The Resilient Streams in the Urban Landscape of Washington, D.C.
The process of urbanization often leads to the alteration of local streams. Such alterations range from complete disappearance of streams by making them flow underground, converting them into canals, loss of their aquatic habitat, and changes in their morphology (Kang and Marston 2006; Kang 2007) . In Washington, D.C. many streams and springs have disappeared during the last 200 years of urban development and federal growth (Williams 1977) . The two rivers bordering the city, the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, and the National Mall within the city, look very different as compared to their respective landscape characteristics in the 1700s due to changing sediment and runoff volumes. In Figure 1 you can see that the current stream density within the city and the surrounding areas reveals a significant difference (Figure 1). However, some times the local conditions of streams are resilient enough to counter the effects of the urban runoff (Kang 2007; Kang and Marston 2006).
Figure 1: A Visual Depiction of the Current Variable Density of the Stream Network within and outside Washington DC (Source: USGS)
While many local streams have disappeared, the resilient Rock Creek continues to drain the western portion of the national city into the Potomac River. The prominent names among the streams that disappeared include Smith Spring, Frankling Park Springs, Gibson’s Spring, Caffrey’s Spring, City Spring, and Tiber Spring (Williams 1977) . While some of them are underground, others were converted into canals or significantly reduced in their coverage for the development of the city. However, Rock Creek has successfully survived through the impervious development of the city.
Despite ambitious urban growth, the federal government protected the Rock Creek Park so that Rock Creek could meander through its flood plain. It is also a vibrant ecosystem supporting aquatic life as well as wildlife in its flood plain. One of the cherished experiences of many Washingtonians is to witness a rich variety of wild life as they conclude their late evening commute from work through the Rock Creek Parkway that partially runs through the flood plains of Rock Creek.
Figure 2: Location of Klingle Creek in Washington, D.C. (Source: USGS)
The successful survival of Rock Creek during the last century of urban growth is also because of its equally resilient tributaries that kept it alive and strong. Tributaries such as Klingle Creek (Figure 2), offer a microcosm to understand the resilient structure and ecology of this national creek. Klingle Creek is a small urban branch of Rock Creek and flows through the neighborhoods of Woodley Park, Cleveland Park, and Mount Pleasant in the city of Washington. It is unique to Rock Creek because of its geomorphic survival during the changing land cover politics around it. Surrounded by highly urbanized landscape, Klingle Creek presents a healthy ecosystem with a variety of fluvial processes. The stream has adjusted to the surrounding highly impervious landscape in a synergistic fashion. Starting as a narrow channel at the headwater, its capacity gradually increases in the downstream direction to accommodate the urban run-off. Various sections in the upstream portion of Klingle Creek experience bank erosion allowing for a sediment supply for the lower portion. The lower portion of the creek includes large rocks creating beautiful waterfalls (Figure 3) while reducing the velocity of the urban flow. It also provides sediment traps for various types of aquatic habitat (Figure 4). Many portions of the creek present lush moss covered rocks and woody debris offering a soothing experience to nature lovers.
Figure 3: Large rocks creating a waterfall in the lower portion of Klingle Creek (Source: Ranbir Kang, 2015)
Figure 4: A medium resolution point cloud (draped with colors from orthoimages) showing the sorting of large rocks in the lower portion of Klingle Creek to trap sediment (Source: Ranbir Kang, 2015)
Despite a highly urban landscape comprising its watershed, Klingle Creek is lined by a riparian corridor with a thick tree canopy. While the occasional tree fall offers woody debris to regulate the eco-geomorphology of the stream, a thick tree canopy helps promote the interception of rainwater. Therefore, it has played an important role in the survival of Rock Creek against the urban sprawl in the heart of our capital. For a long time, Klingle road (which ran parallel to Klingle Creek) was used by locals as a quick access between Cortland Place and Porter Street. However, the frequent flooding and maintenance costs of the road made the city think about alternatives to the road which led to the calls for saving Klingle Valley. While various groups of the community gathered support to remove the road, other groups gathered in favor of keeping the road. The battle grew until the dispute reached the City Council and in 1991, the road was barricaded (Figure 5).
Figure 5: The barricaded entrance to Klingle Road in 2015. The Creek is located on the left of the barricade while facing it. (Source: Ranbir Kang)
Figure 6: The entrance to the new multi-use Klingle Trail in 2015. The Creek is located on the left while facing the trash can. (Source: Ranbir Kang)
After more than two decades of dispute, in 2015 the barricaded portion of Klingle Road was replaced by a multi-use trail (Figure 6). The trail offers a variety of recreational opportunities for users of all age groups. One side of the new trail is bordered by Klingle Creek and the other side includes the historical woodland garden of the Tregaron Conservancy. While benches along the trail offer a view of the creek (Figure 7), the trail also connects the recreational communities of two neighborhoods in the city.
Figure 7: Benches along the new Klingle Trail to enjoy the view of the Klingle Creek. (Source: Ranbir Kang)
Figure 8: Post restoration use of a matting to protect the stream banks of the restored portion of Klingle Creek. (Source: Ranbir Kang)
The process of replacing the road with a trail included restoring various sections of Klingle Creek through alterations of the stream banks and creating a sequence of steps and pools along the stream. It also included efforts to modify the banks by planting native vegetation and covering various portions of the bank with protective matting (Figure 8)..
The replacement of the road with a trail along Klingle Creek is an example of geodesign. There are numerous cases of urban areas across the globe where communities and city officials worked together in geodesigning their cities with a sustainable futuristic approach (Beatley 2016). The high line project in New York City and the urban parks in the city of Singapore are just two more examples where cities introduced green zones within the highly urbanized landscapes to connect their communities with nature using softer sustainable architectural designs. Economics is often one of the major driving forces behind such conservation and restoration initiatives so that the long term future demands are met with minimal cost. The ecological challenges and experiences of residents in Klingle Valley during the next decade will determine the effects of the restored creek on the larger Rock Creek, the role and functions of the new trail, and the appropriateness of restoration design and expenditures in the Klingle Valley restoration project. Klingle Valley, an urban creek along with its sister tributaries of Rock Creek offer us a soothing experience and a quick get away from the urban stress. With Washington moving forward as a sustainable city, Klingle Creek complements that ambition as a resilient hydrology of Anthropocene.
Ranbir Kang is an associate professor at Western Illinois University. With a long term research interest in the Washington metropolitan area, he specializes in urban hydrology, human impact on fluvial systems, and high resolution river surveys.
Stories of Change Hidden in Washington, D.C.’s Alleys
Washington, D.C. is known for its monuments, museums, and grand government buildings. It is associated with policy wonks, foreign dignitaries, and political controversy. But it is also a home town for thousands of people who live in its lively neighborhoods. How best to get a glimpse of everyday life for D.C.’s residents, those people living in places hidden from view on the National Mall? A tour of the city’s most hidden places of all: its urban alleys.
Like many American cities, D.C. has a system of alleys. Most of these narrow thoroughfares are used for municipal functions such as garbage collection, deliveries, and parking. You might also find more informal, but not unexpected, signs of use, like basketball hoops or folding chairs used by those who live, work, or spend time nearby. Yet a turn down the right alley in D.C. might surprise you. In D.C. alleys you’ll find clues about the city’s history of substandard housing for African American migrants following the Civil War, you’ll see evidence of the early roots of gentrification in the 1950s, you’ll glimpse a burgeoning public art scene, you’ll tread across new wastewater management projects, you’ll stumble upon a community garden, or you’ll even find yourself in a hip and expensive commercial enclave. D.C.’s alleys offer insight into how this city has dealt with its long history of strained race relations, how it is creatively managing urban space to sustainably support urban growth and density, and how it is attempting to stay true to its longtime African American and Latinx residents while attracting whiter, younger, and wealthier residents who have flooded the city in recent years.
