rent apartment dc

today's may 11 this is lessons of thesixties. we're interviewing marie nahikian a community organizer the interview is taking place at 1844mintwood place a block that me live on many years. present at the interview isanne gallivan and bonnie rowen from the lessons of the sixties project our videographer is eddie becker and marie's husband gene seymour is here too i'm aka decker. hi marie, hi anka. tell usabout where you came from. i came from north carolina. were you born there? grew up and was born an asheville which is now so hip no one can stand it butwasn't so it when i grew up there. went

to college at the university of northcarolina the first year it became - not the woman's college - it had been thewoman's college of the university of north carolina and the first year that iwent with the first year they allowed men on campus. good choice. yep 64 yeah 64, fall of 64 were you an organize your on campus? ohi ended up being yes. what happened? well it was the sixties it was a lot going on civil rights civil rights was a really big deal we did not have we still we stillreferred to african-americans as negroes

the press even referred toafrican-americans as negroes i guess there were two or three thingsthat went on campus one was civil rights organizing and being supportivebecause greensboro north carolina had a whole history you know with the thedemonstrations at woolworth's etc anti-war was a big deal because thevietnam war with a lot of energy there and locally we ended up organizing a huge studentstrike of the cafeteria in support of the cafeteria workers who were trying tounionize and today you look at north carolina and said you know that wereunion organizer yes there were

and we want that strike but we ended uporganizing places for people to eat we get a lot of baloney sandwiches becausewe didn't want people to eat in the cafeteria while the workers were onstrike. so that was that was important and i got involved with student pressmovement which was a very important part of what was going on at the time i wasthe associate editor of the uncg newspaper student newspaper that hadhere 24 been published maybe once a month and we decided topublish it three times a week that we were really christ we thought we werebig-time journalists and published the paper three times a week so that wasthat was for me

i had friends who were involved with sdsand chapel hill you know it was it was all of that . of the mid you know istarted 64 65 have been 66 67 68 that i think a lot of that happen because ittook me five years to get out of college see difficulty to be that createdactivists that your family that band no i don't i don't know that it wasdifficult my father had been involved in unionorganizing or union whatever at the in kenai lon rayon plant in and cut out north carolina outside ofasheville where they made parachute cord among other things for the war world wartwo and he remembers prior to going in

the navy demonstrating for union andbeing hosed down by water hoses in the cold winter mountain weather with dogsyou know they brought dogs out my grandmother's head was a widow and she hadbeen a matron at the nylon ran planet the inca plant and my mother you know my mother grew up in anorphanage in southern florida so i think the one thing that she used to impart isthat you got to take care of everybody and she did she took care of everyone a lot of our life centered around thechurch actually an episcopal church of st. george's and we spent a lot of timetaking care of people so i don't know

maybe that's the history let that be a lesson oh us student press association i had been very involved with them as acollege newspaper editor a number of experiences along the way and in 1969after i graduated i came to washington in the fall of 69 to become theconference coordinator of the college editors conference which took place infebruary 1970 and of course the anti-war demonstrations were going on and we wereall living around dupont circle we're publishing daily the college onnew service college press service and my

job was to organize what turned out tobe ironically the very first now national gathering around ecology andthe environmental crisis and there were a lot of things born at that conferencein february the ecology symbol we turned into a button which i think i still havemany of black and white we-we use the phrase from pogo about wehave met the enemy and he is us so that led to the organizing that wenton that became the first earth day in april of that same year this was a huge gathering there had beena split between liberation new service

and college press service so marshallbloom and others who were involved with liberation new service when ray mongowas there at the conference college newspaper editors from all across thecountry the hog farmers came from where it wasit was held and yeah well the hog farmers came from vermont to theconference which was held at the key bridge marriott and the reason it was atthe key bridge marriott is because the year before the college newspapereditors conference was at the shoreham and there were some pretty heavy-dutyprotests at that conference around the vietnam war and there was also aconference of college football coaches

going on at the same time and it endedup with the college editors and the football coaches and this wouldhave been in 69 kind of having a big fracas in the middle of the shorehamhotel so no hotel in washington dc would takethe conference back again the key bridge marriott was kind of i think night they didn't really know who we work sothat's where the conference was and i don't even know if the hotel still thereactually still there anyway the hog farmers came and saidwe're here to provide security from vermont and wavy gravy

who you can see in all the woodstockfilms wavy gravy was there at the end of the conference i almost joined the hogfarmers in left hand but i shouldn't they would have probably changed my life anyway there were a number of thingsthat happened at that conference walter hickel was a speaker confrontedby members of the hopi indian tribe him in an elevator as he was leaving i happened to be in the elevator trying toescort him out and they confronted him and they said nickel we've come to give you a message and theelevator started to close and his

security detail said we gotta go wegotta go and he said no no i want to hear what they have to say and theelevator opened up again and they said we're here to tell you that we're dyingand the elevator door closes i mean i'll never forget that and you know what was it two weeks laterthree weeks later that he resigned i don't remember i don't know the timingexactly but it was it was a huge impact um probably excuse me probably the biggest impactwas one of the speakers and all these peoplecame because we ask him to speak it was

amazing one of the speakers was robert ohanderson who was the president of atlantic richfield oil and i'm on thepodium beside robert o. anderson who's giving this speech in this impeccablewhite shirt tie you know suit and some people came up on the stage and i'm likewhat's going on here and walk up behind him as he's giving a speech and takes acan of sludge oil and pours it over his head and i was like the hog farmerswouldn't probably who did it that was supposed to be doing security it was really liberation new servicethat did that some of the folks from

there and anderson was amazing he reached into his breast pocket pullthat his handkerchief and white the oil off his face finished his speech and left, was like, ohsludge oil over my head so what the other thing that was hugesignificance at that event was that the all of the defendants from the chicagoconspiracy trial came except of course for bobby seale who had been separatedbut all of the chicago conspiracy defendants from the 68 democraticnational convention events came to that conference and brought with them

