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EDITORIAL & OPINION
Thirty years ago, The Georgetowner hosted a reception for a book that helped the town rediscover part of its past. “Black Georgetown Remembered” is now a classic of Black history in Washington’s oldest neighborhood. It was published by Georgetown University Press in 1991 with the subtitle, “A History of Its Black Community From the Founding of ‘The Town of George’ in 1751 to the Present Day,” and has gone through several reprints. The book prompted many talks and additional interviews. It records the tales of Black families recalling their homes and blocks of Georgetown — consistently onethird Black until around the Second World War. Gentrification came first to Georgetown in all of D.C. It’s a surprising story of African American life, and those who remain tell this part of everyone’s history more vigorously today. Tonight, the Citizens Association of Georgetown is offering a program on “Black Georgetown Remembered.”
The graveyard at 27th & Mill Road, bordering Rock Creek Park, Oak Hill Cemetery and Dumbarton House, the Mount Zion and Female Union Band Society Cemetery is slowly but surely being changed to a proper memorial. In March 2015, a Georgetowner cover story called attention to the plight of this long-neglected place, one of the oldest African American burial grounds in Washington, D.C. With people like Neville Waters, Thornell Page and Lisa Fager, a nonprofit ensures the cemetery’s preservation and commemoration. “One of the things I have enjoyed, even to this day, is the communal feeling in Georgetown. We’re still close-knit, even though our numbers have dwindled,” Waters told us.
The Georgetown African American Historic Landmark Project continues its installation of bronze free-standing plaques with posts at various locations around town. Last week, the Georgetown-Burleith Advisory Neighborhood Commission voiced its support of the project. More than 80 markers are slated for the historical tour. The project’s mission statement casts a wide net: “To honor together the enslaved and free African Americans who worked in, lived in and built Georgetown; to celebrate together their resilience, strength and fortitude; to promote together accurate African American and American history preservation; to start a dialogue of reconciliation which eliminates any shame, guilt or humiliation; and to foster a commitment to lasting changes.” We applaud Andrena Crockett for her vision and deep commitment.
One of the lightning rods of memory has been Georgetown University’s confrontation of its slavery legacy. “It seems to me that the story of Georgetown and slavery is a microcosm of the whole history of slavery,” said Professor Adam Rothman, a member of Georgetown University’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory & Reconciliation, in 2016, regarding the university’s connection with the Jesuits’ 1838 sale of 272 slaves.
Since then, the university has apologized for arranging the sale of enslaved people from D.C. and Maryland farms to help pay off debts. It renamed two main campus buildings: for Isaac Hawkins, the first slave listed on the sales document; and for Anne Marie Becraft, who founded a school nearby for black girls and later became one of America’s first Black nuns. G.U. has offered descendants of the 272 slaves, most of whom ended up in Louisiana, legacy status in admissions.
Fifth-generation Washingtonian, P Street resident and educator Monica Roaché — former advisory neighborhood commissioner and now a D.C. Democratic Party Secretary — reminded us a few years ago: “The African American community contributed to Georgetown. There were doctors, lawyers, educators and more.”
Georgetown University Professor Marcia Chatelain told us: Washington, D.C., is a place with Black history that has shown “great beauty and inequality. It is a sober reminder and a celebration, too, of achievement and strengths.” She added: By knowing and understanding history, Americans have a chance “to demonstrate what’s possible” — constructing “a well-rounded account.” Black History Month is a time “to be reflective.”
To be sure, we all can reflect on many Black Georgetown names: Yarrow Mamout, Alfred Pope, Hannah Cole Pope, Robert Holmes, John Ferguson, Moses Zacariah Booth and Elizabeth Oliver Booth, Georgetown University President Patrick Healy, tennis doubles champions Roumania and Margaret Peters, Doctors C. Herbert Marshall and Joseph Dodso. Of course, there’s more — and more learning to do.
The cover of the Feb. 20, 2019, Georgetowner: “Our Black History in Georgetown.”