Even prior to the Civil War, D.C.’s alleys told a unique story. As the city’s population increased in the 1850s, alleys were cut from the city’s large blocks to provide access to residential space in block interiors. These new alleys often formed I or H shapes, with only narrow outlets to main streets, and they were called “hidden” or “blind” alleys because the activities inside could not be seen from front streets. As sites of makeshift wood-framed housing, these alleys were where black and white residents found inexpensive places to live downtown. As opposed to other Southern cities that had alley housing, in which a servant or slave house along the alley would share a lot with the main house, to which it would be oriented, the residents of D.C.’s blind alleys were disconnected from the residents of the front streets; their homes were on separate lots and they were oriented to the back alley. In fact, alley-facing lots and front street-facing lots were often separated by other narrow alleys or by fences. D.C.’s alley residents were legally and socially removed from life on front streets.
During and immediately following the Civil War, the city faced a severe housing shortage as the population nearly doubled. Growth of the African American population was particularly profound as freed people flooded the city. Between 1860 and 1870, the black population more than tripled from 14,000 to 43,000. In a pedestrian city without mass transportation, these migrants were forced to live close to employment downtown. As historian James Borchert has detailed, many individuals and families found shelter in the makeshift housing, and later brick row houses, constructed in the blind alleys, which became increasingly overcrowded. The lack of adequate sewerage systems, clean water, and waste disposal also caused high rates of disease and death. Crucially, the overcrowding was not just due to an increase in population. Absentee owners of alley properties recognized the high demand for shelter and increased rents. This in turn led to more density as families were forced to double up in order to pay rent.
An African American family sits outside of their alley dwelling, 1941. Photograph by Edwin Rosskam, 1941. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-012828-D. Public domain. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017764780/
D.C.’s alleys were racially segregated, and whereas the majority were all-white before the Civil War, by 1897, 93% of alley dwellers were African American. Borchert argues extensively that through the first decades of the twentieth century, despite the real dangers of disease, death, and poverty, African American alley residents in D.C. valued their communities. Many were newly adjusting to urban life from being enslaved on Southern plantations, and they created incredibly close-knit, alley-based communities rooted in extended kinship networks and communal help. They treated the alley itself as communal property where children could play, adults could socialize and exchange goods, and neighbors could warn one another about outsiders—particularly white outsiders like police or social reformers—who might enter the alley. Alleys also had exceptionally high retention rates given high population turnover in other cities at the time, and especially because alley dwellers did not own their own homes. In alleys, African Americans made claims to the city.
For those living in alleys, they were places of African American identity and belonging, where necessity reinforced strong communities based on kinship and mutual aid. White Progressive-Era reformers and elites also understood alleys as African American urban space, but for them this had only negative connotations. They published studies reporting on the high rates of disease, death, poverty, and crime in alley dwelling communities, and they generally concluded that the isolated built environment of blind alleys fostered immorality. Findings like these ignored or were oblivious to the positive associations of community or mutual aid that were so central to life for alley residents. Instead, they popularized perceptions of alleys as African American slums.
Restored alley dwellings line Pomander Walk in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2016.
By the 1950s, young professionals, nearly all whom were white, were moving to Washington, D.C. to work for the growing federal government, and these new Washingtonians wanted to live near their workplaces. It was in the 1950s that developers set out to transform downtown Washington, D.C. neighborhoods—those with alley dwellings—into elite white enclaves. In the Southwest neighborhood, this process occurred with federal urban renewal funds, and Southwest’s many alley dwellings were the first to be demolished in the now-notorious clearance of Southwest, which resulted in the displacement of 23,000 of its residents. In neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, Georgetown, and Foggy Bottom, small-scale developers bought alley dwellings, evicted African American tenants, rehabilitated the homes, and sold them to young white professionals, facilitating the transition of these D.C. neighborhoods from mixed-race and mixed-income to nearly entirely upper-middle-class and white. Not called gentrification at the time, the process of displacement, rehabilitation, and resale foreshadowed demographic change that would sweep entire neighborhoods in the 1970s and again in the present day. By the end of the 1950s, alley dwellings were no longer classified as slums, and these low-rent African American communities disappeared from D.C.’s landscape. Yet the built environment persists; turn down alleys such as Snow’s Court in Foggy Bottom, Pomander Walk in Georgetown, or Brown’s Court in Capitol Hill (to name just a few) and you’ll find the narrow nearly-million-dollar rehabilitated rowhouses that once housed the city’s poorest African American residents.
As Washington D.C.’s alley dwellings disappeared due to demolition and rehabilitation in the 1950s, so did the public perception of inner-city alleys as African American community and residential space. By the 1960s, as in the rest of the country, D.C.’s alleys were primarily known as service corridors whose formal functions included vehicle storage and waste collection. In this period of postwar white flight and urban disinvestment, however, alleys also filled with garbage and teemed with rats. By the 1980s, alleys were too often associated with the drug trade and horrific gun and sexual violence. Alleys became symbols of decline in America’s cities, which, compared to growing suburbs, were disproportionately African American, underfunded, and underserviced.
One of D.C.’s “green alleys,” located in a residential neighborhood in the upper northwest part of the city. The alleys are designed by the D.C. government’s Department of Transportation to mitigate storm water runoff. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2016.
Today, as many U.S. cities have seen the reversal of white flight as investment and young professionals have flooded downtown neighborhoods, some cities, including D.C., are turning again to their alleys. These overlooked and long-neglected public spaces seem to be the solution for the myriad puzzles facing growing cities. D.C.’s Department of Transportation, for example, has instituted a Green Alleys program to combat wastewater runoff; walk down an alley in the residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city and you’ll find new permeable paving. The city’s 2016 zoning rewrite now allows for dwelling units to be built along alleys in certain residential zones in an attempt to add density and more affordable housing to the city’s downtown; walk through some back alleys in Capitol Hill and you’ll see new construction of alley-facing houses (this move to put residences back in alleys would have Progressive-Era reformers stunned).
The entrance to The Dabney, a high-end restaurant located in D.C.’s Blagden Alley. The restaurant is accessible only through the alley. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2018.
Alleys even provide an antidote for D.C. residents now frustrated by the effects of recent investment. Those disillusioned by the ubiquity of glass-paneled luxury apartment buildings and mixed-use developments can turn down alleys for a seemingly more authentic city scale. Alleys promise a labyrinth space where one can wander and discover. They remain in people’s imaginations the edgy, dirty, and potentially dangerous parts of a newly glitzy city. And of course, this edginess and “frontier” quality can be capitalized upon as well. Enter Blagden Alley in the Shaw neighborhood, and you’ll find high-end restaurants, a boutique coffee shop, and design firms, accessible only through the alley. Even if you confirm the locations on Google Maps before you go, you’ll still have to trust your sense of direction as you pass a surface parking lot, dumpsters, delivery trucks, and strewn garbage on your way to the center of one of the city’s last remaining nineteenth-century “blind alleys.” In Blagden Alley you’ll also find the “D.C. Alley Museum,” an officially christened collection of alley murals (alley murals, not part of the “museum,” abound in the Shaw/U Street area). While these murals don’t have the defiance of graffiti tags—they are in fact funded by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities—they still give the illusion of artists appropriating the surfaces of private property. Blagden Alley offers a partially curated aesthetic that serves as an antithesis to the large-scale development that now swaths the downtown core.