these yellow signs or yellow flags that were waved constantlyby all of the people at the conference because the flag said bullshit bullshitbullshit and you know where they were with the chicago conspiracy folksbrought their flags with them so that's what brought me to washington that's a long story about getting to dc what did you do next? i actually got whatwas the most probably the first significantly paid job, that i had i wentto work for a non-profit as only you can in dc trade association called theinstitute of scrap iron and steel and

the guy who was the head of this tradeassociation was really trying to cash in on the possibility of the environmentalmovement so i mean what better thing to hire me who would run the conference andhe hired me as a writer and i worked there and wrote a series ofbooklets on the job occupations in the scrap yard we wereall funded by the-the old seta comprehensive education training actright a seta funded program and we were training very low level you know, i remember that my the booksthat i had to write like how to drive a forklift and how to be a metal sorterall of his books were written like it

the third or fourth grade level becausewe were training people for these jobs and we made super 8 movies so we had a whole little film crew thatdid super 8 movies for uh and i actually still have copies of those books, i don'tknow what happened to the movies, but i so i had this job paid me pretty well atthe time and that's was my first job until this it but didn't i also that waswhen it was shortly after that i moved to mintwood place and got very involvedwith the neighborhood in the community and there was an organization around thecorner called the new thing art and architecture center and it wasupstairs right on columbia road

i don't know what's there now perry's isthere an upstairs restaurant or something yet african drummers world yes melvin dealafrican heritage dancers and drummers were there too and topper carew who wasassociated with the institute for policy studies topper and alice carew livedright on columbia road 175 across from what was in the midtownpharmacy and they had this art program for a community-based art program that did unbelievable stuff lord mcneil was anartist who did things with the kids there

i have some of the original posters ithink of new thing architecture center and they did jazz concerts at theepiscopal church there on that's right on connecticut avenue sevenmarket sent mary's writing yeah that margaret so they did jazzconcerts i think topper started doing some filmsfrom there and because i knew people at theinstitute for policy studies and karl hess was the friend of a mutual friendand we found this house and met with place 1829 and we moved into a grouphouse karl didn't move in right away he movedin later i think and wilson clark who

was an environmental activist arm movedin a friend named david preston who believe it or not was in the navyassigned to the white house and his job is that he was the only white member ofthe kitchen crew everybody else in the white house with scylla pinot except for david and david's job was toserve spiro agnew but he lived you know he just went tohis day job which was the navy job and i can remember going to the white houseone halloween to pick david up from work and we were in this volvo station wagoni don't know who's stationed way it was but we all had on nixon mask and the endyou know the secret service was like oh

that's got a funny you know can youimagine you know that many years later david was not real happy in the navy andhe finally got himself out of the navy he was actually a quite accomplishedartists so david lived there one of the first things we had to dowhen we moved into that house was that wilson clark had been living and judascoburn's apartment on biltmore street judas coburn was clifford clarke'sdaughter right no like a child of god child or nice orsomething anyway she was very involved withanti-war journalism and at the time that

we that wilson was living her apartmentshe was working for the village voice's a correspondent actually quite well noone at that . and she was in cambodia so when wilson moved in with us we hadto go move all the things out of judas coburn's apartment and that's when wediscovered five years worth of village voice's stashed under her bed and wenever knew what i don't know what happened to those papers i just don'tremember having to carry them down flights of stairs but we live at 18 2min meantwood which is how i got involved with neighborhood work it was some sort of equipment

in 1if 197people's constitutional convention largely dominated i don't know who all the parties werethe dominated it but obviously the panthers were very involved and karl wasinvolved in the conference it was at all souls church and it was held itsthanksgiving and i'll swear i think it was thanksgiving morning that karl cameto me and said marie do you have a credit card and i was like i have acredit card that belongs to the institute of scrap iron and steel and hesaid we need this credit card right away and i said okay what do you need thecredit card

he said we have to rent a car and i'mlike okay we have to run the car in time he said look i have to run a card forthe panzers because huey newton is coming 2 down and he has to have a carand i was like okay so we get on the phone and the only car we can sign onthanksgiving morning is at national airport so we drive out to up we were we have to drive the nationalairport to get the rental car but we stopped on the way at all souls to pickup to black panthers who were going to be the drivers so we get to the airportand the two guys i don't know their names but the two guys say oh we can'twe can't have this car and i said it's

the only car we could find it has to bea black car i said we it's a yellow ford and he was like no noshe won't ride in this car and i said it's the only car we can rent so theyfinally, you know took the car drove it off and i never saw the car again huey newton and the panthers kept thatcar for a very long time because this was in november of 7early nineteen seventy-onethat one day these two people show up at theinstitute for scrap iron and steel and i'm asked to come and sit in theconference room with these two gentlemen

and guess where they're from they'refrom the fbi and so it's it's a good cop bad cop because the bad cop guy looks at me andsays how long have you known she would notin and i said he who anyway there were a series of interviewswith the new york with the fbi about my having rented this car but the amazingthing was that the panthers paid for it i i was always afraid that you know ithink my boss at the institute scrap iron and steel were kind of concernedbecause they've had this car for several months now that no one would ever paythe bill on the american express card

but we'd have to pay it immediatelybecause no one kind of put the two and two together until the fbi showed up and shortly thereafter i no longer had achop the tickets - tickets crapper and feel thank you karl house thank you hearingthis it was a great job i mean it was you know a regular salary so that's umthat's when i karl has got me a job working for richard barnett at theinstitute for policy studies and the rest that guess they say is historybecause my active as life continued my organizing life from that pointforward

