Building America in Chevy Chase DC
Join us this Wednesday, April 23, for a 7 p.m. Zoom webinar being hosted by the Chevy Chase Community Association about the “WINDOWS 250” project that helps frame conversations about future development of the civic core with an understanding of our community’s exclusionary history.
The topic is a new campaign called “WINDOWS 250: A Neighborhood in the Nation’s Capital, 1776-2026” created by the 3/4G ANC Committee on Racial and Social Equity (RASE) and HCCDC. It features a series of posters that celebrate the nation’s coming 250th anniversary with a challenge to redeem the promise of the Declaration of Independence on a local level. The CVS on Connecticut Avenue displays the entire series of eight posters, with individual ones in participating storefronts along The Avenue.
Log in here for the Wednesday, April 23, 7 p.m. on Zoom
HCCDC President Carl Lankowski will moderate a panel for the free, hour-long webinar on Zoom. He is a RASE member and project director of “WINDOWS 250: Building America in Chevy Chase DC.” Joining him will be local historian Cate Atkinson, anthropologist Mark Auslander, and Jocelind Julien, a direct descendant of a family displaced from Broad Branch Road a century ago whose enslaved progenitors also worked for George Washington.
The poster exhibit tells our local story from Colonial times to the present, including the little appreciated stories of free African Americans who participated in the agrarian industry that once defined these rolling acres; the advent of modern suburban development in the 1880s; the building of an exclusive, utopian neighborhood; and the unfortunate history of land dispossession that gradually displace virtually all Black landowners by the 1940s. We conclude with more recent efforts at restorative justice and truth telling that aim to honor the full multiracial history of our community across the past 250 years.