he had “...made several inspections along the lower Potomac River and found many open sewers emptying into the river and it is also known that the cities of Alexandria and Washington empty into the river near Hunting Creek.” This made the waterways unfit for “bathing,” as shown by an outbreak of typhus among two youths who had swum in “polluted streams.” The sanitation unit planned a “systematic campaign for sanitation” led by Dr. A.L. Carson, head of the health unit, and White, the head of sanitation. They aimed to inspect every “home in the Dranesville magisterial district” to see if householders were in compliance with the state and local health laws. Upon completing an assessment of Dranesville, Carson and White intended to complete the same process in the other five districts. In July 1934 Carson asked the Board of Supervisors to provide the County Sanitation Officer (White) with power “to approve or reject the installation of plumbing” to “insure [sic] the proper working of any system for the disposal of human sewage” and reject those systems “improperly installed.”

The county program benefited from the 1930s New Deal work programs that aimed to put unemployed residents back to work while providing new public infrastructure. But as with the previously described urban renewal funding, their benefits flowed, in Fairfax, mainly to those who could afford to furnish the “private” end of what was essentially public-private investment. Programs like the Civil Works Administration and Federal Emergency Relief Administration offered Fairfax County free labor to upgrade home sanitary systems, but only to homeowners willing to furnish the necessary building materials. It is unclear how many African American workers were hired to do this work or how often the work benefited Black homeowners, but scholars have documented a longstanding (national) view of African Americans as "unemployable,” notwithstanding frequent complaints from Black community leaders. That Fairfax’s sanitation program offered unequal benefits seems clear from a 1939 Fairfax Herald article tallying visits to assist with water and sewer needs as reaching “139 White and five colored” homes over a year. The disparity replicates the pattern seen elsewhere across county history, of disinvestment in African American communities amid the hoarding of resources for White homeowners, leading to decline of those communities’ surroundings and infrastructure, thus reinforcing a narrative of Black people as incompatible with White visions of the modern suburban culture.

The sanitation campaign in Fairfax County, led by Dr. A.L. Carson and Robert J. White, led to deleterious consequences for Black residents. Black poverty was policed and criminalized. For example, in 1938, four years after Carson requested to increase the power of sanitation officers the county supervisors unanimously adopted the "Sanitation Ordinance” for the County of Fairfax Virginia. The supervisors argued that the approved ordinances promoted residents’ health. However, the new policy instituted non-compliance penalties that included fines and jail time. The penalties for not following the new regulations included fines between $5-$50 and no more than thirty days in jail. While it is unclear at this point if anyone was charged under this ordinance, the criminalization of poverty is chilling. Black residents in the county requested county support to address the infrastructural maladies afflicting the community and were met with inaction and criminalization. Consequently, the lamentable conditions persisted. 

Concern in the 1950s over substandard housing conditions throughout the county, from rodent-infested homes to dangerous water supplies, inspired updates to the county Housing Hygiene Code in 1961. While raising standards, the revisions also increased penalties for violations, effectively criminalizing economic distress—a sign of tensions between authorities and communities that continue to vex county housing policies today. That 1961 code became the basis for all subsequent codes to date. The 2023 update (to a 1976 version) described itself as “the first basic housing code for the County which provided healthy quality standards for people’s homes.” and, significantly, included “strict enforcement regulations” to be “carried out by the inspection of Director of Public Health.” For appeals of rulings by the director, the ordinance created a five-member “Board of Housing Hygiene” composed of county “freeholders,” appointed by the Board of Supervisors. The code gave significant power to the Director of Public Health, permitting them “to enter, examine and survey” dwellings during reasonable hours for “inspection, examination and survey.” Owners and occupants of properties were required to let them in. Following each inspection, health officials were to draft a written report enumerating violations, giving copies to both the county and the occupant. In the dire event that a residence or unit was deemed “unfit for human habitation … constituting serious danger or hazard to life, health or safety of the occupants or to the public,” it was to be “placarded” and an order to vacate imposed. Non-compliance could trigger a $300 fine or up to thirty days in jail. This criminalization of hazardous housing conditions was remarkable at a time when the county itself acknowledged the insufficiencies of its available housing stock. 

The code’s origins were no more innocuous than its effects: Officials made no secret of the fact that it targeted the poor, pointing to Gum Springs as its reason for being. They described the community, home to 3,200 mostly poor and working-class Black residents, as “Northern Virginia’s largest ‘slum,’” according to a 2010 retrospective by the Mount Vernon Gazette. Longtime Gum Springs resident and community leader Ron Chase differed. “We didn’t live in a slum,” he asserted in a 2007 interview (quoted in the Gazette article) in which he called county claims to that effect deceitful. “I don’t believe those figures about dilapidated housing,” he continued. “The county was looking for reasons for replacing the housing in Gum Springs, and it used those statistics as justification.” Rather than solving a housing problem or bettering the condition of those forced into sub-standard dwellings, the strengthened ordinance worsened the economic precarity of Black residents and expanded authority of officials to surveil and police. The racialized scrutiny only increasing long-standing animosities between county administrators and Black residents. 

The County’s exclusionary zoning practices, coupled with its sanitation and hygiene codes, provided the foundation for an architecture of exclusion that threatened African American communities and Black homeowners. It is within this historical context that the development and application of sanitation policies in Fairfax are easily visible especially so in the era of Massive Resistance (to school integration), which shaped discourse around African American residents. Tasked with disease prevention and infrastructure improvement, sanitation campaigns in practice criminalized poverty. Discriminatory sanitation policies implemented by empowered sanitation officers (White, most often) disproportionately disadvantaged Black families. The sanitation reports reveal indifference, at best, to the plight of residents. 

A 1966 investigative news report by graduate students at American University on Gum Springs, founded by free Black Virginians before the Civil War, shows this process in action.  Its narrator tells us, as he tours the village, “Gum Springs today still has no sidewalk. The paths of Gum Springs are paved with dirt, not cement, and the drainage system depends on the thirst of the earth. The battle against flooding goes on.” Like those in other Black enclaves, Gum Springs residents were frustrated by the county’s neglect. Louise Carter, addressing Fairfax Supervisors, powerfully articulated their position:

Describing herself as a lioness “protecting her cubs,” Carter offered an impassioned plea that strategically leveraged her dual identity as a protective mother and conscientious taxpayer. Her speech before the Board highlights the impact of county neglect and the Black community’s resistance to its persistent disregard.