“Let Go,” a mural by Rose Jaffe, is part of the “DC Alley Museum” located in Blagden Alley. The murals are funded in part by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2017.
D.C.’s alleys have, at the moment, found a tenuous balance between longtime uses and new investment: in Blagden Alley and nearby Naylor Court, garbage trucks trundle past professionals eating at high-end restaurants; rats scurry beneath Instagram-ready murals; and prostitution and drug use take over the alleys by night, while families living in restored alley dwellings set up block parties by day. You might lament the late gentrification of these alleys, the last holdouts in a larger area that’s already thoroughly gentrified. Or, you might enjoy an urban space that manages to attract racially and economically diverse groups of people. At least for now, you would be right to think so either way. Alleys offer a glimpse of life in this city in transition.
James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980).
On September 24, 2016, thousands gathered on the National Mall to celebrate the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The building is distinctive: the bronze-meshed ziggurat moves upwards towards the sky and into the light. Inside the new 400,000 square foot museum are some 36,000 artifacts that share truths about America’s past and tell stories about 400 years of of black life in America. The new museum allows Americans to walk the path from slavery to civil rights to the Black Lives Matter movement.
As much as what we will learn and experience because of what is inside the museum, the mere presence of this museum on the Mall also makes a difference.
It’s all about “location, location, location.” The Mall is a stage for our democracy, a place we tell our national story. Being “on the Mall” makes a powerful statement about a shared identity, about belonging and about recognition. It confers national legitimacy. It’s the reason that each year dozens of groups lobby for their memorial or museum to be on the Mall. Finally, in the last several years, the Mall has become “a space,” both metaphorically and literally, for African Americans.
Both the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC, said aloud as neh-MOCK) and the recently completed 2014 memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr.—also on the Mall—mean the African American story is accessible and integral. Each has extended our national narrative to include the contributions of African Americans. At the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, then President Obama noted “This national museum helps to tell a richer and fuller story of who we are.” And he is right. Because of these new additions, including the 2004 opening of the National Museum of the American Indian, the Mall now reflects a national history that includes a wider, more racially and ethnically diverse society. Visitors to the new museum are reminded of this by the quote from Langston Hughes: “I, too, am America.”
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial represents a significant departure from other memorials on the Mall. It is the first to commemorate an African American, and by extension, the first memorial to recognize and legitimize the modern Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights memorials are a litmus test for how far society has progressed towards the goal of racial equality and justice and to what degree society has fulfilled the Civil Rights Movement’s goals. And while there are many other memorials to Martin Luther King Jr. around the country, the MLK Memorial on the Mall confers a national legitimacy on the Civil Rights Movement and its objectives.
New additions to the Mall transform the meaning of this public space in the heart of the nation’s capitol. The MLK Memorial boldly challenges the Mall’s dominant narrative that is devoted largely to national identity and national history as defined and embodied mostly by white men (the Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, Grant memorials), and a white heritage reflected in Greco-Roman architecture. The MLK Memorial is a critical development in commemoration on the Mall because it reflects a new writing of the basic principles of equality, rights, and justice.
The National Mall is an extraordinary public space that mirrors our national narrative of who we are and how we came to be. As we have embraced a more inclusive history, commemoration and expressions of national identity have also changed. The new National Museum of African American History and Culture, The MLK Memorial and the Museum of the American Indian correct the implicit bias on the Mall towards a narrow definition of national history and national memory that has ignored minorities. Visitors to the Mall now see a place that more closely reflects the diversity of our nation and our national experience.
These recent additions on the Mall remind us about the power of public spaces to tell these new national narratives. The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the MLK Memorial are more than just buildings or statues. They represent the dream for equality, and justice, and a full inclusive democracy. The Mall has become a space for that dream to come true.
Lisa Benton-Short is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at George Washington University, Senior Fellow with the Sustainability Collaborative and the author of the 2016 book The National Mall: No Ordinary Public Space
American Indians of Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake
When Captain John Smith sailed up the Potomac River in 1608, he found 13 American Indian villages along its banks. Spanish incursions beginning in 1521 brought diseases, land grabs, resource destruction, military assaults, and slave raids. Nonetheless, there were several large villages and fortified towns by the time of John Smith’s 1608 visit. At that time, three major political groups vied for power in the region: the Susquehannock in Pennsylvania; the Piscataway Chiefdom in southern Maryland; and the Powhatan Chiefdom in Virginia and farther south.
Every place in the Western Hemisphere has an ongoing American Indian story, and the Washington, D.C., area is no exception. People had settled on the shores of Washington’s Anacostia and Potomac rivers as early as 9,500 BCE. Their descendants still reside here. The Nacotchtank Indians of what is now D.C. were part of the Piscataway Chiefdom, with settlements stretching along the Potomac River. Anacostia, a rendering of the word “Nacotchtank” by the English Jesuits who came with Leonard Calvert in 1634, was the home of their most important leader.
Captain John Smith’s map (1612) showing Nacotchtank details (Library of Congress)
Indians of the Chesapeake Bay would form early and lasting impressions on the newly-arriving European settlers. This is where Pocahontas met Captain John Smith, after all, setting up one of the great legends of early American settlement. But the presence of Indians also played a role in racial segregation laws that were only recently changed.
Chesapeake Indians were riverine communities, drawing sustenance from the waterways for as much as 10 months of the year. The Powhatan confederacy of Indians that greeted the Jamestown settlers included tribes from the Carolinas to Maryland. The Piscataway often sided with the Powhatan Chiefdom against the English, and when the Powhatan were defeated in 1646, English settlements quickly expanded. King Charles deeded Piscataway territories to Lord Baltimore in 1632, and European settlements reached what is now Washington, D.C., by 1675.
British settlement during the 17th century followed the usual pattern of expansion. Indians were pushed off their lands. Treaties and alliances were made, then promises broken. Frontiersman pushed into Indian land at the expense of the communities. Epidemics of introduced diseases decimated the Indigenous population, down to perhaps a tenth of its former number.
“There is petition after petition, speech after speech, on record by the chiefs to Maryland Council, asking them to respect treaty rights,” says Gabrielle Tayac, niece of Piscataway Chief Billy Tayac. “Treaty rights were being ignored, and the Indians were getting physically harassed. The first moved over to Virginia, then signed an agreement to move up to join the Haudenosaunee [Iroquoise Confederacy]. They had moved there by 1710. But a conglomeration stayed in the traditional area, around St. Ignacious Church. They’ve been centered there since 1710. Families mostly still live within the old reservation boundaries.”
Map of the American Indian Tribes of the Chesapeake region (courtesy Doug Herman)
“By 1700, the English had settled and established plantation economies along the waterways, because they are shipping to England,” says anthropologist Danielle Moretti-Langholtz at the College of William and Mary. “Claiming those pathways pushed the Indians back, and the back-country Indians become more prominent. Some Natives were removed and sold into slavery in the Caribbean. This whole area was kind of cleaned out. But there are some Indians that remain, and they are right in the face of the English colonies. We can celebrate the fact that they’ve held on.”
But it was racial laws and policies that pushed for the near “disappearance” of Indians from the region. In Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, white indentured servants united with black slaves in an uprising against the Virginia governor in an attempt to drive Indians out of Virginia. They attacked the friendly Pamunkey and Mattaponi tribes, driving them and their queen Cockacoeske into a swamp. Bacon’s Rebellion is said to have led to the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, which effectively embedded white supremacy into law, driving a wedge between whites and blacks that came to dominate American social dynamics.
