All Things Local: The Village That Shaped Us

DC Public Library Radio

On this week's episode of DCPL's "All Things Local", host Olubunmi Bakare is joined by Dianne Dale, author of "The Village That SHaped Us". According to Dr. Thomas Battle, director emeritus of the Moorland-Spingarn Center at Howard University, The Village That Shaped Us sets the standard for how to look at a community. Using oral history interviews in the way of Anna Deavere Smith and Studs Terkel to tell the story of a Freedmen's Village settled in 1867 on a hill overlooking the nation's capital in SE Washington, DC, the reader is taken on a journey into a community sold to blacks by the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War. Sale of the land and life in the community led to such events as the establishment of Howard University, the Tuskegee Airmen program at Tuskegee Institute (now University), and Brown v. Board of Education. In a series of oral history interviews copiously illustrated with over 300 pictures and documents, the book takes you on a journey through the history of a neighborhood; safe, industrious, self-sufficient, now gone through changes brought by or through the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation ruling marking the beginning of changes that devastated the landscape of this quiet village--chopped to pieces by highways, byways, bridges, flight to the suburbs and urban renewal. It chronicles in plain language the inevitable decline of a community that mirrors the devastation wreaked in comparable communities across the country.