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Hub, Home, Heart
Greater H Street NE Heritage Trail
14 The Changing Faces of H Street
The handsome church on this corner is the second to occupy this spot. The first was a small brick chapel built by John A. Douglas in 1878 for the new Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church. Soon after, it was renamed Douglas Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church to honor its builder and his wife Sidney, who donated the land. The current building replaced it in 1898 as the block filled with brick houses and stores.
Douglas Memorial served a white congregation. But beginning in the 1940s, its members moved away, and the parish dwindled. In 1958 the governing Baltimore Conference assigned a young African American pastor, Forrest C. Stith, to rebuild the congregation. By knocking on doors and reaching out to youth, Stith increased the church's membership from nearly zero to 200 in three years. On 11th Street between I and K, Holy Name Catholic Church experienced the same racial makeover.
As these church histories show, well before "white flight" transformed American cities in the 1950s, the face of H Street was changing. Descendants of European immigrant families, thanks to public school education, moved into better-paying professions and newer neighborhoods. African Americans had become a majority in Greater H Street by 1950. In response the DC School Board switched the white Franklin Pierce Elementary on Maryland Avenue, and other neighborhood schools, to the "colored" division. The Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation of the nation's schools accelerated white flight to exclusive suburbs. For decades, in a very divided city, Greater H Street was almost entirely African American. As the 21st century opened, though, it followed the city's trend towards a more racially diverse population. |