well is it huh ips was with like no place i hadever really experienced before burnett was working on roots of war his book roots of war and then the nextone was the was the corporate a boy and this is terrible and global reach he had just started research on globalreach his office was across this little hallway from mark raskins office and iwas dick barnett's quote assistant he evidently had gone through a lot ofassistance and you know it was fine i did research for global reach

it was also the period of time whenellsberg was there so it was kind of exposed a bit to the research that wasgoing on around the pentagon papers i mean it was ips was clearly a centerof a lot of the national organizing was going on i however would got more and more deeplyinvolved with the neighborhood and what was going on in adams morgan you knowadams morgan had a history already there had been some early neighborhoodorganizing out of st. margaret's church i think there's even been probably somesun during if i remember it was steven klein who had the archives fromthose years of stephen lived on the

fillmore street so they're always been and he worked ata id at the state department but they're always been a lot of kind ofneighborhood civic activity as it were and it was that that particular time iwas also exposed to milton kotler's work at ips who wrote a book on neighborhoodgovernment and it was that whole seed of neighborhood government and reallyleadership from a number of people but specifically i think proper guru armcertainly milton was involved although he didn't live in the neighborhood buttopper was the one who knew a lot of the the key people in the neighborhood andso we embarked on this project to

organize a neighborhood government wewere going to have our own independent government because there was no homerule and so we figured well we'll just select their own government and organizeit and we met every saturday for hours at the potter's house which had beenopen too long but it was there and it was a coffee house and we met thereevery saturday morning to try to come up with the constitution and a bylaws onhow we were going to organize our neighborhood government and we came upwith the whole concept of single-member districts and selecting five delegatesfrom each single member district within adams morgan and i'm i'm trying toremember the exact boundaries certainly

16 street and connecticut avenue probably what's the street right off of thebridge ashmead calvert ashmead thatway over to connecticut avenue as far south as went down for the swannn “t” idon't remember what the southern boundary was but it includes swan streetand “t” street and as straight rap oh yeah rap was there onwillard street you know so was that far down, anyway was so wehad these five single member districts and we move forward to elect ourneighborhood government and we formed

something called the adams morganorganization which took on an amazing kind of a series of things that we did.there was there was an economic development committee that led tocreating a worker-owned co-ops like fields of plenty stone soup was a little bit moreindependent i'm not sure they were really connected so much directly butthey were further down the hill but certainly fields of plenty and one of the funny stories i could remember from fields of plenty there has never been a store where you had items in bulk

where you had something where you putthe scoop in and scoop it into a bag and you bought nuts or fruit or whatever itwas the health department went whacko ohyou can have this and we ended up having a rather protracted back and forth withthe dc government and the health department over how we could displaythings that start at fields of plenty which was which was on 18th street i think right where this coffeehouse isnow the amo office was a few doors down from that and hess had organizedthe science and technology committee and decided that among things we were goingto build

entrepreneurship around issues of food so in a warehouse on champlain street hestarted growing fish had a lot of youth involved and growing the fish the problem was that the electricity inthe warehouse was not particularly reliable, the electricity would go off andthe fish would die and we would start all over again i'm not sure we ever had any fish thatwe were able to eat because we couldn't keep the electricity on in the warehousenow karl if he were here rest his soul would probably tell methat yes we did eat fish from the from

the community technology but he wasinvolved in all kinds of things around technology and community science & but the fish were the bigproject community park west came out of an amo committee walter pierce lived in the neighborhoodwalter and his you know the whole group of youth in that neighborhood had playedon that park for years one of the great lessons that i learnedabout community about community organizing came from the community ofthe community park west experience there was a garden

it was a community garden and a lot ofdifferent people grew in this garden but it was kind of like a hodgepodge i mean they were not plots that was notthis it was not that but a lot of people you know had tomato plants and beansand whatever and it was a very diverse group lot of latinos who were growingyou know older white folks lot of black folks were growing in the garden andthere arose a big controversy because someone one night stole a lot of thetomatoes the tomatoes were gone and people were very upset because that itnever really happened before and what resulted from that was thatthere was a big discussion and they

decided okay we have to have individualgarden plots, divided up the community garden assign these plots, and you knowwhat, the garden never worked again after that, it was like well that's my plot nowthat's my plot you know and it was this constant back and forth i don't know what's happened to thecommunity garden whether it's still there but i hope it's just peoplegrowing tomatoes that would make a big difference. can you tell us that you workand how is he in the right there's one other community part storyyeah oh what a beautiful

it's called the walter pierce park and the way we ended up getting the money to buy it because it was owned bythe shapiro family is that we had this huge television and someone because wehad this community technology committee learned how to make a video of some sorti think it was nick demartino, that started that project and we made a movieabout shapiro park and what became community park west and we had thiswalter pierce did this we loaded this big hunk of wooden television on like adolly that we took to congress and we hauled it around from congressman tosenator to congressman to senator and show this movie to anybody who wouldwatch it because we wanted congress to

approve the money to allow the districtto buy community park west it took about two years but it workedand that's how the park got to where it is today with now walter pierce park but that was an important learning kindof curve for me as a community organizer because you can have a lot of ideas andstrategies but if you can't think through how you're going to deal with itultimately and on the money side was a really important one and that kind ofbecame a really key issue around housing you asked about my work and housinghousing became a big issue because

gentrification was starting to reallytake off in adams morgan we started organizing and doing rallies and havingtenant groups and probably one of the most powerful organizing tools we hadwas antioch school of law which was up on 16th street and they sent a lot oftheir law students who became interns and worked as you know legal folks witha lot of the tenant groups they worked out of the amo office so the housing committee because amo hadthis series of committees that i've described but the housing committee wasa big one the housing committee i mean there wassending became so much going on so many