Perhaps most damaging of all was the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, pushed forward by the white supremacist and eugenicist Walter Ashby Plecker, the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. This Act made it unsafe—and, in fact, illegal—to be Indian. Plecker decreed that Virginia Indians had so intermarried—mostly with blacks—that they no longer existed. He instructed registrars around the state to go through birth certificates and to cross out “Indian” and write in “Colored.” Further, the law also expanded Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.
While many Indians simply left, the Mattaponi and Pamukey stayed isolated, which protected them. They kept mostly to themselves, not even connecting with the other Virginia tribes. But they continue today to honor their 340-year-old treaty with the Governor of Virginia by bringing tribute every year.
On the Eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay, the Nanticoke mostly fled into Delaware, while a small band called the Nause-Waiwash moved into the waters of the Blackwater Marsh. “We settled on every lump,” said the late chief Sewell Fitzhugh. “Well, a lump is just a piece of land that is higher, that doesn’t flood most of the time.”
The remnant Maryland tribes consolidated under the name of Piscataways, and around 1700 removed to southern Pennsylvania. There they came under the protection of the Iroquois, where they became known as the Conoy. By the end of the 18th century their official numbers had been reduced to 320 persons. Their lands and political autonomy were completely destabilized, and reservation boundaries were not respected past 1700.
Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage would not be overturned until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia. Mildred Loving is often identified as black. She was also Rappahannock Indian. But consequent to Plecker’s actions, Virginia Indians faced considerable challenges proving their unbroken lineage—a requirement necessary for achieving status as a Federally Recognized Tribe. The Pamunkey received Federal recognition in 2015, and six other Virginia tribes in January 2018—500 years after Pocahontas.
The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian located on the National Mall, welcomes you to visit and learn more about the Piscataway and other Indigenous peoples of the Americas during your visit to Washington, D.C., for the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting.
Recommended readings:
The Aborigines of the District of Columbia and the Lower Potomac – A Symposium, under the Direction of the Vice President of Section D. Otis T. Mason; W J McGee; Thomas Wilson; S. V. Proudfit; W. H. Holmes; Elmer R. Reynolds; James Mooney. American Anthropologist, Vol. 2, No. 3. (Jul., 1889), pp. 225-268. https://www.jstor.org/stable/658373?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Mid Atlantic Division Team Takes 2018 World Geography Bowl Title
Mid Atlantic Division Team Takes 2018 World Geography Bowl Title. AAG President Derek Alderman (far left) presented the new championship award.
The Mid Atlantic Team won first place in the 2018 World Geography Bowl, an annual quiz competition for teams of college-level geography students representing the AAG’s regional divisions. The 2018 event was a milestone, marking the 25th year for hosting the event during the AAG Annual Meeting.
On April 11, while the International Reception was pumping away upstairs, the World Geography Bowl was underway on the third floor of the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans. Ten teams representing eight of the regional divisions as well as two ad hoc spoiler teams competed in the 9 round preliminary match up. The eight divisions represented were: Mid Atlantic, East Lakes, West Lakes, Southwest, Southeast, Great Plains/Rocky Mountain, New England-St. Lawrence Valley, and Middle States Divisions. The two spoiler teams were aptly named Longitude and Latitude.
The championship round challenged the top two teams from the round-robin preliminaries: Southeast and Mid Atlantic. After a neck and neck round of toss-up questions, Mid Atlantic pulled out the victory in the team question portion of the final. AAG President Derek Alderman was on hand during the final round to serve as the guest judge and grantor of the prize atlases courtesy of National Geographic Society to the winning team.
Most of the students who participate on the regional teams are chosen during their respective regional division Geography Bowl competition held during their regional division annual meeting each fall. All students who participate receive funding from their regional division as well as the AAG in order to help offset the costs of attending the AAG Annual Meeting.
The winning Mid Atlantic Division team’s roster was:
Matthew Cooper, University of Maryland
Christine MacKrell, George Washington University
Brian Slobotsky, University of Maryland
Zachery Radziewicz, Salisbury University
Daniel Milbrath, Salisbury University
The first runner-up Southwest Division team’s roster was:
Jesse Andrews, Appalachian State University
William Canup, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Jacob Cecil, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Darby Libka, University of Mary Washington
Randi Robinson, Mississippi State University
Jared White, University of West Florida
The second runner-up Great Plains/Rocky Mountain team’s roster was:
Tristan Boyd, University of Colorado, Denver
Karl Bauer, Kansas State University
Sara Newman, University of Colorado, Denver
Peter Brandt, North Dakota State University
Lindy Westenhoff, University of Wyoming
Jonathon Preece, University of Wyoming
Sujan Parajuli, South Dakota State University
In addition to team prizes, the top individual scorers are also acknowledged. The Most Valuable Player of the 2018 World Geography Bowl was Jesse Andrews from Appalachian State University (SEDAAG) who was presented with an atlas courtesy of Gamma Theta Upsilon.
The remaining top five individual scorers listed in order of points received were:
Matthew Cooper, University of Maryland Graduate Student (MAD)
Kate Rigot, University of Colorado, Denver Graduate Student (Team Latitude)
Deondre Smiles, Ohio State University Graduate Student (East Lakes)
Tristan Boyd, University of Colorado, Denver Undergraduate Student (Great Plains/Rocky Mountain)
Thanks to the 2018 WGB prize donors and volunteers
Organizers of the World Geography Bowl would like to express thanks to the countless volunteer question writers, team sponsors/coaches, moderators, judges, and scorekeepers who make the competition possible, and to the many students who competed across the country. We would like to recognize the volunteers this year as: Paul McDaniel (Kennesaw State University), Wesley Reisser (US Department of State & George Washington University), Rob Edsall (Idaho State University), Dawn Drake (Missouri Western State University), Richard Deal (Edinboro University of Pennsylvania), Zia Salim (California State University at Fullerton), Ronnie Schumann (University of North Texas), Liz Lowe (GIS Technician, New Orleans City Park), Jim Baker (University of Nebraska-Omaha) Patrick May (Plymouth State University), Jase Bernhardt (Hofstra University), Mel Johnson (University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc), Olumide Olufowobi (University of Lagos), Megan Heckert (West Chester University), Tom Bell (University of Tennessee) Peggy Gripshover (Western Kentucky University), Amber Williams (West Virginia University), Lee Ann Nolan (Pennsylvania State University), Jeff Neff (Western Carolina University), Casey Allen (University of Colorado, Denver).
World Geography Bowl organizers thank its supporters, who generously donated atlases, books, gift certificates, software, plaques, and clothing – Texas State University, National Geographic Society, Pearson, Gamma Theta Upsilon, University of Georgia Press, Clark Labs, Esri, Guilford Press, Syracuse University Press, Penguin Random House, American Geosciences Institution, and Expedia – who recognize the important role the competition plays in building a sense of community and generating excitement around geographic learning. Your continued support is truly appreciated.
A special thank you goes out to the World Geography Bowl executive director, Jamison Conley (West Virginia University) for his volunteer efforts at organizing the bowl since 2015.
2019 World Geography Bowl – Washington, D.C.
The 2019 World Geography Bowl competition will be held in Washington, D.C. in April 2019. Regional competition typically occur during the fall at respective AAG regional meetings, where regional teams for the national competition are usually formed. For more information on organizing a team or volunteering at the national event, contact the World Geography Bowl executive director, Jamison Conley at West Virginia University at Jamison [dot] Conley [at] mail [dot] wvu [dot] edu or the AAG Geography Bowl coordinator, Emily Fekete at efekete [at] aag [dot] org. To learn more about the 2019 World Geography Bowl, follow updates posted here.
