Northern Virginia Archive of Black Community Resistance

Assessment of Literature:

The primary focus of this project centers on the effects of suburbanization and expansion in established Black communities, and the response of these communities in resistance to displacement and slow violence through suburbanization and expansion. This assessment of the literature is included to highlight the key discussions and past analysis of suburbanization and housing, and community as both a site of inequity and a site of resistance. This section is also integral to understanding the effects suburbanization, development, slow violence, and displacement has on Black communities throughout the nation, and more specifically here in Northern Virginia.

The literature of suburbanization is incredibly deep, as this is one of the most notable events of the twentieth-century, and while the analysis of suburbanization covers so many facets, the effects of suburbanization and displacement on Black communities in more rural areas still lags behind other points of research. Instead, research often centers the experiences of more urban communities, key points of research note the history of American housing has intersected with racism, leaving cities marked with geographies of inequity.[1] Studies like Montrie’s historical analysis of rural surroundings of Memphis, TN, The Fight for Fairfax’s history of Fairfax County’s development, and From Frontier to Suburbia’s look into the growing changes in Loudoun County discuss the implications of suburbanization on the previously rural surroundings of these areas.[2] However, the discussion of the implications for Black residents and Black communities is disparate or bordering non-existent in literature like The Fight for Fairfax and From Frontier to Suburbia, which specifically discuss two of Northern Virginia’s counties – Fairfax and Loudoun respectively.

While the literature on suburbanization paints a clear picture of the interaction/intersection of race, housing, inequality and suburbanization, there remains a significant lack of historiography of suburbanization on Black histories in interactions with suburbanization and displacement. Instead, the foci of suburban inequalities reflect the exclusionary practices that restricted Black and Brown access to the suburbs, and benefits such as the GI Bill.[3] As Charles W. Mills, Danielle Purifoy and Louise Seamster, and Cedric Robinson argue in their own separate works, the predication of whiteness as a hegemon leads to a dismissal or erasure of non-white stories, or experiences from the literature, intentional or not.[4] Thus, a gap exists when searching for Black histories in locations like Northern Virginia, particularly when referring to their encounters with displacement throughout the twentieth-century.

Where literature exists on the impacts of suburbanization on Northern Virginian communities, much of it fails to center on the experiences of Black communities. In the case of Russ Banham’s The Fight for Fairfax, their historical narrative centers the lens and experience of heroic developers, playing into narratives and myths of progress that demonstrate the way in which they improved the land, moved the state beyond its racist roots. Yet, the communities left behind, and paved over – like the Black community of Willard, VA was for Dulles International Airport – are left as footnotes.[5] Books like Andrew Friedmans assessment of the covert capital in his eponymously named book begins this process, juxtaposing the entrenchment of the military complex into the Dulles landscape with the way colonial practices were mapped onto the landscape all the while demonstrating interconnectedness between past and present spatial politics in Northern Virginia.[6] However, his work does not center on the experiences of displacement on behalf of suburbanization and Northern Virginian development. Thus, the transgressive literature on Northern Virginia’s problematic history of displacement, and neo-colonial interactions with the land and its communities are present, yet requiring deeper analysis.

This goes even further for discussions of rural community resistance to displacement, particularly for geographies like Northern Virginia, therefore requiring deeper inquiry. Black geographers and scholars of slow violence, such as Maia Roberts and Maia Butler work on displacement in place, and Rob Nixon’s slow violence thesis, illuminate the reasons for these gaps.[7] Because of slow violence, gradual and attritional violence can quietly displace Black geographies, communities in place.[8] Often this means the emotional and physical geographies are displaced, leaving their stories untold. The work of Black geographers and studies on slow violence highlights the stories that are often unheard, and open space for scholarship on Northern Virginia’s Black communities, and other rural Black communities and their experiences with displacement.

In the case of Northern Virginia, while a base of research exists on the Black geographies like Arlington, a broader analysis of the whole region is required.[9] Tinner Hill, Gum Springs, and St. Louis require further inspection, particularly in the field of slow violence and displacement. When these locations are mentioned, the analysis is limited, typically stating similar facts shared between research and books, often employing surface level analysis of their community efforts to fight displacement and systemic issues, or to challenge white supremacy. When other Black geographies that have been displaced are discussed, they are often treated as footnotes in the story of the greater process of development – for instance Willard, discussed previously.[10] Communities outside of Fairfax County – like the many Black villages in Loudoun County – have even less discussion when it comes to displacement and their experiences with development and change. This points to a clear gap in the analysis of Northern Virginia’s development, and the study of Northern Virginia’s Black communities.

The spaces in the literature on, and the history of displacement in Black communities point to the myth of progress in the historiography and the experience of Black communities in their encounters with suburbanization. By diminishing the existence of Black geographies in the process of developing Northern Virginia through racial hierarchies of racial capitalism, and failing to acknowledge their existence in the historiography, the myth of progress has continually displaced Black geographies – both rhetorically from the literature, and physically from the landscape – in Northern Virginia through the use of slow violence, displacement in place, and physical displacement. Analysis of slow violence and displacement in Northern Virginia is lacking. Yet, lacking even more is the acknowledgement of these communities’ work to fight displacement.

