Kingman Park
A Segregated Community and Center for Civil Rights.
Introduction
Kingman Park is a neighborhood in northeast Washington developed in the years between World Wars I & II, during the height of segregation when black Washingtonians struggled to find decent housing. African Americans were largely shut out of new housing developments in and around the city by racially restrictive covenants.
With no such restrictions imposed on the new housing in Kingman Park, house sales took off, attracting an exclusively African American population. The residential development engendered the building of a new neighborhood, including churches, businesses, and other institutions, all of which were segregated. Kingman Park residents enjoyed a vibrant and tight-knit community, but they were also removed from white Washington and were continuously denied equality in public education and recreation by government policies.
To fight racial injustices, residents banded together. Several sites in Kingman Park became important scenes of civil rights demonstrations and activities contributing to the end of legally sanctioned segregation practices in the city and nationwide.
In 2018, in recognition of its cultural history, the Kingman Park Historic District was created and listed in the DC Inventory of Historic Sites and the National Register of Historic Places.
The Kingman Park Historic District is in Northeast Washington DC, on the banks of the Anacostia River.
Early History
Cool Spring
The area that would become Kingman Park is located just outside the original city of Washington as laid out by Peter L’Enfant in 1791. It occupies the tract of land in the distinctive “notch” at the plan’s northeastern edge. At that time, the property was known as Cool Spring for the abundant cool water springs that flowed through it.
In this image, the Kingman Park Historic District (upper right) is superimposed over a map of L'Enfant's plan for the City of Washington.
This 1861 map shows Cool Spring, bounded by C Street NE to the south and 15th Street NE on the west. Benning Road runs at an angle along the north side. Cool Spring Road (now Oklahoma Avenue NE) and the Anacostia River are on the east.
For the first 75 years of the city’s history, Cool Spring was part of rural Washington. Before the Civil War, the property was farmed with slave labor and included a large brick farmhouse, agricultural buildings and quarters for enslaved workers. In this detail of a fanciful bird's-eye view from the Civil War, looking southwest, Cool Spring sits just under the left side of this text box. The grid of the city's streets is at the top of the image.
Horse-drawn streetcar in Washington DC in 1889
Improvements
Following the Civil War, the city began implementing a vast program of infrastructure improvements, such as paving streets, laying gas lines and water and sewer mains. But these improvements were slow to reach beyond downtown and northwest Washington. In fact, the only services in the area that would become Kingman Park was a sewer trunk line, built to carry sewage from the city to be dumped directly into the Anacostia River, and a city dump at Benning Road and Cool Spring Road.
The first indication of change came when the Columbia Railway Company ran a horse-drawn streetcar line from downtown along H Street NW across North Capitol Street to H Street NE where it terminated at a streetcar barn at 15th Street NE. At its terminus, the streetcar line connected with the toll gate of the Columbia Turnpike, a toll road which continued over Bennings Bridge, across the Anacostia River and into Maryland.
Rosedale & Isherwood
Several years later, real estate investors, who also had a stake in the streetcar company, platted part of the former Cool Spring tract into a residential subdivision. Laid out in a modified grid, the subdivision extended from today’s 15th to 21st streets NE. At the time of subdivision, the former Cool Spring property was known as Rosedale, but was alternatively referred to as Isherwood, for 19th-century property owner, Robert Isherwood. The real estate developers thus named the new residential subdivision “Rosedale and Isherwood.”
This map is a survey plat of the 1876 Rosedale & Isherwood subdivision
The lot marked "Columbia Railroad," on 15th Street NE just south of Benning Road, held a streetcar barn that provided stabling for 44 streetcars and the 180 horses used to pull them.
In the early 1890s, to accommodate new electric streetcar technology, the Columbia Railway Company replaced its old car barn on 15th Street with a larger car barn and powerhouse along Benning Road. The barn provided storage for the new electric streetcars.
The first houses to be built in Rosedale & Isherwood were clustered on the blocks adjacent to the streetcar terminus, but by the 1890s, development had spread to the east with rows of houses filling several blocks. The modest frame rowhouses attracted a racially mixed and immigrant, working-class population.
Kingman Park
While houses progressively filled the Rosedale & Isherwood subdivision, the area east of 21st Street remained undeveloped into the 1920s. By 1927, the Corps of Engineers began the reclamation of the unhealthy and insanitary Anacostia River above and below the Benning Road Bridge and the city extended infrastructure services easterly, opening the area up for development. Housing was in short supply for the city’s growing population, so real estate investors and developers seized the opportunity to build rows of residences on the former Anacostia River flats.