blocks and so many buildings and isdeveloping and always pressure a couple of things that happened rap incorporated with the fluid streetit was it was it was a drug treatment program in it was much more than thatwith the community organizing arm that really pulled in a lot of kids rap youknow i can always be depended on to to be there when you needed people and wewe were doing with in college gentrification impressive we called itdisplays so we would do these and displacement isthis is what 773 the beginning your congo'sconversion of all departments , most

right condo started doing some condomsconversions the law had changed that made the only rental housing not sowonderful in terms of the favorable tax treatment and change nixon was in the white house and for allthe things you can say really awful about richard nixon when he came to thedistrict of columbia nixon was in the interesting and wage and price controlsis what allowed us to get a local weather the wall which allowed us to have a lotof the very progressive housing

legislation that came out of that and itwas you know who's wage and price controls that he did federal national level that allowed thathappen in the district of columbia we organize we got a very good at that timei felt very strongly in control probably the strongest parts of the lawwere right of first refusal if you live at that time initially in asingle family house you have to be offered a right to buythe house before the owner could sell it because so many of our family touringrental housing and the second thing is that it is set out basic controls onfiction

so you couldn't just walk in and walkpeople out which you can still do with some places in the country but in thatsense it was a very strong legislative framework but prior to that it was a lotof of organizing a lot of tenant organizing it went on and that after the first rent controlwall there was a second law that was passed that extended the right of firstrefusal to multifamily building and ultimately down the road after marionbarry was elected mayor we converted three thousand units in three years totenant ownership from and a rental - 1of the building still remained to that

up and down columbia run uncle lives in one certainly i would andone at one point having been gentrified off of mental place you know when i leftit with place to watch the of actually wrote an article about how i was beingquote displays network was already become an issue oh yeah becoming you're gonna needan initial right first to tee up things he was amazing i got a call from this harvey videoalready there was another key person in this

and her name is fanny hill this fannywas amazing woman who cooked she cook for everybody and somewherealong the way pg pg the gasworks washington guess and why in hip yeah but it wasn't thatwas what he had my had hired her she has kind of this communityambassadors who would show up all over the city and show people how to cookwith no honey i actually still have her i helped her write this email somerandom restaurant on 18 31 for that that's another story anyway miss fanny was this kind of person whoshe lived in a little house on the

street and you know she would justmaterialize all this food and she used kids her kids bank everything cookedeverything and so a lot of the organizing that we were doing wassuccessful because people would come to the new miss fanny was cooking so peoplewould show up for any me so miss fanny was a key part of thecommunity organizing that went on in adams morgan because she was she washired by watching gasps work i think they paid or almost nothing butmiss annie did food demonstrations for all of these community events where shewould come in and show you how to cook with no money

she did some amazing things as i said istill have her cookbook which i helped her write miss danni was a part of thebusiness success of organizing and adams morgan because she would always come andthis family used to refer to me as her play daughter she was also big with alot of foster kids and she and i actually shared a foster child oncethat's very interesting story from a school board member as to how i ended upwith his foster child named kyle miss fanny call me up and miss harvey wholived on seating place called me up and said there's something going on downhere because we all got these letters and we went and looked at the lettersand the letter basically said you have

3bought the entire every rental property on the on the block and we were like appalled that was awhole was 27 families it was like what are you doing we had just gotten the home rule i meanof the just gotten the ring control bill in place and there was this littleobscure thing in there about the right of first refusal if you lived in asingle family house and i was like well you should apply we weren't sure how it would apply butthis should apply

i had also been appointed to the firstrip commission so we were in the process of writing regulations for it and hadcontinued i no longer work for em i was the executive director i was the firstexecutive director but i no longer work for them full time i had gone to workfor a common cause around the home rule campaign i had worked for npr for a while and soonce we started to look at this piece of paper and kept saying well we should beable to do something and so i went to johnny barnes johnny barnes was a youngattorney working at the georgetown legal clinic and i said johnny

don't you think there's something we cando about that and he was like well yeah i'm not sure what but he wrote a letterto the developer and said you violated local law because these families deservetheir first right of refusal there are many into an ounce of thestory of how this rolled out but most significantly we ended up in court andthe families were amazingly strong you're not putting us out of our houseswe started doing son raising frank smith had become i guess the chairperson ofthe adams morgan organization at the time i was sitting on the rinkcommission johnny barnes was headed the legal thing and finally

somewhere along the way johnny said idon't think i can represent 127 families and we got i want to say arnold importer but i have to check to make sure but wegot a major law firm to represent these families so at that point we would gointo court before the judge and there would be 27 families 27 cases thedeveloper and this slew of corporate attorneys and finally one day the judgelooked at the courtroom and said you know what you all need to go outside andfigure out how you're going to settle this because if you don't we're going toend up in the supreme court

so we never mitigated the issue of firstright of refusal we actually went out and ended up settling and the developeragreed to sell the houses to the family huge victory and then it was like noneof them had any money how are we going to pay for these houseswe've been doing fundraising and then of course the families started to get alittle panic eight because we only had so much time in which to meet this rightof first refusal and about that time there had been an effort to build up abranch of perpetual savings and loan at 18th in columbia road mo once again was very involved and at afederal level they have there had been

some legislation passed called the community reinvestment act and itjust been passed and so with research done and eddie i'm sure you'll be ableto fill in on the reason because it was a it was a community-based research andeducation group that special reserve the perpetual research prison is still going that's good to hear anyway they werevery involved in putting together the framework and we follow the challengebefore the federal home loan bank board because perpetual refuse to providemortgages for these 27 families to buy their houses and that's a verysimplistic over

overview of what happened available johnbrown that's right interest research he waswith the ralph nader research i had forgotten about john brown we alsohad another group of nader lawyers around the federal communicationscommission but that was a whole another project that am i was involved in thathad to do with ownership of media anyway that that was a very important work thatwe did at that point but we followed a challenge at the federal home loan bankboard and the federal home loan bank board members i actually have met since then a womanwho was a member of that board who