In addition, a photo album of the event will be shared soon.
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Annual Meeting
AAG 2018 New Orleans Annual Meeting PDF Program
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Annual Meeting
2018 Annual Meeting Program: New Orleans, LA
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Southwest Louisiana’s Creole Trail Riding Clubs
By Alexandra Giancarlo Photos by Jeremiah Ariaz
Jeanerette Trail Ride, Jeanerette, LA, 2015, Photo by Jeremiah Ariaz
You could say trail riding and horse culture is in Acynthia Villery’s blood. “I was going to rodeos in my mother’s womb,” she explained to me. A Texas transplant, Acynthia hails from a long line of Creoles in south Louisiana. Her heritage has such mixed origins that, when asked about her background, she jokes that she’s “a Heinz 57,” referring to the alleged fifty-seven varieties of the famed sauce.
Trail riding—recreational horseback rides featuring anywhere from a few dozen to thousands of participants, held on a weekly basis by a rotation of dozens of trail riding clubs—occurs throughout southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana, even spreading into Mississippi in recent years. Despite the practice’s present-day geographic breadth, it is most closely associated with the Creoles of rural Southwestern Louisiana who descended from some of the region’s earliest settlers, many of them landowning gens de couleurlibres (free people of color) in antebellum times. Others were enslaved and played a crucial role on the farm and the ranch. All had multiracial origins, owing to the multi-generational mixing of people of European (usually French), Native American, and African ancestry.
To learn more about Creole culture, check out this field trip:
Zydeco, Gumbo, and Black Innovators: A Day Trip to Southwestern Louisiana Creole Country
This field trip is a day trip to the southwestern part of Louisiana, home to the mixed-race French heritage Creoles. In collaboration with community members, we will be treated to a traditional Creole lunch and listen to a private music demo by renowned zydeco artist Keith Frank (and have a Q&A with the artist). The Black History Month exhibit at Opelousas Museum (“African American Business Owners and Innovators”) has been extended to accommodate our group and the exhibit’s curator, a Creole community historian, will be guiding our tour. Over the course of the day, we will learn about Creoles’ little-acknowledged history—such as Creole cowboys, predating much of the white settlement of the area—and their often-obscured contributions to the region’s cultural offerings. En route, we will watch a classic documentary film on Creole lifeways by ethnomusicologist Nicholas Spitzer (Tulane) to set the scene.
Much has been said and written about the recent removal of four New Orleanian monuments to Confederate leaders and an 1874 white supremacist uprising[1][2]. More will be said at the Annual Meeting. The wide-ranging struggle over New Orleanian monuments includes how those memorials (re)defined New Orleans’ place in American space and time around Lost Cause ideology, variously comforting, threatening, affirming and negating certain historical/geographical narratives about the city, the American South, and the United States as a whole. They rendered the Confederate cause noble, the South distinctive yet within an American nationalist imaginary of post-bellum reconciliation and “redemption,” and simultaneously championed white supremacy while obscuring and/or glorifying the violence necessary to secure and maintain it. [3]
What New Orleans’ Confederate monument boosters wanted to do to and through monumentalized public spaces is important, as are the efforts of Take ‘Em Down NOLA to redefine those spaces, this city, and the American national story through monument removal. Geographers have written about the broader questions of historical memory and memorialization in the American South[4]. In considering the meaning-making done by and against Confederate monuments in the Crescent City, we should not forget what unmonumentalized places, events, and people do to historical memory, what I call the political geography of forgetting inconvenient history in New Orleans. What historical events unheralded in public spaces do to collective memory and the political definition of place can be as important as those monumentalized. Think of those numerous small plaques, sidewalk markers, and “stumbling stones” in Paris, Berlin, and other European cities to the deported and murdered in the Holocaust; Before their installation, the fact of Nazi extermination of Jewish life was largely invisible in contemporary urban landscapes, or confined to museums and monuments instead of distributed through quotidian spaces where those absent lives were lived and ended. Think also of how few, and recent, are Parisian memorials to Algerians killed in that city during France’s dirty war against Algerian independence. The relative visibility of memorializations of German (and Vichy French) state violence against Jews and the Resistance in the 1940s and near-invisibility in public space of French state violence against Algerians and Leftists in the 1950s and ‘60s both reflects and reinforces France’s belated historical reckoning with collaboration in World War Two and ongoing historical amnesia of crimes by “good” Republican, Gaullist France twenty years later.
New Orleans’ passage through black slavery and slave resistance, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction and its counter-revolutionary rollback are the historical backdrop upon which Confederate monumentalization rested. Here, I wish to address a few historical sites within an easy walk from the AAG Annual Meeting that have remained unmemorialized, which are foundational to not just this city’s past and its reality today, but are constitutive of major aspects of America’s present reality. Check them out while you’re visiting New Orleans for the Annual Meeting. And if you do, consider what it means for our past, our present and our future these places aren’t part of the stories we tell ourselves about where we came from and how that shapes the prefigurative politics of who we are and can imagine ourselves becoming.
Historical sites mentioned here: [1] Jackson Square, where Jean St. Malo was executed in 1784; [2] The Omni Hotel, formerly the site of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel, New Orleans’ most opulent slave auction site; [3] The corner of O’Keefe and Common Streets, scene of the 1866 New Orleans Massacre; [4] Lower Canal Street, site of the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place; [5] Former site of Orleans Parish Prison, currently inside Armstrong Park. Where 11 Italians were lynched in 1891. Conference hotels: [A] The New Orleans Sheraton; [B] The New Orleans Marriott; [C] The Crowne Plaza Hotel. (Courtesy, Brian Marks)
Start in Jackson Square at the heart of the French Quarter. During the Spanish colonial period, this was the Plaza de Armas at the foot of the seat of the colonial government and Catholic cathedral. As a slave society initiated by French colonists in 1719 and expanded by the Spanish, Louisiana was home to maroon communities of African people who emancipated themselves from bondage by retreating into wetlands behind the high ground near the Mississippi River from which plantations were cut out of the forests and cane brakes of South Louisiana. One of those people history has recorded was Jean Saint Malo, who led a community of Maroons east of New Orleans in present-day Saint Bernard Parish before his capture by Spanish slave-catchers in 1784. He was executed in today’s Jackson Square on June 19, 1784. There’s no historical marker of this event, or St. Malo’s life, in the Square. The hugely important role of African people in building colonial New Orleans and making a Revolutionary Atlantic, from the Louisiana maroons, the Haitian Revolution forcing France to sell Louisiana to the United States, the Haitian refugees who came to New Orleans in the 1790s and greatly shaped the city, to the Haitian-inspired 1811 slave uprising in St. John the Baptist parish not far from the city, are largely a constitutive absence in New Orleans’ public memory.[5]From Jackson Square, head down Chartres Street (it’s pronounced ‘Charters’ by locals) two blocks to the Omni Hotel on the corner of St. Louis and Chartres. This hotel sits on the former location of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel[6], built in the 1830s and the site of the most prominent slave market in the city, a city which in the 1850s had at least 50 different businesses buying and selling enslaved people. Five different slave auctioneers, buyers, and holding pens were located on this street corner alone; another cluster was around Esplanade and Decatur on the other side of the Quarter, a third in the modern CBD just west of Canal Street along Baronne Street. In a very material way, these innocuous New Orleans intersections were the beating heart, the nerve center, the financial nexus of that enormous engine of human suffering, forced migration, and economic valorization we call the American domestic slave trade. And it was that trade that pushed black slavery, Native American land dispossession, and the pernicious circuit of slave/land/cash crop accumulation westward through the South. The domestic trade centered upon New Orleans revived, through that territorial expansion, what might have been a stagnant institution, augmenting the tremendous political and economic power of the Slave South the United States of America, and later the Confederate States of America, fought so hard to sustain, expand, and defend from any challenge. And while the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge now has a permanent exhibit on the New Orleans’ role in the slave trade, and the Historic New Orleans Collection put on an important exhibition on the city in the domestic slave trade in 2015[7], consider what it says not about New Orleans’, but about America’s, blindness to its history there exists today but one humble brass plaque acknowledging any of this in those New Orleanian neighborhoods through which so many thousands of enslaved people were bought and sold, through which the destiny of 19th Century North America was cast, making first the Mexican-American War and later the American Civil War inevitable.
