Northern Virginia Archive of Black Community Resistance

The myth of progress in Northern Virginia is central to how the growth and change in the region are talked about and experienced. The myth of progress reflects narratives spawned by developers and those who sustained the massive change in the County during the post-war period, fortified by racial capitalist structures that sustain relations with land and communities in settler colonial systems. While the experience of the majority, primarily white and quickly developing communities, was one of affluence, modern homes and amenities, and growing infrastructure, the experience of Gum Springs during this era lies in stark contrast. Reflected in the way demographics shifted in the County, Black geographies in Northern Virginia, and more specifically, Gum Springs in Fairfax County, experienced slow violence through structural inequalities that bred displacement in place.

From 1940 to 1970, Fairfax County's demographics quickly changed. In 1940, the primarily rural county with family farms and small communities had a total population of 40,929; by 1950, the County had nearly doubled to 98,557; by 1970, it had ballooned to 455,021.[1] Primarily white, middle- and professional-managerial class workers moved into the County, bringing higher incomes, an influx of living and working infrastructure to service them, and skyrocketing home prices.[2] The County's median income quickly grew to one of the highest in the country.[3] However, while suburbanization and commercialization of the County brought significant gains for many of the new and primarily white arrivals, wages did not rise for the County's Black residents.

            From 1950 to 1960, the loss of farm fields and the growth of commercial and housing districts often meant many lost out on their previously steady – though not high – income.[4] In addition, the demographics were shifting significantly for Black residents of Fairfax County, such as those in Gum Springs. In 1920, the County's Black population was 20% of the total population, but by 1970, the Black population only reflected 4% of the total population.[5] While the Black population had grown (15,859 in 1970), it had not kept up with the proportion of white residents (435,737 in 1970).[6] The shift in the rate of Black landownership is revealing. Black landownership decreased significantly from the end of the 19^th century to the middle of the twentieth-century. In some cases, white purchasers could procure Black properties inexpensively by paying delinquent taxes. This practice, while legal, facilitated geographic segregation within the County.[7] Limited access to homes, jobs, and education created a multitude of structural barriers for Black citizens of Fairfax County.

The myth of progress in Fairfax County establishes a narrative of rising tides lifting all boats. The myth appeared accurate, given that median income rose, new homes were constructed, local economies prospered, and poverty rates were meager. The reproduction of the myth was also apparent in the way white residents “continued to see local black and white relationships as merely based on 'mutual respect and admiration...”[8] Thus the myth persisted, despite the decades of excluding Black residents and the ongoing neglect of Black communities. Exacerbating the deeply rooted racial inequality was the development of suburban subdivisions for white families.  Suburbanization expanded the spatial separation of Black and white residents. As Andrew Friedman states in Covert Capital, utilizing the infrastructural improvements surrounding large employers like the CIA in Langley, VA, the primarily white in-migrating families were building “dream houses… in the secluded new subdivisions [on] large parcels.”[9] These developments sprouted with modern homes to fulfill the “New Frontier” attitude of Northern Virginia.

The standard of living and lifestyle in these new developments represent the hypocritical dichotomy at the heart of the myth of progress. Conceptually and as a structural force, progress was represented as a universal good for all while serving as a political, economic, and social exclusion system. Black communities that existed since the end of the nineteenth century were positioned outside progress. The engines of modernity focused on creating new monuments to progress on top of what was perceived as unoccupied space waiting for development. These processes of progress enacted a process of slow violence – political and socioeconomic practices of violence that created enclaves of haves and enclaves of the have-nots. The have-nots were geographically enclosed, located in pockets of poverty and substandard housing,[10] desperate for significant investment, starved for resources, depressed by high unemployment, and impaired by mounting infrastructure problems. The loss of farm jobs also left a generation of agriculturally skilled laborers with few employment alternatives. The economic quandary left many with limited funds to care for their families and even fewer resources needed to invest in repairing their homes. For many of the Black residents, whose homes were built at a time before the passage of building and sewage codes, the new policies were economically burdensome. With stagnating incomes and rising unemployment, residents of Gum Springs could not upgrade their existing homes or purchase new ones.