looked at me and said i remember thatbecause there were no records we didn't know what to do once again the pressure ended up withnegotiations with perpetual who agreed to provide the mortgages and agreed tobuild the building in a way that there would be a courtyard and a place for acommunity gathering which ended up being of course the farmers market right in the new bank building and athing columbia road which i think today is still there i'm just said it may not be there toomuch longer but so the families were

given the right to buy their houses theygot the mortgages and then it was like these houses have to be rehabbed andperpetual that was one of the big issues is that they didn't want to writemortgages for houses that were falling apart in many ways they were you knowvery small two-story houses so we started looking at where to get themoney and determine of course that the best source was federal rehab loans thatcame through the district of columbia but when you look at the map for whereyou could get a rehab loan all the map was that was colored that you could getloans there was not one block and adams morgan where you could get acommunity development loan and at that

point we took on the city council andthe department of housing and community development the hdd here and finally they designated by specialresolution one block if adams morgan which was the17 qualify for rehab loans the next big hurdle of trying to keepthese 27 families intact some of whom were very were older seniorcitizens and this battle went on for three or four years and trying to keepthem intact was very hard it was a very very critically important piece ofhousing history in an affordable housing

history in the district of columbia i remember going through the agony ofwhere the family is going to live while we have what's going on and they got relocated i think two of the families didn't makeit back to their houses after we have one passed away but that was the saga ofseating street which led to the second round of the rent control law which thenincorporated the extension of right of first refusal to multifamily buildingsthat ultimately spawned thousands of rental units being converted to tenanton co-ops that still exists today that

many of us live in and still go to thatyou talked before that importance and housing to women and the importance ofwomen is housing in ages oh yeah was always the women always thewomen who organized and kept the organization together i remember a tenant group i you know even even the latino latinofamilies the latino organizers i remember a group of families on a teenstreet all of the members of the tenant association where women that is what because women are the ones who keep thefamily together who worry about are my

kids going to have a place to live and ithink that that was a huge motivation i mean i can remember having some quotepolitical discussions about whether or not housing was a woman's issue havingwas definitely a woman's issue because it was mostly women who were doing theorganizing doing the tenant work not a hundred percent but probably 8percent werewomen iggy know and to this day the buildingthat i lived in plaza west on columbia road all of theofficers of that tenant co-op were women and to this day as far as i know one ofthe original officers who and mccain who was the secretary of that co-op is stilli mean she may have finally resign with

still the secretary of that colorboarding and the keeper of the history so i think that that was always the casethat women were able to see what was in their own best self interest in a waythat i think men were never forced to have to think about it a lot of it hadto do with children and families can you tell us that some people you work withyou in the neighborhood 3d john wow you talk to that johnny linejohnny barnes was an important attorney certainly the folks at any of law schoolwere really committed in the leadership at antioch was very committed edward jackson and jackson who lived onbeyond ontario road

you're right i was a key person healways headed up every few months a community cleanup where he would havepeople out shoveling and raking and cleaning up the neighborhood to keep itclean that was his that was his niche that was hiscommitment but he was a very important leader he was very involved in hischurch community his whole family was he was a homeownera long time homeowner ontario place charlotte i'm sorry i have to stop and think shelived she had been displaced from ontario place at one point which iswhere walter pearson his family live

charlotte and then she moved to a houseand was actually on columbia road she was a key person in every one ofthese single member districts that were key leaders carol davis on linear place which ofcourse had been home to a lot of the old sds organizers and anti-war arguments onorganizers before yeah but what are you all going to haveto help me on here he ended up being he ended up being a the legislature in california he livedin ontario place there was a collective of people who live there was reallydavis there i think really davis was

karl what on when your place what was he was he was involved withjames bond come on kylie no wasn't karl oh tom hayden of course all right who became a sweater later incalifornia ya tom hayden lived on linear place where right next to the firestation because carol davis slipped on the other the other side to wear thishad to have been 74 maybe 71 to 74 there were there was arotating number of people who lived in on that particular house there's anapartment building mid-block on linear place i have no ideawhat it's like now

but that's where dorothy mcgee lived anddorothy mcgee was a key part of everything that went on in the communitybecause she was the publisher of three different underground newspapers thedaily rag colonial times boy who can remember the color i thinkcolonial times was first in the daily rag and then newsworks there was another communitynewspaper bob bollman was involved as was called the rock creek monitor jude franco and there was another personand one is brian brian who works for brian who works for the it's not thefederal home loan bank board with the

federal housing finance agency i think you said i don't know maybe he'sretired on the station 39 years ago i was on the first wpfw board was a hugebattle over getting the license pacific guide applied for the license we finallygot the license and then there was another huge battle between the pacificnational board and the local folks over how black the station would be becausethe national you know movement left folks wanted to control the station butthe local folks wanted to control their own stations and there was all thistension there that led to jazz and justice radio andthat was it was a big deal when we as a

local board agreed that we would playonly jazz and that's what we started out as paying playing only jazz i then was elected to the nationalpacific aboard as a part of that effort man the course the station still thereit's gone through its struggles and continues but i can't believe it was 39years ago i figured that out yesterday i think it was 39 years the chris then wethe whole issue of homelessness surface for the first time we never had how muchpeople i can remember doing an interview with the new york times was writingabout the coalition for the homeless and mitch schneider and the community forcreative non-violence and i i read that

interview again recently and i was likei can't believe i said this but i actually said in adams morgan we didn'thave homeless people because people kind of took care of each other and if therewas somebody who i can remember walter pierce's mother used to let everybodyunder the sun you know if they needed a place to staythey would you know you knew where people could go and stay we didn't havethat level of homelessness but as the gentrification and displacement spreadand as the economy got more and more difficult well jimmy carter was elected in 74 74after work and grow