While resistance to systemic oppressions, fights for access to social welfare systems[11], and resistance to displacement from gentrification has a larger body of research, the literature on Northern Virginia is primarily placed within larger pieces of research, such as those examining Black communities in Arlington, and one about Gum Springs, in their broader historical analysis post-emancipation into twentieth-century.[12] Thus, while there is literature on and analysis of Black resistance to displacement – particularly in the more modern field of gentrification – analysis of small Black communities and their work to resist slow violence and displacement is lacking – even more so for Northern Virginia.

Works that do exist on historic resistance in these communities create important touchstones in the research. Judith Burton’s dissertation and John Terry Chase’s book on the Gum Springs’ community action to improve education, housing, and employment opportunities, or Anna Buczkowska’s thesis on Tinner Hill’s resistance against segregation and displacement.[13] However, these works that center Black resistance in Northern Virginia are very rare. This gap must be filled, the communities of Tinner Hill, Gum Springs, and St. Louis all have rich histories of resistance, and present opportunities for modern organizers and communities currently facing displacement to study how to approach resistance.

This project aims to highlight the stories of Tinner Hill, Gum Springs, and St. Louis. As small Black geographies that began with humble rural beginnings discuss how the myth of progress has created slow violence, and displacement, while discussing how these communities put in earnest efforts to resist displacement. Inserting the stories of these communities into the literature this project aids in the study of suburbanization, slow violence, displacement while aiding in the understudied history of Black resistance against white supremacy, and implicitly assumed racial orders of development inside of Northern Virginia.

 

The framework of “The Myth of Progress”:

Discussion of an outright “myth of progress” within literature on suburbanization and the development of the twentieth and twenty-first-century landscape of America does not exist. It instead acts as a rhetorical framework that undergirds the assumptions, actions, and narratives of development inside Northern Virginia. Scholars who analyze suburbanization and racism in housing often point out the frontier expansionist nature of the era of suburbanization, such as Kenneth T. Jackson, going as far as to call it the crabgrass frontier.[14] The nature of the frontier in the United States perpetuates an idea of progress, where building up of homes, subdivisions, and capital through homes is seen in a positive light.

The “myth of progress” acts in pernicious ways. As Mills argues in their work on the “racial contract”, the dominant spatial order is predicated on whiteness, white space is therefore normative, it becomes enlightened, and can manifest the destiny of its choosing[15] – at the expense of any othered bodies, spaces, and sites.[16] The choices made by white residents of Falls Church in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reflect this. By choosing to segregate the town, forcing Black landowners to only purchase in a district amounting to 5% of the town’s land, and driving a road through the Black community of Tinner Hill, dominant spatial orders were reified. All the while no known benefits came from the development boost that followed these actions.

The creation of dominant spatial orders bolsters Cedric Robinson’s idea of racial capitalism, where systemic extractions of value through an unagreed upon but enforced hierarchy perpetuates whiteness and control of space and resources.[17] The implicit nature of de jure and de facto segregation and legalized structural inequalities allows for the extraction of wealth and the denial of peace for people of color while white communities and white homogeneity is able to flourish. This is visible in Gum Springs, as decades of inequalities in funding created an environment that denied peace for the community, as flooding from lacking infrastructure, and laws that marked the community as filthy all the while suburban communities sprung up around them.

As Bhandar shows, the teleology of western property regimes reflect narratives of progress in which land is fallow, unused, waiting to be settled.[18] This terra nullius, vacant land, is possessed through dispossession – in Bhandar’s example, through colonial regimes – yet this is also represented in cases of American suburbanization. Eminent domain and other means of acquisition could/can clear whole towns in the name of “progress.” [19] Private development plays an integral role in this, as they purchase and “create” space, where if you build it “they will come”.[20]  Naturally, because of the frameworks of racial capitalism, the value for this white space is predicated on the devaluing of Black spaces.[21] Thus, in the creation of the myth of progress, acquisition of land is seen as essential, the devaluation and the legal and theoretical devolution/devaluation of “empty” and therefore not whitened space is natural.[22] Private interest supplies the demand and in turn demands the supply of suburban development, while the primacy of whiteness is assumed as natural, an unquestioned naturality of un-racialized yet racially homogenous space.[23]

This devaluation is both achieved through what Purifoy and Seamster called creative extraction, but also through defining what constitutes “proper” landownership, and land stewardship. This in turn reifies plantation and colonial orders in private and public property landownership that are defined by white logics.[24] In locations like Loudoun County this becomes visible through the potentially harmful conservation culture that places an emphasis on conservation easements as a method of controlling developing – though it has fallen into a process of perpetuating white wealthy landownership. Orders of property ownership based upon racial hierarchies, and displacement therefore become perpetuated by the myth of progress.

While the “myth of progress” is articulated through the work of scholars, there is no preexisting language that concisely names the totality of this framework. As such, this project invokes the phrase “myth of progress” to encapsulate the ideas of these scholars therefore forming a framework to analyze the process of suburbanization and its effects on historically Black Northern Virginia communities. The myth of progress is central to the way in which Northern Virginia was suburbanized and developed throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first-century, and the ongoing effects of the rhetoric still reverberates throughout the Black towns, villages, and enclaves. The Northern Virginia landscape forever shaped by Black life, Black communities, and Black refusal to disappear.

 

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