Progress in the County meant only progress for some. Slow violence surrounded Gum Springs. While the community had experienced a relatively short period of economic stability as Fairfax County's farmlands prospered in the 1940s, the 1950s and 1960s saw economic retrogression and increased infrastructural inequality.[11] Investment in proper drainage systems in Gum Springs had long been a problem dating back to George Washington's land ownership.[12] Compounding the flooding issues, county investments in their infrastructure only became significant after decades of problems. The Mount Vernon District and surrounding area saw significant investment; Gum Springs experienced uneven development and constrained livelihoods. Select areas of Fairfax County faced impoverished deleterious conditions, with these pockets of poverty holding the majority of older dilapidated homes in the County.

When the Fairfax County government finally began to focus on the pockets of poverty, that decades of disinvestment had produced, their efforts were decades late, particularly for Gum Springs. By the 1960s, Gum Springs, the largest pocket of poverty in the County, contained the majority of dilapidated homes marked as unfit for habitation, while having the highest unemployment rates.[13] Uneven development left Gum Springs with an underfunded education system, high unemployment, and a dilapidated infrastructure. At the same time, the County's selective investment in certain areas supported a narrative of Northern Virginia's exceptionalism, a narrative that spawned the myth of progress.

In the eyes of many who sought to address the problems of dilapidated housing and low employment, the rhetoric took on a particularly violent tone that hints at the necessity of action for the betterment of the County and its people through redevelopment and forced removal.

In the year before the passage of the 1961 Minimum Housing Hygiene Standard Code, the County Health Director and newspaper articles termed substandard locations like Gum Springs sites of crime and filth, with one report saying the County required an anti-slum weapon.[14] In the case of a rented home containing 21 families, the Northern Virginia Sun urged “Action Needed in Fairfax To Curb Slum Breeding.”[15] In the words of a County Board of Supervisors appointed committee member charged with a study of housing conditions, “The conditions… adversely affect the surrounding areas, depress real estate values, comprise a threat to the public health, and afford a breeding ground of disease crime and misery.”[16] While it is clear a solution was needed – Gum Springs, as a pocket of poverty, had severe issues that needed attention – the solution chosen reflected the racist narratives of the mid-20th century. It was the narrative that bolstered the myth of progress.

To address the situation, County Health Director Harold Kennedy urged the Board of Supervisors to grant the power of eviction in cases of substandard dwellings, in one case claiming that “he doesn’t want to throw anyone out either – all he wants is something to hang over the heads of landlords who otherwise would ignore his pleas for decent standards.”[17] This type of language centers the idea of progress in the county while also constructing an image of who deserves access to the County's bounty of progress. Consequently, the frequent discussions about "defeating the slums" and "development for the good of all" were racially coded. The discourse marked some sites, such as Gum Springs, as filthy, criminal, and deserving of containment and even violent removal.[18] The discourse of county officials makes the violent implications of political narratives legible. At the same time, the efforts of communities like Gum Springs to resist the slow erosive violence of county policies deserve close attention.

Slow violence was carried out in Gum Springs by neglecting the Black geography while the County progressed around it. Bolstered by racial barriers to success that limited Black residents, the community dealt with infrastructural problems and uneven development while the County primarily flourished. By the time the County addressed the mounting problems in the community, the rhetoric surrounding poverty-stricken areas like Gum Springs shows that it was viewed as uncleanly, crime-ridden, and unhealthy due to the barriers and uneven development that made Gum Springs struggle to keep up with development throughout the County.[19] Compounding effects created a spiral in which the community was underfunded, underemployed, underhoused, and literally underwater. However, the neglected “slum” needed to be attacked, removed, and remade, often with little consideration of why these problems existed. Instead, the ordinance focused on the real estate values of surrounding areas and crime.