car that's true 76 ok so it's about 1976that some very significant things happen namely wage and price controls getlifted which had been imposed by the nixon administration nixon was like thelast president to ever fully fund the development of affordable housingbecause it was under nixon that section 8 program was created once that came to an end and wage andprice controls came to an end prices started to spiral out of controlboth in terms of rental housing and of course we had the age-old argument inthe district of columbia that well give rent control

you know no one's going to build anyrental housing as long as you're ever in control even though new rental housingwould have been exempt from rent control that was you know that was always theargument economically so we began to see i think that was kindof where because what happened is waiting price controls were listed undercarter and if you remember interest rates hit twenty-three percent andeverything spiraled out of control it was at that point that i went to iwas working for the barry administration at this the local housing department and westarted the tenant purchase assistance

program where we put in place a wholeseries of things to help tenants bother building that's when we did threethousand units in three years we had an innovative grant from hudpatricia robert harris had been secretary of hud we had other grantsthat we were able to put in place and the whole theory behind tenant purchasewas if we can get folks into ownership by the building and we had technicalassistance we funded muscle and metropolitan washington planning andhousing who would come in with the team of people to provide technicalassistance and organizing and getting people could you have to exercise yourright within a certain period of time

hundred eighty days i think it was ahundred and twenty and it all worked very well except that the premise wasget people into ownership once the coop own the building then itwould be pretty easy to get long-term mortgages the problem was that long-term mortgageshit that twenty-two twenty-three percent and nobody could afford that so it was areal kind of panicked to figure out how to do that and there was an insurancecompany that actually came to the table jim gibbons the gibbons know jim who wasthe president of this insurance company and he agreed to give mortgages to thetenant co-ops

i have to track down and think throughhis name which was pretty amazing in and of itself the a society google see uncle andconservation that's right of lenders it would finallymake the construction loans and i guess it was at that point that i decidedi should run for city council because i ran for city council twice once at largewhich i think was a much more exciting time and then of course oncefrom word one but it was the first time i started to work kind of professionallyas an affordable housing developer and then i was elected president of the newcoalition for the homeless and community

for creative non-violence and mitchschneider had i had an issue on the ballot givingpeople the right to shelter and the coalition for the homeless which was allof the various nonprofit neighborhood groups who would come together to try todo programs etc for homeless people dennis buffet was a was a leader in thatwhole group took a rather novel position of opposing the ballot question for theright for shelter it was it was very very divisive but aschair of the coalition for the homeless i had to speak for that position whichwas very very hard because i'm not sure i ever really agreed but the big concernwas that if you were going to have a

right to shelter what you were going toend up with was big warehouses which is exactly what happened because that wasthe only way you could you could provide that kind of basic right to shelter butthe ballot initiative want you know pass so the district of columbia's this hasbeen changed i don't think it has like new york you have a basic right toshelter which does define in some very clear ways the government'sresponsibility to support people who need housing in new york it's been onthe books for a very very long time but you city council races what lessons

well i think the i ran for city councilbecause i thought i could use that as a basis for organizing oh no on a wider basis and i think therewas a point in time when the government was still very new that that might havebeen possible but i think by the time i ran for the word one seat it haddeteriorated into electoral politics business as usual and it was a questionof-of you know who could do what you know with whatever people at the pollsand i think that my my-my race for city council on board one you know posed a real racial dilemma fora lot of people who thought well we

should vote black as opposed to lookingat issues and i think that the those that was a difficult time was a verydifficult time for me it was very difficult time for a lot of people whotold me murray i really would like to support you but icannot use why would you ask me this plus i have tostop and think what year it was maybe you should maybe you should put it on myarm jenny 78 79 8- yeah yeah with 17 i was functional yes and you know i don't know what to tellyou no no that was the second time on thatlist

the first time i ran at large oh forcity council with large place that thinks i found out the other day i thinki placed 3rd hr crawford one that seat ya know that was the second time in ward1 yeah that was right smith who wouldbecome chairperson and frank had never been involved historically but he wasalso involved with ips he was a fellow at ips and the christian there'sthe whole saga of my role with ips when i when nick barnett fired me because hesaid i was spending way too much time you know dealing with work that wasn'this and i said to him well i don't know whyyou can't use your own finger to dye

your own phone and i think it was thenext day that i was told you know marie you really should find something else todo and that's when i kind of started freelancing and working you know in theneighborhood stuffed full time but i subsequently was among the first groupof women nominated to be a fellow at ips arthur wast thou nominated me to be afellow and charlotte bunch was in that groups it was this group of womenbecause the big controversy and ips was there were no women there were no womenfellow so i was among that first group and asit was related to me later i wasn't there but it was related to me laterthat i was elected because the work i

guess the big debate was between markyou know markin dick barnett mark raskin dick barnett made the ultimate decision the other fellows were involved but theymade the ultimate decision but my work was not considered academic enough youknow scholarly i was not doing scholar wework community organizing was not considered scholarly enough even thoughwe were doing a lot of stuff that challenge basic economics and on and onanyone but that would have been nominated as a fair amount ofsignificantly changed my life is by probably would have never run for citycouncil

yeah so tell us what all this amazingexperience college inform your life since then well i guess it depends on who you mightask but from my perspective everything i get after that was about organizing iworked as a affordable housing professional and i went on to workinitially and i i left the district in 85 yep in 85 and went to philadelphia wherei was a neighborhood what they call the neighborhooddevelopment fellowship and i built a huge amount of housing in northphiladelphia much of which is still

the very first kind of sro we built converted to school did thevery very first tax credit low income housing tax credit deal that was everdone with fannie mae is an investor in north philly arm and from there other than the fact that that's where imet my husband and that's where our son was born i then went to new york because janewent off to new york so we lived in brooklyn for 20-plusyears and i did a variety of housingdevelopment work i worked in queens i

