The National Park Service has removed from Northwest Washington landmarks the name of a onetime D.C. official who advocated destroying Black residents’ homes to support new development.
Melvin Hazen, who died in 1941, mapped woodlands outside downtown D.C. as the city grew beyond its original street plan and became D.C.’s surveyor in 1908 before being appointed to its Board of Commissioners.
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Though a Post obituary hailed him as a “City Father,” the Park Service said Hazen, as a surveyor, promoted the destruction of Reno City, a Black neighborhood that stood in what is now Fort Reno Park.
“It is an ill-devised, ill-shaped subdivision that you cannot do anything with unless you just wipe it off,” Hazen said of the neighborhood in a 1926 Senate hearing.
A ‘city father’ tried to erase a Black neighborhood. Now the neighborhood wants to erase him.
On Wednesday, the National Park Service said in a statement that it would remove Hazen’s name from a Northwest Washington park and trail after “careful consideration,” calling him “a leading force in the systematic dismantling of Reno City.”
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“Melvin Hazen was instrumental in the displacement of Black residents,” the statement said.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), who wrote the Park Service last year requesting the name change, said in a statement that Hazen “chose to wield his power by promoting segregation, prioritizing all-white communities and marginalizing African-American residents.” Under his leadership, she said, Reno City was labeled a “blight” and Black families were pushed out of homes they owned.
“The removal of his name from Rock Creek Park is long overdue,” she said.
The park also got a new name: Reservation 630, its number in the Park Service system. The Park Service said in its statement that, though it had administrative authority to remove Hazen’s name, only Congress has the authority to rename the park.
Chuck Ludlam, a local resident who advocated for a name change after researching enslaved people who worked the land north of Connecticut Avenue, said he hoped the Park Service would solicit new names for future congressional action. He has suggested the name Catawba — the name of a grape possibly first cultivated by enslaved people on a nearby vineyard.
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For now, though, Ludlam said it is “appropriate that Hazen no longer be honored.”
“It’s a good example of cancel culture in the sense that it was a process,” he said. “I would rather have a contemplative process with real research and real facts than a rush to judgment.”
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Hazen’s name was stripped from the park and trail as the D.C. region continues to grapple with landmarks that honor Confederates and segregationists — a process sometimes complicated by different agencies with overlapping authority and jurisdiction.
Just last month, for example, Maryland legislators introduced a bill to remove a racist senator’s name from Chevy Chase Circle on the D.C.-Maryland border. D.C. residents voted in 2020 to remove a plaque honoring the senator — Francis G. Newlands, who advocated the repeal of the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote, before his death in 1917 — and Norton co-sponsored related legislation that same year.
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Some advocates for name changes say there is more work to be done.
Neil Flanagan, who detailed the history of the Reno City neighborhood in a 2017 article for the Washington City Paper, said in an email that other officials involved in its clearance should be scrutinized in “a systematic, historian-led analysis of the city’s namesakes.”
“If that’s enough to strip Hazen’s name, then is it enough for the others?” he said.