CHANGE. Architectural remnant of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel, home to one of New Orleans’ dozens of slave markets, built into the existent Omni Hotel. 400th block of Chartres Street, French Quarter. (Courtesy, Brian Marks)
In the St. Louis, people were auctioned under a grand dome in an auditorium ringed with decorative columns. In this city where slave markets and holding pens were ubiquitous, only two historical markers exist; in Algiers, across the river from the French Quarter, a marker attests to the landing site where thousands of enslaved people arrived from the Middle Passage. Across the street from the Omni is a marker on The Original Pierre Maspero’s Restaurant (440 Chartres) acknowledging that building was once the site of a slave auction. One architectural detail on Chartres hints at the former occupant of that block, part of the word ‘[EX]CHANGE’ preserved on an arch of the former St. Louis Exchange that was incorporated into the Omni, built on the site in 1960. It’s a poignant reminder of what this place was and how the materiality of New Orleans’ central role in the domestic slave trade survives in spite of the erasure of this memory from the city’s sidewalks and buildings.
O’Keefe Street looking towards Canal Street, overlooking the site of the 1866 New Orleans massacre. (Courtesy Brian Marks, March 2018)
Keep walking down Chartres to Canal Street and turn right. Go up Canal four blocks and cross Canal to Roosevelt Way, then one more block to the corner of O’Keefe and Common. At this location a year after the end of the Civil War, on July 30, 1866, a meeting was held in the de facto State Capitol, the New Orleans Mechanic’s Institute, to amend the 1864 Louisiana Constitution, which did not guarantee equal voting rights to all men over 21, to include universal male suffrage. While slavery had been abolished through the 13th Amendment the year prior, black voting rights and civil rights more generally were flagrantly suppressed throughout the South, including Louisiana. The state’s Republican legislators and freedmen, many Union Army veterans, wanted to put into the state Constitution what would eventually become the 15th Amendment. That late July afternoon in 1866, around 1:30pm, a pro-voting rights march of black army veterans and others, marching from the Treme neighborhood just north of the French Quarter to the Mechanic’s Institute was met at O’Keefe and Common by an armed crowd of ex-Confederates and off-duty New Orleans Police and Firemen who attacked the march and subsequently the convention delegates inside the Capitol; at least 37 people were killed and more than 100 injured on this street and in the building, long since demolished.[8]
The same street view (as previous photo) during the massacre, from the perspective of the police/civilian assailants’ skirmish line. From Harper’s Magazine, August 1866. (Courtesy Brian Marks)
The 1866 New Orleans Massacre wasn’t just a local story; outrage over the killings nationwide was one of the precipitating events in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the Republican sweep of Congress in 1866 and 1868, the implementation of Military Reconstruction in the South and the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. And yet, there’s no public memorialization of where it happened in New Orleans. Why is that? And what does it do to how Americans think about how their country came to be what it is today, or how New Orleanians imagine their city in American history, that it remains unacknowledged in public space?
Head back to Canal Street, towards the river and the conference hotels for the Annual Meeting. Right where you’ll be crossing Canal Street many times with your fellow tote-bag toting AAG’ers between the Marriott and the Sheraton, this was a battlefield in an uprising against the United States on September 14, 1874. And the rebels won that day. Here along Canal Street down to Decatur near the river front, the Battle of Liberty Place saw the White League, a white supremacist paramilitary insurgency who sought to overthrow the Reconstruction state government of Louisiana, attack, defeat, and besiege the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, the State Militia, and the city and state government. Three dozen people were shot and killed in the battle. One block down from the Marriott at the Customs House, now the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium (423 Canal Street), Louisiana’s Governor, Republican loyalists, and U.S. Army troops were besieged for three days by 5,000 White Leaguers before military reinforcements arrived.[9] Even though Reconstruction in Louisiana survived until 1877, Liberty Place and many other related episodes of anti-Reconstruction violence around Louisiana and across the region between 1873 and 1876 affected a counter-revolution in the American South, known by its participants as “Redemption.” This counter-revolution ended black voting and civil rights, removed black elected officials from office, and cancelled the limited economic and public educational reforms that were attempted during Reconstruction.[10]
Canal Street looking towards the Mississippi with the two main conference hotels in view (the Marriott on the left, the Sheraton on the right). (Courtesy Brian Marks, March 2018)
New Orleans was, again, central to these processes. The two 1870s U.S. Supreme Court cases that gutted the 14th Amendment’s civil rights protections for nearly a century implicated this city. The Slaughterhouse cases[11] (1873) – ostensibly about New Orleans’ municipal government power to regulate water pollution from dumping offal from abattoirs upriver from the city’s drinking water intakes – were hijacked into a broad constitutional judgment voiding federal power to enforce citizens’ civil rights violated by state governments. A short drive from the conference to the corner of Harmony Street and Tchoupitoulas (it’s pronounced CHOP-it-TOOL-us) takes you to as close as you can get to that former river batture dumping site, now occupied by the Port of New Orleans. And you guessed it, there’s no public memorial or signage or acknowledgment of this place’s historic role in undermining the enforcement of the 14th Amendment until the mid-1960s.
Illustration of the White League routing the New Orleans Metropolitan Police in the Battle of Liberty Place, September 14th 1874. This view from the middle of Canal Street roughly between the two main conference hotels. The view is facing east towards the Customs House, currently the Audubon Insectarium. Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 1874. (Courtesy Brian Marks)
The case U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), tried in New Orleans district court before heading to Washington, destroyed the last vestige of federal enforcement power against constitutional civil rights violations.[12] Cruikshank was among the few indicted by federal agents for the infamous April 13, 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which more than 100 African-Americans were slaughtered at the Grant Parish courthouse by a white mob in the course of overthrowing the local, pro-Reconstruction, government.[13] (In that tiny North Louisiana town of Colfax, the official State of Louisiana historical marker emplaced in 1950 reads – today, in 2018 – the “Colfax Riot” … “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” A private memorial, dating to 1921, in that town’s graveyard to the three white rioters who died in the violence acknowledges they fell “fighting for white supremacy.” Following his initial trial in New Orleans, Cruikshank was acquitted by the U.S. Supreme Court who ruled the federal government overstepped its powers to enforce federal constitutional guarantees violated by state and local governments. This confirmed black people could be massacred with impunity and the national government would not intervene to hold them criminally responsible.