Charles Sager, the first and most prolific of these developers began construction of his first row of houses in early 1928. As he advertised these first houses for sale, he was deep into planning for the construction of hundreds more. He evoked the suburban ideal by dubbing the emerging neighborhood Kingman Park.
The neighborhood, like the newly developed Kingman Lake and Kingman Island, which were being carved out of the Anacostia River for recreational purposes, were named for Brigadier General Dan Christie Kingman, chief engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of the Anacostia Flats reclamation efforts.
Kingman Park was not conceived as an African American community, but the city’s housing shortage was particularly severe for African Americans, and Kingman Park real estate investors quickly capitalized upon a ready market.
At a time when much of the city’s new housing carried racially restrictive covenants barring black ownership or occupancy, Sager began running ads touting “Kingman Park Development for Colored.” City-wide, African Americans often paid significantly higher prices for houses than whites, but Sager offered these houses for the same prices and same “easy” terms” as he had to white buyers.
Other developers capitalized on Sager’s success and built rows of houses for black occupancy. In its first few years, just before the Depression hit, the area between 21st Street and Oklahoma Avenue, south of Benning Road, became the stable nucleus of the African American neighborhood of Kingman Park.
This interactive map features the historic district's buildings, which are shaded to represent the developers of Kingman Park. Charles D. Sager developed and built the 301 pale yellow buildings, mostly rowhouses, between 1927 and 1941. Use the + and - buttons at lower right to zoom and click-and-drag to pan around the map. Click a building footprint to get a pop-up about its construction.
A Segregated Community
The residential building boom in Kingman Park led to the creation of a new African American community in racially segregated Washington DC. The new residents established churches, built businesses along Benning Road, and formed a neighborhood organization, the Kingman Park Civic Association (KPCA), to advocate for the African American communities of Kingman Park and Rosedale & Isherwood. The city and federal governments also responded by deliberately selecting the area for the construction of schools, public housing and a golf course, all of which were segregated by law.
Segregated Schools
In 1931, the city started construction of what it touted as “the most extensive Negro educational center in America” across Benning Road from Kingman Park. Charles Young Elementary School was the first school constructed (1931), followed by Browne Junior High School (1932) and then Phelps Trade School for Boys (1934).
Spingarn High School was not built until 1952. This 20-year wait represented a failed promise by the school board to a generation of Kingman Park residents.
This circa 1938 aerial image is looking west, with Young Elementary on the right and Kingman Park in the upper left, separated by Benning Road NE, which runs diagonal, left to top. The large empty lot on the left is where Spingarn High School was not being built.
Segregated Public Housing
Established in 1933, Langston Terrace Dwellings was the city's first public housing built for African Americans. It is one of the most important examples of modern architecture in the city. The 274-unit housing complex was designed by Bauhaus -trained, African American architect Hilyard Robinson .
Residential units were sited around significant open spaces featuring celebratory sculptures and a terra cotta frieze, The Progress of the Negro Race, portraying the history of African Americans from slavery to freedom.
Langston Terrace Dwellings—described in period accounts as a “planned Utopia”—was highly sought after, so selecting the first 274 families out of thousands of applicants was a difficult task. Applicants made their claims in writing, repeatedly mentioning onerous rents and cramped quarters.
In one handwritten application, Alvin Johnson succinctly explained his desire to move to Langston Terrace: “Three rooms kitchenette and bath in Langston Terrace.” Then a young adult, Johnson was seeking to move out of his parent’s modest two-bay house in Rosedale & Isherwood that he shared with his parents, an uncle and many siblings.
Although it was limited in capacity, the government-subsidized housing at Langston Terrace was a huge success and served as a demonstration model for the potential of low-rent housing.
Segregated Recreation
When Rosedale Playground opened in 1913, it was restricted to whites-only. As Kingman Park developed immediately to the east, this “public” facility was off-limits to a significant number of area residents, including children who lived right next to the park.
The Rosedale Playground, 17th & Gales Street NE, is now the Rosedale Community Center, Pool, and Recreation Center, just west of the historic district.
In the decades before World War II, African Americans were denied access to most municipal golf courses and private clubs in the United States. In DC, only the 9-hole course near the Lincoln Memorial was open to African Americans. For decades, black golfers lobbied the federal government to desegregate the city’s courses to no avail. Finally, in 1934, the Superintendent of Public Buildings announced plans for an 18-hole course for blacks to be built in Anacostia Park. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration, the new course opened to great fanfare in 1939.
During the 1970s, Lee Elder (shown in this photograph), the first black golfer to play in the prestigious Masters Tournament, took over management of Langston Golf Course. Elder invested his own money to improve the course to make it a first-class base for the Lee Elder Celebrity Tournament and to establish golf camps for inner-city children.