Ukraine vs. Russia: The Forgotten Historical Dimension
BY CHRISTOPHER JONES
Signs of imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine have dominated news headlines in recent days. The deployment of close to 130,000 Russian troops along Ukraine’s borders and into neighboring Belarus combined with increasingly alarming diplomatic announcements from U.S. and NATO representatives – including the call to evacuate U.S. embassy personnel from Ukraine’s capital Kyiv – have many wondering if a major European war is imminent.
Unfortunately, much of the news analysis of the crisis has focused on short-term causes of tension between Russia and Ukraine rather than deeper historical patterns. Especially puzzling is why analysts of the crisis don’t factor in one of the 20th century’s worst atrocities.
Under Stalin’s rule of the Soviet Union (1929-1953), Ukraine suffered the most traumatic chapter of its long history – the Holodomor – from 193233. In Ukrainian, “Holodomor” means “extermination by hunger.” Stalin’s policies of forced collectivization and the targeting of Ukrainian ethnic Kulaks – whom Stalin considered a counter-revolutionary class – required Ukrainians to ship essentially all farm produce to Moscow, resulting in manmade, mass famine estimated to have killed between 3.9 to 7.5 million Ukrainians and some 7 to 10 million people under Soviet domination.
Of course, estimates of the number of Ukrainians who died during the Holodomor vary widely – as one might predict given the disinformation associated with the superpower rivalry in the later Cold War era and up to today. Public sources such as Wikipedia provide Holodomor death totals ranging from a low count of 3.9 million Ukrainians (under the “Holodomar” listing) to as high as 7.5 million (under the listing of “Soviet Famine of 1932-33.”) In a Fact Sheet of January 20, 2022, the U.S. State Department recently embraced the figures of 7-10 million Holodomor deaths referencing research from the Europe vs Disinfo website (euvsdisinfo.eu.).
Though the Holodomar’s death statistics are always in contention in such public forums, Ukrainian officials hold Stalin and the Soviet Union responsible for launching a twentieth-century genocide against their people. In 2010, a Kyiv appellate court found Stalin and others “guilty of genocide against Ukrainians during the Holodomor famine,” according to a Radio Free Europe broadcast of January 14, 2010. Four years earlier, in 2006, the U.S. Congress had approved of The Holodomor Memorial to Victims of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 193233 in Washington D.C. Managed by the National Park Service, the memorial opened to the public at 1 Massachusetts Ave. NW on November 7, 2015.
Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939, Hitler of Germany and Stalin of the Soviet Union invaded Ukraine on their way to carving up Poland. While many Ukrainians welcomed liberation from Stalin’s terrorizing rule and cooperated with Nazi authorities, an underground “partisan movement” formed and a Ukrainian Insurgent Army rose to fight off both Soviet and Nazi occupation.
By 1945, with Soviet and Allied victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, much of Stalin’s anti-fascist propaganda remained focused on Ukraine. Following Soviet losses of over 20 million people in the Second World War, Russian communist bitterness over Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi occupation – either real or amplified through disinformation – remained strong, as it does to this day.
Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin, continues to characterize Ukraine’s history and independent cultural identity much as Stalin did. “You have to understand that Ukraine is not even a country. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe and the greater part was given to us,” Putin told U.S. president George W. Bush at the NATO summit in Bucharest Romania in April 2008, according to former National Security Council staff expert on Russian and Eurasian affairs, Fiona Hill, as reported in The New York Times.
Today, as Russian forces surround Ukraine for a possible all-out invasion and seizure of its capital Kyiv, it bears keeping in mind Ukraine’s long national independence struggle and its enduring cultural identity and achievements. We should also remember what Ukrainians will never forget – Russia’s history of genocide against the Ukrainian peoples, its annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine, its relentless stream of disinformation, its continuing diplomatic and military hostility, and its brazen designs to reabsorb Ukraine and other eastern bloc “republics” back into the Russian motherland.