New Orleans did not fail to memorialize the Battle of Liberty Place. The problem is the city, soon after the insurrection, decided to honor and glorify the insurgents with a stone obelisk erected on Canal Street in 1891, relocated a short distance in 1993, and finally removed in 2017. This column is not about whether that monument or others in New Orleans should have been removed, but I do note that today there’s nothing in the area that tells the story of what really happened there in 1874, how it led directly to the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, impunity for anti-black violence, and disenfranchisement for 90 years, or what America would be like if history had gone another way, if equal voting rights had been enforced, if Reconstruction had not been subverted and different people with a different agenda had served in that pivotal Southern Congressional bloc in the following century. My opinion is we’d have had the legislation passed in the New Deal and Great Society about 50 years sooner, and a very different regional and racial distribution of wealth and power in this country. To not teach the historical/geographical hinge a site like the Battle of Liberty Place pivots between diverging paths in the making of America, the one taken that led us to this moment and another forsaken, is to rob us of our collective imagination to make a different future. In that sense, it’s not enough to just take down the monument.[14]
A last stop, assuming your feet don’t hurt too much already, is back up Canal Street, once more past the throngs of geographers, all the way to Rampart Street at the northern boundary of the Quarter. Turn right and follow Rampart to Armstrong Park, just past Congo Square, and go through the main, archway entrance opposite St. Ann Street. Inside the park, near where the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for the Performing Arts now stands, was the old Orleans Parish Prison. At this location the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants took place on March 14, 1891, an event that resonated widely to catalyze nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment in American public opinion.[15] The New Orleans of the 1880s and 1890s attracted thousands of Italian immigrants, many of them Sicilians, who worked on the docks, ran small shops, and did truck farming.[a] So many Sicilians crowded into the French Quarter, back then a decaying slum, that it earned the nickname ‘Little Palermo.’ When in October 1890 the New Orleans Police Chief was shot dead by unknown assailants, the Mayor and Police decided the guilty were Sicilians and rounded up 19 men for trial. Nine were actually tried and were acquitted of all charges. The next day a huge crowd, led by prominent New Orleanian legal and political figures, was agitated to action and led to the prison where they forced entry to the building and killed eleven of the 19 Italians held inside, eight managing to hide. The grand jury empaneled to investigate the murders made no indictments, even agreeing in writing with the lynch mob’s charge the jury had been bribed to acquit the Italians, so no one was held accountable.
National press coverage of the police chief’s murder, the trial, and lynching was extensive. Leading American newspapers like the Boston Globe and New York Times editorialized in favor of the lynching, while the Italian government and Italian-Americans widely decried the violence and lack of punishment for the murderers. Through these sensational press stories, Americans were acquainted for the first time with terms like “Mafia,” “stiletto,” and “vendetta” in service of the criminalization/racialization of southern Italians as undesirable persons to be discouraged or barred from the United States. So while mass immigration by southern and eastern Europeans to America would continue for another three decades, the 1891 New Orleans Italian lynchings were a critical, foundational moment normalizing hostility against these new immigrants[16], building towards the National Origins immigrant quota system that heavily restricted south and east European migration, and all but eliminated immigration from Africa or Asia, from 1924-65. We should all know about this, every child should learn it in American history class. In a New Orleans so proud of its Italian/Sicilian heritage — its St. Joseph’s altars, the Monument to the Immigrant showing an Italian family, knapsack and kerchiefs and caps and chubby baby and all, arriving from the river in Woldenberg Park with an angel harkening behind them to the Old Country, Irish and Italian parades on St. Patrick’s Day (don’t ask, it’s too complicated) – it’s inconceivable to me this event in this city is unmarked, unmemorialized, invisible in the middle of a public park. Because the events of 1891 silently shout every time a sitting Cabinet member praises America’s 1924 restrictionist immigration law[17]. And we don’t hear. And we could use those memories these days.
There’s numerous self-guided tours on the internet you can use to experientially learn more critical New Orleans history (and geography). I like the excellent collection of tours online at New Orleans Historical. And you can hire a tour guide to tell and show you more than I’ve done here; Hidden History Tours does excellent walking and bus tours of African-American New Orleans history from people who know the struggle to make this history visible because they’ve waged that struggle themselves. On the Annual Meeting agenda, consider the April 9th Black Geographies Past and Present field trip to Whitney Plantation, the daily 4/10, 4/11, 4/12 and 4/13 African Life in the French Quarter Walking Tours, the Thursday 4/12 A People’s Guide to New Orleans: Resistance in the Treme Walking Tour, or the Friday 4/13 Interpreting Slavery at River Road Plantations field trip. For those inside the meeting, consider hearing the President’s Plenary and subsequent discussion by five panelists on 4/10, the themed sessions on black geographies like Mike Crutcher’s 4/11 address on the Treme neighborhood and the 4/14 session on Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn. See you in New Orleans.
— Brian Marks, Louisiana State University and A&M College
[a] In my family’s story, one of my great-great grandparents was a Sicilian immigrant who stowed away on a ship bound for New Orleans, then jumped into the Mississippi and swam ashore just below New Orleans to arrive clandestinely.
[4] Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman, eds. 2008. Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
[5] Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, 1992. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
[7] John Pope, “Slavery in New Orleans is the subject of a harrowing exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 27, 2015.
[8] James Hollandsworth, 2004. An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
[9] Lawrence Powell, 2013. “Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk-Stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics.” In Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, eds. From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World. London: Routledge. pp. 127-49.
[10] Nicholas Lemann, 2006. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Macmillan.
[12] Robert Goldman, 2001. Reconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the vote in Reese and Cruikshank. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
[13] LeeAnna Keith, 2008. The Colfax Massacre. New York: Oxford University Press.
[14] Scott Marler, “Removing the Confederate Monuments In New Orleans Was Only a First Step Toward Righting the Wrongs of History.” The Nation, June 14, 2017.
[15] Alan Gauthreaux, 2010. “An Inhospitable Land: Anti-Italian Sentiment and Violence in Louisiana, 1891-1924. Louisiana History 51(1): 41-68.
[16] Christopher Woolf, “A brief history of America’s hostility to a previous generation of Mediterranean migrants – Italians.” Public Radio International, November 26, 2015.
[17] Adam Serwer, “Jeff Sessions’s Unqualified Praise for a 1924 Immigration Law.” The Nation, January 10, 2017.
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Annual Meeting
Flood Control Infrastructure and ‘Political Hydrology’ along the LA-TX Gulf Coast
An intact portion of the 17th Street Canal (flooded after Hurricane Katrina). Concrete flood walls top the levees. CC by 2.5 Wikimedia Commons, by Infrogmation
The nation’s costliest natural disasters continue to be caused by flooding. Every year, with enormous personal and financial cost to U.S. citizens, floods damage crops, infrastructure, businesses, personal property and, most unfortunately, cost American lives.1 Americans are quick to forget such disasters, however, in part because they’re frequently popping up in other places. Remember the devastating flooding in south Louisiana in August 2016? It cost $10.0 billion. Other than Texans and Oklahomans, most Americans probably do not recall their floods way back in May 2015. It cost a mere $2.6 billion.1 And these are just a couple of examples. The single event we have not forgotten, thankfully, is the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina-Rita flooding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It cost $153.0 billion, the most expensive flood disaster in the U.S. Of course, this was until Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. Cost are still being tallied, but unofficial estimates of flood damage cost associated with Hurricane Harvey range from $150 to $240 billion.
