“Doing community work in an environment in which the powers that be have decided that you aren't supposed to even be here any more is like climbing a muddy hill: you can do it, but it is going to be messy, you are likely to get hurt, and you need to be really careful about equipping yourself for the climb and being realistic about the speed at which you can get to the top of the hill.”
This was Mrs. Thelma Taylor, another of the personalities working in Washington D.C.'s Black community that Mr. Thomas Stepforth Sr. and his son Major Thomas Stepforth Jr. met through Mrs. Velma Stepforth.
“The thing about gentrification that certain people don't understand, and certain people do understand and fully intend: when laws and rents and policies are set to make housing un-affordable for long-time community residents in a particular neighborhood, what you do is break generations of people through displacement. You break people from thinking they have any agency over their own life, and their children and grandchildren learn that their guardians are powerless to protect them from losing all connection with the world as they understand it. This is the same breaking of personhood that was done in slavery.”
“We don't have that problem so much in Lofton County, because it is accepted that the 39 percent of the Black population there is not going anywhere,” Major Stepforth said. “Our muddy – and since 2019, bloody hill – has been to make Lofton County accept that we are not in the county to just meekly accept whatever the rest should want to do like it is 1819, and that we have goals and plans and a vision of our own that we will carry out.”
“The right to remain – this is something we struggle for here,” Mrs. Taylor said. “Getting people connected to the resources they will need to remain is not just a question of rent money. There is policy to consider.
“What happens when you have neighbors who will call the police on you because they don't like how your church sounds on Sunday morning, or don't like your choice of celebration at home? What happens when you are a senior citizen and you have to navigate a whole new neighborhood around you that has no respect for you or your culture? What happens when you are a business owner whose new customers are constantly looking for the White man who owns your job and actually is in charge, and will drown you in bad reviews for insisting that they respect you and your ownership? What happens when you can't get regular access to federal or state resources because you are a district, not a state, and the powers that be on the Beltway would like to pretend Washington D.C. isn't a majority Black city and are in line with the forces that want that fact ended?
“All of it is a muddy hill. It takes skills that an easier walk does not require. We are working on all sides of it to climb it. Covid-19, if it becomes what the Beltway seems to not know how to stop, will add poison to the mud … so we surely appreciate you, Mr. and Major Stepforth, helping us get access to new climbing ways and means.”
A note about this: I have seen everything Mrs. Taylor describes in the past 40 years, in the gentrification of the Black communities of San Francisco, CA. All I have added is Washington D.C.'s specific district wrinkles, but I know precisely what it is to live in a city where the powers that be have decided, in their planning documents of the past and into the future, that Black residents are not a part of the city's plan. This muddy hill is PERSONAL.