How are black Americans faring?

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Ten years ago, I lived in Washington, DC, watching cranes scatter across the landscape on the northern banks of the Anacostia River. I was back in town recently and now the cranes have been replaced by high rises. Shiny riverside walkways lead to new restaurants overlooking the water. The once litter-strewn river is devoid of plastic bags.

The economic development of a city is often referred to as progress. Yet in most of the city, it has meant that Washington’s black population has dwindled to the point where “Chocolate City” is no longer an appropriate nickname. Now the last mostly black part of this once mostly black city lies east of the river in neighborhoods 7 and 8, in neighborhoods like Anacostia, Congress Heights and Barry Farm.

I was in Anacostia with members of the Headway team, right next to the 11th Street Bridge Park that Megan Kimble wrote about for Headway in August 2022. Residents spoke to us about the changes they saw in their neighborhood, changes that are often distilled into a single word: gentrification. We’ve heard from hundreds of longtime residents, newcomers, and visitors to the neighborhood over the past few months, and we’ve met many more at the Anacostia Riverfront Festival, where we’re setting up a booth to capture a time capsule of the community.

Progress is Complicated for Black People in the U.S. Every time I tell someone I’m a Headway editor, covering stories that explore the world’s challenges through the lens of progress, I think of the glacial, stalled, or backward movement for black people. Americans on most of the key indicators of socioeconomic status, including life expectancy, homeownership rates, and access to banks. The issue Headway has addressed the most is housing insecurity. Black people make up 40 percent of those who are homeless in the US, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. The reason for this is not mysterious: It is the product of decisions made over decades that have made limited progress toward justice for Black Americans.

For many black people in Anacostia, those high-rises across the newly glowing river are dangerous signals. Rents and taxes are creeping up as the percentage of black homebuyers in the area declines. Many locals will tell you that Anacostia has its challenges, and more investment in the community could help. Good parks and better funded schools are widely appreciated. But the encroachment of luxury buildings and the long-promised bridge park could also cause displacement, as has been the case elsewhere in the city in recent years.

During our time in Anacostia, we looked for examples of majority black communities with thriving economies — thriving black businesses, high rates of black home ownership, high black wealth accumulation, and other indicators of progress toward economic justice for black Americans. Our exploration took us back to the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, once the financial center of the African American community, which was torn apart by whites in the Tulsa Race Massacre 102 years ago. Victor Luckerson, who conducted more than 200 interviews for his recently published book on Tulsa, wrote for Headway about how the group economy concept—Black Americans supporting a local black economy—fueled entrepreneurial success in Greenwood, posing a question: Are there modern examples of what a predominantly black community in the United States can be?

This is the starting point of an exploration we call Progress, Revisited. We look back at historic moments of progress toward racial equality for Black Americans since the early 1900s, and look forward to their lessons and legacies in the present day. We follow in the footsteps of scientists commissioned by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights to investigate the persistence of racial inequality in five core areas of US life: economics, education, health care, criminal justice and housing. In each of these areas, we look for times when black communities have made remarkable strides toward racial equality, and ask how we build on or learn from those advances today. In my introduction to the series, I included a quiz to test your knowledge of how far we may or may not have come in improving economic justice for Black Americans.

Any attempt to document black progress in the US is indebted to WEB Du Bois. Du Bois brought an iconic set of images to the 1900 Paris World’s Fair: a selection of photographs and distinctive data visualizations. Du Bois intended to replace the image of black Americans under slavery with a vision of a free black nation growing in health and power in the face of extraordinary resistance from white supremacy at every turn.

Du Bois, who died on the eve of the March on Washington in 1963, understood progress in terms of generations. Among the questions he sought to clarify were questions that recurred in my conversations with parents and older adults in Anacostia at the Riverfront Festival, and I invite you to reflect with us: Are we doing better than our ancestors ? Are we building on their best ideas and learning from their worst mistakes? What kind of future are we preparing the next generation for?

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