This 1938 aerial photograph looking east over Langston Terrace Dwellings (right side) shows the golf course still under construction in the distance. When it opened the next year, it was named for John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), a Virginia Congressman and first dean of Howard University Law School.
The Langston Golf Course occupies the northern and eastern parts of the Kingman Park Historic District and backs up against the National Arboretum and the Anacostia River.
Black Churches
Several churches representing various denominations were established in Kingman Park, becoming centers of social and religious life in the community. Mount Pisgah Baptist Church (established 1906) is the oldest of the neighborhood churches. Pilgrim AME Church (1926), Saint Benedict the Moor Catholic Church (image at left, 1946), Peace Baptist Church (1949), and Mt. Moriah Church (1958), were black churches.
Black Businesses
While white businesses predominated along Benning Road in the first decades of the 20th century before the development of Kingman Park, African American entrepreneurs increasingly established their own businesses along the corridor, catering to the growing black community. The Langston Theater was one of the most notable entertainment spots and retail centers. The theater, designed by noted theater architect John Zink, was open to blacks and its stores housed African American businesses such as Loretta Jones’s beauty parlor, the Malone dress shop, Milton Chisley’s flower shop, the Langston Food Shoppe delicatessen, Aristo Cleaners, and the Langston Barbershop.
The Fight for Civil Rights
While these segregated facilities provided residents with necessary amenities, they also reinforced racial segregation. Kingman Park was separate from white Washington during the height of Jim Crow. The residents of Kingman Park were inevitably forced to fight for equal access to quality education, recreation, and other services. In the process, many sites in Kingman Park became scenes of important Civil Rights events, ultimately leading to the desegregation of public schools and recreation in the District and nationwide.
Browne Junior High School
In 1941, just eight years after it opened, Browne Junior High School was already woefully overcrowded. Angry and frustrated parents petitioned Superintendent Hobart M. Corning and the School Board to allow Browne students to enroll at Eliot Junior High—a nearby, under-enrolled school for whites. When Corning and the Board denied the request, Browne Junior High School-student Marguerite Carr and her father James C. Carr, Sr.—the new PTA president at Browne—became the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit, Carr v. Corning. The case argued that D.C.’s segregated school system denied students equality in education and challenged the separate but equal doctrine in education.
While the court case played out, the School Board attempted to relieve the overcrowding by annexing Blow and Webb elementary schools, on the south side of Benning Road, to serve as overflow space for the Browne student body. These old “cast-off” white schools lacked gyms, libraries, auditoriums, working cafeterias and even fully functioning restrooms. Furthermore, Browne students had to cross the busy and dangerous Benning Road to go between classes.
The Carr v. Corning case failed as the courts upheld segregation, but the loss fueled the battle for the integration of public schools. Rather than fight for quality education under “separate but equal” schools, civil rights lawyers and activists focused squarely on eliminating segregation altogether—a victory that would be celebrated in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education.
Rosedale Playground
In 1948, neighborhood residents, with support of the anti-segregationist Young Progressives of America, demanded entry to Rosedale’s pool and recreation center. A racially mixed group of people carried banners and chanted, “Jim Crow Must Go.” Still, and despite a majority black population, the Board of Recreation maintained its whites-only policy at Rosedale. In the summer of 1952, after a black teenager, seeking relief on a hot night climbed the fence at Rosedale Pool and drowned, protests ratcheted up. As these demonstrations attracted nationwide attention, the Board of Recreation finally reversed course and in October 1952, announced that the playground and recreation center would be open to all. It was not until May 19, 1954, however, that all District playgrounds were desegregated.
Langston Golf Course
Langston Golf Course finally offered residents of Kingman Park and the broader African American community access to golf, but black golfers had to continuously push for quality conditions. In 1937, the Wake Robin Golf Club (photo), the first African American women’s golfing association in the nation, joined with the all-male and African American Royal Golf Club to not only push for improvements, but to fight for the desegregation of all public golf courses. In 1941, they turned to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who, in keeping with his landmark decision to let Marian Anderson perform at the Lincoln Memorial , ordered that all golf courses operated by the National Park Service be desegregated. Washington’s black golfing community continued to grow, and along with it a deep loyalty to Langston and its history. Today, the Royal Golf Club continues to maintain its clubhouse at 539 23rd Place NE in a rowhouse in Kingman Park.
Notable People
Kingman Park was home to a broad swath of African American society that lived, worked, played, worshipped and went to school together. The community was self-contained and included doctors, lawyers, ministers, educators, entrepreneurs, clerks, truck drivers, construction works and skilled and unskilled laborers. Many individuals associated with Kingman Park made lasting contributions to the city and country.
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