Washington's Board of Public Works and the Burial of Black Georgetown

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cultural resource management projects in and around Washington, DC, have documented the episodic and nearly complete displacement of the city’s first exurban Black communities in areas that would become metropolitan suburbs. This recurring theme illuminates a posture of indifference toward the Black communities that were established during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the relationships that are put in place as a result, between prospering people of color and a modernizing municipal/territorial government of Washington, DC. In the Georgetown neighborhood, a dramatic investment in the infrastructure followed the establishment of a single municipal government for the City of Washington in 1871, and the abolishment of Georgetown’s charter as an independent municipality. Establishing new street grades in this context resulted in the near-burial of homes in an African American section of Georgetown, which became an unofficial dump for fill excavated during infrastructure work. Here I argue for an association between the extant and relict infrastructure and the former African American community of Georgetown, and use this perhaps tangential material culture to discuss the economy of Black Georgetown, through its buried homes and other outcomes of infrastructure projects in the city.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37484.0