A sure way to reduce annual flood cost and protect the financial and personal livelihoods of Americans residing in flood prone regions is to strengthen America’s levees, an enormous system of flood control infrastructure.2 This means fortifying, heightening, and/or moving levees away from the river. These options, especially the latter, are in accord with “integrated flood management,” which has become the status quo in Europe.3, 4 In the Netherlands this approach is known as making “Room for the River.”4
Flood control in the U.S. is long entrenched in the paradigm of the “100-year” flood (i.e., 1 percent event), a strict probabilistic approach rooted in a decades old practice from the late 1960s that was advocated by insurance agencies and based on shaky assumptions regarding statistics, climate, and land use.5 A 100- year flood event may seem unlikely to occur during any given year, but it has a 26 percent chance of occurring in the life of a typical 30-year home mortgage. These are not favorable odds, and they’re even less favorable in view of documented historic (recorded) climate change, land use change, and land subsidence that has occurred since the 1950s.
Change had come to America, at least it seemed. With an inability of Congress to pass climate proof flood policy, action occurred at the executive branch. President Obama’s Executive Order 13690 (Establishing a Federal Flood Risk Management Standard and a Process for Further Soliciting and Considering Stakeholder Input) (6), anchored with an extensive synthesis of floodplain science research, included many tenants of “integrated flood management” with similarities to those already practiced in Europe.3, 4 In particular, EO 13690 explicitly required up to date scientific climate change projections to be included in the design of flood control infrastructure as well as embracing a modern “flood risk” approach that takes into account human safety and the value of human activities (e.g., industry, property values, agriculture, etc…). This is broadly in agreement with the direction advocated by the nation’s highest body of science, the National Academies of Science. Specifically, EO 13690 provided three options for redesigning federal flood control levees, including i) utilizing the best “actionable” climate change science, ii) construct levees two or three feet higher than the elevation of the standard 100-year recurrence interval flood, or iii) design levees to the standard of a 500-year flood recurrence interval (in the Netherlands federal levees are designed to withstand flood events having a flood recurrence interval of 1,250 to 10,000 years). An additional key component of EO 13690 is that it recognizes the value of “working with nature” to reduce flood risks, which supports environmental conservation and restoration of valuable floodplain wetlands and associated ecosystem services. This is especially important along the Gulf Coast and the lower Mississippi River because the storage of flood waters on the floodplain increases nutrient sequestration, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which are associated with the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, an enormous seasonally occurring area of hypoxic (oxygen poor) water off the coast of Louisiana and Texas detrimental to the shallow marine ecosystem. Thus, EO 13690 in essence represented a change from flood control to flood management. The intended move towards this “integrative” approach to flood management was not just substantial, it represented a paradigm change in the vision and mechanics of U.S. flood control that was also environmentally friendly. And, as levees are the embodiment of flood control infrastructure, implementation of EO 13690 is squarely in accord with President Trump’s stated intentions to improve the nation’s infrastructure.
Implementation of EO 13690 required stakeholders, such as states and levee boards, to develop a plan based on one of the three above approaches in coordination with federal agencies (e.g., FEMA, Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force, Water Resources Council, etc.). Thus, local and state governmental institutions had several options that enabled them to alter the placement of levee systems in accord with their own priorities, such as nature preservation, agriculture, cultural heritage preservation, and urbanization.7 Implementation of EO 13690 would have seen the U.S. finally moving forward with adaptation of a modern “integrated” risk based approach to flood management that enhanced floodplain ecosystems as well as respecting up-to-date climate change that impacts flooding in America.
Predictably, EO 13690 was abruptly challenged by some stakeholders, including those who are arguably in most need of reduced flood risk. The Association of Louisiana Levee Boards (representing all levee boards within the state of Louisiana) was opposed to implementation of EO 13690. Louisiana contends that EO 13690 would adversely impact the Louisiana economy, and that it represented “social engineering.” Louisiana levee boards were also resistant to EO 13690 because it recognizes modern climate change science, to which there is skepticism. Louisiana was also concerned with EO 13690 because it could result in significant disruption of industry and populations residing within the wetlands and floodplains of the Mississippi delta. But in the Netherlands, the Dutch were able to efficiently implement their “Room for the River” plan within the Rhine delta, which has one of the densest populations in the world with exceptionally high economic activities and property values.
Nationally, the new standards of EO 13690 were welcomed by a larger swath of stakeholders, including the Association of State Floodplain Managers.8 And fortification of the nation’s levee system was also in accord with Congressional action following the 2005 flooding of New Orleans.9 Alarmingly, it was revealed that U.S. federal agencies have scant information regarding the overall integrity of America’s ~165,000 km system of flood control levees.2, 5
The new White House administration rescinded EO 13690 in a Presidential Executive Order on 15 August 2017, about two weeks prior to the devastating flooding by Hurricane Harvey of the Houston metropolitan and coastal southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana. The precipitation totals from Hurricane Harvey event had perhaps a 500-yr recurrence interval, and the cost of the flood disaster is on scale with the Hurricanes Katrina-Rita flooding along the Gulf Coast.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), 2016. U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/
National Committee on Levee Safety, 2009. Recommendations for a National Levee Safety Program: A Report to Congress from the National Committee on Levee Safety.
European Council (EC), 2007. Directive 2007/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2007 on the Assessment and Management of Flood Risks.
Delta Commission, 2016. National Water Plan 2016-2021. Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, Rijkswaterstaat, the Hague, the Netherlands.
National Research Council (NRC), 2013. Levees and the National Flood Insurance Program: Improving Policies and Practices. Water Science and Technology Board, Division on Earth and Life Studies, National Academies Press, Washington D.C.
Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), 2015. Executive Order 13690 and the New Federal Flood Risk Management Standard Explained. ASFPM News & Views, 28 (1), February 2015.
National Levee Safety Act, 2007. 121 Stat. 1288, Public Law 110-114-Nov. 8, 2007, 110th
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The process of urbanization often leads to the alteration of local streams. Such alterations range from complete disappearance of streams by making them flow underground, converting them into canals, loss of their aquatic habitat, and changes in their morphology (Kang and Marston 2006; Kang 2007) . In Washington, D.C. many streams and springs have disappeared during the last 200 years of urban development and federal growth (Williams 1977) . The two rivers bordering the city, the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, and the National Mall within the city, look very different as compared to their respective landscape characteristics in the 1700s due to changing sediment and runoff volumes. In Figure 1 you can see that the current stream density within the city and the surrounding areas reveals a significant difference (Figure 1). However, some times the local conditions of streams are resilient enough to counter the effects of the urban runoff (Kang 2007; Kang and Marston 2006).
Washington, D.C. is known for its monuments, museums, and grand government buildings. It is associated with policy wonks, foreign dignitaries, and political controversy. But it is also a home town for thousands of people who live in its lively neighborhoods. How best to get a glimpse of everyday life for D.C.’s residents, those people living in places hidden from view on the National Mall? A tour of the city’s most hidden places of all: its urban alleys.
On September 24, 2016, thousands gathered on the National Mall to celebrate the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The building is distinctive: the bronze-meshed ziggurat moves upwards towards the sky and into the light. Inside the new 400,000 square foot museum are some 36,000 artifacts that share truths about America’s past and tell stories about 400 years of of black life in America. The new museum allows Americans to walk the path from slavery to civil rights to the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial represents a significant departure from other memorials on the Mall. It is the first to commemorate an African American, and by extension, the first memorial to recognize and legitimize the modern Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights memorials are a litmus test for how far society has progressed towards the goal of racial equality and justice and to what degree society has fulfilled the Civil Rights Movement’s goals. And while there are many other memorials to Martin Luther King Jr. around the country, the MLK Memorial on the Mall confers a national legitimacy on the Civil Rights Movement and its objectives.
