Alexandria…
in their words

“… I lived up on Fort Ward for about fifteen years, and the McKnights and another family called the Youngs—and I was telling Pat Knock—remodeled the old school into a home…. And it was the McKnights who lived in front of us. I lived in the seventh house, and then the schoolhouse that was turned over to a house, and then the graveyard was right behind that….

… My mother… the family owned [land that] was always on Braddock Road—right across the street from Blessed Sacrament. Right there where they got those little houses that they just built…. And they just built some city houses on their property. That’s where I was raised, right there until I got married…. It was just like one big family. You know, you didn’t have to lock your doors… and if we ran out of sugar, we look over next door and just go on in and get the sugar and tell them when they came home that we borrowed some sugar from you. You know… everybody looked out for everybody. We didn’t have to pay for no babysitter. You would just sit for each other. If the parents say, ‘Don’t leave the yard, you don’t leave the yard.’ And, when our family owned, we had a large yard and most of the… like my grandfather and all his friends, they would play croquet every day. So, on one side of the house was the good grass, and you couldn’t get on that side because [that was the croquet side.]….

… [The City of Alexandria] wanted the land for the park and my mother—she was forty, and she didn’t want to sell hers. That’s when the city told her that if she didn’t sell it, she would lose out because they were going to condemn the houses because they didn’t have any bathrooms, no running water and stuff, so that is when she gave in, and that’s when… they told her to see if anybody had a purpose for a house down here [Seminary neighborhood] …. Anybody that sold the land up at Fort Ward, they put the[ir] name [on] the list for a house. So, my mother already had her house, so she put her name down and that’s how I got it here, through my mother…. Anybody that sold these houses—anybody that lived in these houses right here had land. That’s how they got the houses.… Yep—all that was land, and we had homes on it, and we didn’t have the running water on the inside. The city was going to cut down on all this too, if they didn’t sell. So, they finally got T.C. Williams High School and 29 homes. So, everybody that in this section of the 29 homes had lived around in this area….”

To learn more about Maydell Casey Belk, check out the complete transcript by Patricia Knock for Alexandria Legacies—Fort Ward Oral History Project.  For the complete transcript, click here.

“… Well we, I think we had heard of it, maybe we had heard of it because it was in a high school civics class or maybe a political science or something where it was mentioned, I came from a really large family and we had lots of friends, we had friends all over that area and I played ball all my life so I had black friends, white friends, and all that other stuff but we lived in segregated counties so, by dumb circumstances, my folks moved into Alexandria just a couple of months after they said you must integrate your schools by doing this and I don’t know how much you know about the actual logistics of how they did it…. Right, right, that is the popular version of history. The real version of history is this; in Alexandria there were three high schools, three four-year high schools…. T. C. Williams [now known as Alexandria City High School], everybody’s heard of it, Hammond [Francis C. Hammond], and the third school George Washington and so all three of these high schools were four-year schools, they all had a principal, a student body, and a yearbook, and a football team, and a basketball team, and the clubs, in these three high schools, and of course all three high schools were rivals…. Well, they were districted by a geographical boundary of a part of Alexandria, so (points to describe where the schools were located within the city), so everybody that lived here (located in the middle) went to T.C. and everybody that lived here (points to the left of T. C.) went to G.W. and everybody that lived here (points to right of T. C.) went to Hammond and it was typical but, the make up of the city, all the black folks lived (points to describe the location of the black neighborhoods in relation to the three high schools) down here, so they all went to G. W. and all the white folks lived over here so they all went to Hammond, and T. C. was kind of in the middle and it was mixed up more than anybody else compared with the other two, but none of them unlike what people have heard from this movie, none of them were one all white school and one all-black school it wasn’t that way. They were all integrated just by the people that lived in the community around the school, but because of the make up of the school was very, very predominantly black in the G.W. high school district and very predominantly white in the Hammond district, and T.C. was kind of fifty-fifty….

“… I think it was more the reasons when you say the high school didn’t seem to be integrated was just because the neighborhoods [that] the high schools were in naturally segregated areas of town…. And by the way the reasons we were naturally segregated may have been because of some hatred like ‘You can’t move into my neighborhood; your family can’t move into my family’s neighborhood.”

To learn more about Michael Lynch, check out the complete transcript and essay by DeJanett Talley, who was a student at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland.  The transcript is housed at Digital Maryland.

