My Mother’s City
Life in Washington D.C., America’s Jim Crow capital city
Washington D.C.
In 1933, my grandmother and mother, who was just three years old, boarded a train somewhere in South Carolina, and came to live in Washington, D.C.
My mother was born in a small African American community in South Carolina called Santuc. The railroad tracks are just up the street from where she was born on a sharecropper’s (her grandparents’) farm. On the other side of the tracks was Union, South Carolina, the big city where the whites lived. In coming to Washington, my grandmother did not escape that segregated Jim Crow world. However, there was work for African Americans in Washington, and the city, full of Black professionals and strivers, was a good place for Black people in 1933 despite the Jim Crow realities.
The city was racially segregated. Uptown was dominated by whites, while my mother and grandmother, like many of the African Americans in the early 1930s, arrived and took their place downtown in the U Street corridor. My mother would not move from that neighborhood until the 1950s, but some African Americans, somehow, were able to move uptown a little earlier. That is also part of the city’s story.