was executive director of habitat forhumanity in new york city which was probably one of them as satisfying jobsever had because at that point habitat took no government money so we raisedall our money and it was wonderful because then we could just decide how wewanted to spend it and we did some pretty important things at that time we finished off the thefamous jimmy carter buildings on the lower east side and started doing inphil housing we did one of the first projects in brooklyn and habitat ofcourse and we did the first project started the first project in harlem

so we did a lot of housing there iworked with in long island at the long island housing partnership doing kind ofconsortium financing with banks for senior citizen housing worked in queensdoing economic development with the queens borough president we did some housing but i was doing alot of entrepreneur development and very very diverse communities and then uhworked with housing works in new york city which was providing housing forpeople who are living with hiv nh and of course some of the very early folks thati knew in adams morgan live de menthe would place who died from eight

i mean the impact of that was prettypretty heavy duty you know people who had been involved inan amo organizing people who had supported i did a radio show and in dc at onepoint with john wilson before he ever became a member of the city council on wamu andwe talked about local issues and one of the people involved with that show diedof aids so eight took its toll not just in the gay community and thearts community but in the community

development you know community as well so i i builtand managed housing for people who are homeless but we're also active drugusers so i did that with housing works and then i guess in 2the district to workat hud right in the aftermath of when the recovery act waspassed by the obama administration and we did the neighborhood stabilizationprogram which was the national hugely successful even today effort to put notonly money on the street to help people buy foreclosed properties and make themaffordable but also a very very successful effort at building capacity

and local technical assistance effortsto build the capacity because people have forgotten how do you buildaffordable housing how do you do the kind of we never really got down to thekind of basic community organizing that people still i think don't quite knowhow to do every day how do you bring people together and howthe people figure out what's in there own best self-interest that's a very hard question becausepeople don't know how their own self-interest connects to the decisionsthat get made that change their lives and there's much of what you look backon now

and you think you know this is it's likeit's like your life passing in front of you what happened to all that workbecause i think we've done a lousy job of succession planning a proactiveanother way of describing it but we sometimes i think we haven't done a verygood job of bringing along the leadership that even has the notion thatit's possible to change things but then i look at the young people who are partof my sons you know the twenties and i'm like ohwell you guys are doing it one of the young african-american men who was one of the first people that myson connected with in college name is

james days james is organizing in ohio and one dayhe you know and we've talked often on he was winded chaffins best friends and hehe said to me you know somebody named cortland cocks and i was like a winocourt when cocks of course you know to cortland booth and courtland is a partof what they call the sncc elders who are now working with young people over you know all of these issues the blacklives matter and it's like hey maybe this is going to come around you know i mean i remember my earlyconfrontations with you know with with

sncc and being told get out you know just leave now you you don't need to be here which ledto a very very important moment for me in college because i was able to becausei was asked to live leave a snake organizing conferences iended up walking down the street dead and these are bed this church andmeeting martin luther king and doing a very long interview which wassubsequently published with coretta scott king so it's a very it was a very importantthing for me to have been told to leave

but that you know that i think thequestion becomes can we can you bring people i mean i was a jackson delegatewhen jesse jackson ran for president and we elected all these local delegates andpeople forget the amazing organizing that he in and the people around him did thequestion becomes can you can you cole s these folks back together in a way thatwill make a significant difference thank you thank you thank you when asked questions so what-what one thing about get somemore detail about call has he was coming

out of this karl has the head was barry goldwaterspeech writer and he came out of a of a heavy-duty libertarian really an economist kind of history andif you read any of his books and work now you you see what that history was i'm notquite sure how karl got to the district of columbia accept that obviously he worked for barry goldwaterso that's what brought him here and when i met karl the first time he was livingat on about at buzzards . it was after

he left the buzzards . boat i guess theyall got evicted or maybe he broke up a relationship i don't remember both thathe came to live with us a minute would place and karl had very very newthoughts about what libertarianism what being an amicus mint and it all had todo with the whole issues of local control which is the reason why he wassent to heavy-duty supporter of the neighborhood government work that wewere doing he never disagreed that you neededregulation that you needed regulatory framework but that it should becontrolled as locally as possible and if if decisions could be made major policydecisions could be debated and made in a

town hall atmosphere people acted moreresponsibly not just because they were with theirfriends and neighbors but because it allowed them to be educated about whatwas in fact in their own self-interest because i think what happens now aspeople become so isolated day they don't know they don't know that you knoweconomic decisions are not in their own best self-interest and i think karl wasan important it was an important thinker and heactually you know he actually wanted to do things it was more than just being asinker he actually wanted to do things and sore adams morgan as soon as thelaboratory we were a great laboratory

it was no question that just like manymany things you think of historically in the district of columbia i mean look at urban renewal we were thegreat laboratory and southwest dc of urban renewal you know eleanor frank eleanor rooseveltlooked at all these o people living there on the river withno indoor plumbing and we have to do something and what do they do that raised all ofsouth with dc and moved all of 27 thousand families moved from there tochar basically so we've always been a

great laboratory i think the distinctpart of what happened in adams morgan is that it was truly you know an effortfrom the bottom up it was not something that was likesomeone's great experiment and i think that was that was an important and ithink the other thing that was so important about what we did is that itwas promised on many different kinds of people both economically and raciallybeing able to work together the amo flag which my mother made thatsaid unity and diversity you know you know so it's a neighborhooddid struggle to achieve school in - yeah and you know when it what people maybedon't know or understand about when

marion barry was elected mayor he was avery very important progressive leader to the very end hewas an important progressive leader and those of us who were involved with hisfirst administration we really thought we were going to builda local government that was going to be different that would be very different would bevery progressive that would be very locally based with advisory neighborhoodcommissions and that's how decisions and policy got a the problem of course wasthat congress controlled everything i mean that's certainly was something thati think he'll the mason and you know