“…It was always in my mind, in order to successfully integrate schools, you had to desegregate or integrate the housing in the city. It would always be artificial if people were [not] able to live where they wanted and were able to. When I came to Alexandria that did not happen. I don’t care if you were a millionaire and you were African American, you just couldn’t. [When] my wife and I came here, we could not find a place to live unless you were in public housing, which was segregated at that time, or one of the families that owned a house in the black neighborhood forever. There was no place for you to live. Most of our teachers lived out of the city. I think there were eight or nine black lawyers practicing here including me when I got here in 1958. Only none of them lived in the city, except me. But I was determined I was going to live here. I don’t know why (laughs); I was just determined I was. Most of our doctors except for one lived out of the city. It was just that kind of situation. It was clear to me that you had to attack that, and we did, starting with the public housing first because there was black public housing and white public housing in different parts of the city. So, we started with that because we had some force of the Federal Government to try to do it even though the Federal Government created it. They weren’t the greatest of help, but at least we could lean on them. And, then we pushed for, our first effort in housing was, to push for voluntary desegregation of housing where we tried to get the City Council to adopt just a resolution to realtors and other folks saying, “you know you outta sell to different people regardless of race.” That was quite a battle and quite frankly, the way that actually happened. The woman we lived with was an old schoolteacher. She taught here forty years. A few of those years in the black school, a few of those years without pay because they didn’t pay the black teachers for two or three years. She was retired and she wanted to stay in Alexandria, and she went up here to Southern Towers. First, she called, and they said they had a vacancy. When she went up there, they turned her down. So, she called me crying. And, just a few weeks before that, one of the firetrap houses downtown, about five or six black kids were burned. So, I went down to City Council with my friend who was on the School Board. He and I went down to City Council and actually sat there throughout the Council Meeting and at the end of the Council Meeting I stood up and recited this, “the least you can do is ask people to open it up” and they did. The next meeting it actually passed and then ultimately, as things got better between the Federal Government with its requirements on open housing and others, it wound up the situation….”

To learn more about A. Melvin Miller, check out the complete transcript and essay by Lisa Youngentob, who was a student at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland.  The transcript is housed at Digital Maryland.

“…I love to do things for the city. When we moved here in 1940, which was before Chinquapin [white-only, defense worker housing] opened up, this was just a little Southern town, not really terribly clean and exceptionally segregated. I think Chinquapin and probably Cameron Valley [also white-only defense worker housing], and when those two communities started doing things in and around the city, it sort of helped the city get out of their Southern doldrums. I think ‘cause so many people were here with so many different lifestyles and things. I think it kinda helped make the city something other than a little Southern town. It was quite interesting to watch the place grow. And it was—and living in Chinquapin was just a great experience. We were not exceptionally well-liked by a lot of people in town. The young ladies that lived in Alexandria—their mothers always told ‘em, ‘Don’t go out with them guys from Chinquapin.’ Matter of fact, the lady I married lived on North Fairfax Street, and we met through a blind date, and she had been brought up by the, ‘don’t go out with anybody from Chinquapin,’ so we got married [laughs] after all that. It was a lovely place….

… Well, we came here from Wyoming. My dad had worked in Nebraska and Iowa and Missouri, and every place on the railroads. We moved here—we got here on December 22, 1940. My mother and seven kids on a Greyhound bus came from Wyoming…. Well, we lived at 31 East Linden Street over in Rosemont from December until the first part of July when we moved out. They were still—they didn’t have the road completed when we moved out there [to Chinquapin]. They had half of it paved, and they were working on the other half—going around the circle when we moved out there. Then it was a wonderful place to ride a bike, ‘cause it was just smooth as glass. But it was a nice place….

… My brother went to the service in the summer of 1942, which left eight of us in the house. My mother and father slept on the daybed in the living room. My two older sisters slept in the first bedroom. My two younger sisters slept in the middle bedroom. And my older brother, myself, and my younger brother slept in the last bedroom. And then, when my older brother went to the service, just my young brother and I slept in the last bedroom. And one of my older sisters left, about two years after Bill left, and got married. And I guess my other sister had the bedroom to herself ‘cause Mom and Dad stayed out in the living room on the daybed until she left and got married in probably ’47 or 48’, and then they got out of the living room.”

To learn more about Jerry Sare, check out the complete transcript by Jen Hembree for Alexandria Legacies—Chinquapin Village Oral History Project. For the complete transcript, click here.

“… The neighborhood I grew up in was a mixed neighborhood. There were some Negroes and there were some whites, and they lived next door to each other. Then, at the corner, there was a drugstore, and they were just like part of the family, in that they talked to us. I can remember when my mother was very sick, that Mrs. Duncan would come and bring food, or find out if there was anything she could do to help. Mrs. Duncan had also grown up on the same block as my father had, when they were children….

… When I grew up, we all played together. There was no segregation except on Sundays. Because the white kids went to the white churches, and we went to the black churches. Other than that, all of us played together, and like when I was playing hide-and-go-seek, when I was very little, I was hiding, but I somehow found my way to King Street. And as I was walking down King Street, Doug Duncan [neighbor] saw me, took me by the hand, and brought me home…. There was a certain communication between us, and it seemed that there was a certain love or interest in all of us, as neighbors, to one another.”

To learn more about Elsie Thomas, check out the complete transcript by Donise Stevens for Alexandria Legacies.  For the complete transcript, click here.