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Lessons from a Black community that was built from scratch to succeed

2023-11-01 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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At the intersection of Shiver Drive and Jube Court in Fairfax County, the street signs double as a kind of victory post. They signal the triumph of Jube Shiver Sr., a Black schoolteacher who couldn’t buy a house in 1960 because of racially restrictive housing covenants — so he built his own neighborhood. A subdivision called Randall Estates.

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Shiver died in 2010 at age 88. But he lived long enough to realize his dream of having a home, some land and the opportunity to build a community where Black families could flourish. At a gathering recently to celebrate the inclusion of Randall Estates on the Fairfax County Registry of Historic Sites, Jube Shiver Jr., the developer’s son who also lives in the subdivision, noted, “It was no walk in the park building this community in the early 1960s during Jim Crow.”

The historic registry rightfully honors what Shiver Sr. and the other original homeowners accomplished. What doesn’t fit so neatly on a historic marker is the answer to a question that perhaps is even more important: How did they do it?

How did a group of middle-class Black people manage to create a safe, comfortable, enriching and, for some, luxurious neighborhood — a veritable slice of heaven on Earth, to hear some of the residents describe it — in the midst of intensive White resistance to civil rights gains in the 1960s?

The example of Shiver is invaluable: He was a tradesman by training, a graduate from Armstrong Technical High School in the District who went on to study industrial education at Virginia Union University.

He was teaching at the Manassas campus of the Industrial School for Colored Youth — yes, another trade school — when he decided to build a housing subdivision. So one day he put teaching on hold and donned his general contractor’s hat.

Shiver, who was in his 30s, hired teams of skilled craftsmen to build 37 of the 48 modern- and ranch-style homes that were sold at Randall Estates. He would also construct apartment buildings and start his own property management company, which his son took over after his death.

Trade school has been given a black eye by those who believe such hands-on skills relegate the student to a lower caste and only college can provide a path to economic success. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Another striking feature of early life in Randall Estates was the presence of men — the husbands and fathers. Many of them knew each other from work or school before moving to the estates, which relied on word-of-mouth for sales. Many of them played sports — everything including golf, touch football and basketball.

“The parents were close-knit, and you’d have groups of men who were very tight,” recalled Kimberly DeLaine Bose, who also grew up in Randall Estates and returned to raise a family there after graduating from college. She is the Randall Estates Civic Association’s secretary. “The fathers would play pinochle or bid whist and go Christmas caroling through the neighborhood. It was very unique, although we didn’t know it at the time.”

But it doesn’t have to be unique. It can be that way all over if the people in a community get together and do things that make their community stronger.

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“One of the things I remember about growing up is always feeling safe,” said Inez Bryant, who is president of the Randall Estates Civic Association. “We had teachers in the neighborhood. People from the church lived in the neighborhood. Everybody knew you; everybody was looking out for you.”

“When I look back on it, I guess my parents had me in this little sanctuary,” Shiver Jr. told me.

“I don’t know if I should say this out loud, but it was like growing up in a magical bubble,” Bose said. “There were trying times, I can say in retrospect, but sometimes I just scratch my head and say, ‘I don’t know how aware of all that I really was.’”

There was “massive resistance” to school integration in Virginia. There were members of the Ku Klux Klan holding statewide elective office and using the rhetoric of white supremacy to incite violence and suppress Black voter turnout.

When Paul Sullivan, a White federal employee, protested against racially segregated swimming pools at Little Hunting Park in 1965, his family received numerous death threats and their mailbox was bombed several times. The Black family that had not been allowed to use the pool was also threatened and eventually left town. James Lewis, the first head coach of the Washington Mystics women’s basketball team, was asked to leave the Bucknell Manor tennis courts after a White friend had invited him to play there.

One of Randall Estates’ original homeowners, William Carr, could not legally occupy the house he had built in 1965 for his children and German-born wife because of Virginia’s miscegenation laws. They maintained an apartment in the District for two years until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in 1967.

It’s just as well that the youngsters of Randall Estates weren’t robbed of their childhoods to a bombardment of racial ignorance and evil.

There are ways to make life better. Randall Estates had no crime to speak of, certainly nothing like gun violence, homicides and carjackings.

Suppose every teacher and school bureaucrat who worked in D.C. lived in D.C. Especially the shop teachers? Same for the police. The District would become one of the safest and smartest cities in the country, virtually overnight. People behave differently — teach better, police better — when they have skin in the game. The point is, improvements can be made.

Randall Estates is reaching a turning point, however, and the neighborhood will still have much to teach. White people are moving in at a rapid clip. If the neighborhood hasn’t already stopped being majority Black, it will soon. Neighbors appear to be desegregating but not necessarily integrating. But perhaps the hopeful lessons of the Randall Estates’ founding will hold, and the neighborhood values will endure.

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