julius hobson and the people who startedthe dc stated party believed you know they were they were the premise for ya we can do this and we can do it in avery different kind of way it was a time of great optimism and wedid some pretty of you know there was some pretty amazing things that happen i mean adams morgan in the work thatmarion barry was doing he wasn't even on the school board at that point aroundthe pilot district project took on the issues of police brutality that you tookthe parallel right down the line what's going on now with black livesmatter i suspect folks in black lives

minor know nothing about the pilotdistrict project so the question bending maybe they dobecause courtland's connected them so we can help with somebody like court letteryou know jimmy garrett or somebody else would have connected them the inspiration i don't know solomon skior any you can provide for jim darrell of these names well certainly karen clients with wasimportant i mean she-she kind of came along as we were doing housing stuff andshe was very involved in community development and financing and sheactually gave me a job once when i

really needed one which was at people'sinvolvement corporation where we did we convinced howard university president togive us some of the vacant houses in the droid park and i convinced the districtof columbia government to give us some loans and we actually rehab houses inthe droid park which was pretty cool those were all historic so that was anexciting kind of time that was under the president who had been president forever so care and i think work particularly at the hud level with genobarone ii and was an important kind of person and i think karen now works inbaltimore doing community development if i'm correct but i may be incorrect but ithink she's in baltimore jim zarrella

jim jim was one of the tim was one ofthe thinker's you know who kind of took the concept of a community reinvestment and built on it i think i can't remember the name of thenonprofit in the coalition that he put together and i think that was what wasreally interesting around a lot of what was going on is that you had you hadthese connections between people who were doing to some extent theoretical orresearch or whatever but in adams morgan you know we were we were the doers wewere the ones who support yeah why not i mean human i mentioned something aboutthe federal communications commission

and what happened there there were a group of public interestwarriors and charles firestone being one who were very involved in the issuesbefore the fcc around local media and the fact that local media was becomingmore and more consolidated and they followed the challenge to the fcc thatled to you know splitting up some of the-the mediacontrol between tv and it led to the rule that said that somebody onecorporation could not own a major newspaper the radio and the televisionthat spawned h you are being given the howard university by wtop and had a lotto do with what happened with the

washington start but we day we werethere lap i mean we were the community of voicethat said yes we don't think there should be localmedia control if you work with you mark you know absolutely videos absolutely nick nickwas cutting this like i'm a he had also been a part of us student pressassociation and college press service and knit said we're starting this videoproject and he would teach kids how to use video how to use technology he did the that i pretty sure it wasnick who did the-the famous tape that

led to our dragging this movie aroundcongress to get them to run community park west on now walter pierce part so nick was nick was an important part i think he lived with us in 1829 for abrief time i can't remember how long it was like a couple of months somewhere inthere so the community video project i alwayssaw it as a kind of extension of much of what we were doing community control schools i mean thatwas that was a whole thing at hd cooking and that's how marie got built the moviethat has an interesting history but the

applicants trees disappointment so i understand i do remember when thepool first opened down there because i'm a i-i-i swim if it was so crazy becausethe pool and marie reed had so many different cultures swimming in the poolyou could never bring order yeah you know - who was swimming whatlane and more they all going this way or where they go on this way or that waskind of like the community garden story it was like oh my god it was thelifeguards just had no control over that pool at all it was always free swim always know you

of course you know it was on it was onmet with place that we had the first met would place block party that withinabout three years became adams morgan day and the people on meant would placehated of after that they were like god adams morgan day we're all these peoplecome from it cetera i can remember when they were doing whatthey would do they started doing evening stuff at what was then having youngfrere and some of the younger folks in the community decided we're going tostand around outside and scare them so maybe they will all go away from thesegroups of young men kind of grouping arrest the evening and having anaffair just hoping that these people

would go away and not come here to eatthis french fruit it and you know the whole thing about the bars everybody was like up in arms aboutevery everything you opened up with about the bar remember when columbia station open itwas like now original come , station this yeah adams morgan didn't want to be anothergeorgetown exactly exactly and in fact that it was the big dealabout the subway whether or not we're gonna have a metrostop in adams morgan and ended up at

woodley because people didn't want themetro stop because it would become like and that's exactly why georgetown has nometro stop they fought against it well that was very i don't know i don'tknow what year it was to be honest it would have been a natural and 76 andthat would come yeah but they were still building partsof it so - 72 73 yeah construction of a few years yeah disaster now well look at who designed it wasdesigned by the army corps of engineers

the army corps of engineers have neverdesigned anything for public wide public use you know that's not what they had everdone and then of course congress stop sending any maintenance also gets aroundjurisdiction especially virginia refused that i meanpressure yeah one two three so ok campaign ran for city council herea hundred waiver unsuccessful bid and he was riding on this myth you guysactually created when we see was like yeah and-and the my campaign beenordered one use the use the heart you

know and up until ready two years ago your bumper sticker was still on theback of a one-way sorry you know and you know what there wasanother one and i don't know if it's still there but somebody tell me the nottoo long ago that there was another one on the back of a stop sign somebody was really under the back ofsubstance a cap with university there was one right there issue as youcome up whatever it is that goes across i guessif you go all the way across columbia

road to catholic university and come upthat way yeah michigan app which is really funny then the he can he can he can postersthe yellow ones what is our meeting i mean you know youdaddy booking my father's my grandfather camein the second wave the second massacre in the union he was recruited off the boat literallymy grandfather because he could speak multiple languages he was 12 years oldhe can speak multiple languages but he was recruited to go to a military schoolcalled ben lippen huh

in western north carolina to playfootball and that's how i ended up in north carolina