As more Black people migrated to Washington D.C. following the Civil War, many white citizens perceived the nation’s capital to be a place that granted Black people the leisure of white society. In 1894, one citizen wrote in the Hawaiian Star that the capital was “a negro aristocracy.” This writer claimed that Washington D.C. was “one spot on earth where a part of their number has a social standing, and where they are something more than mere hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Read more.
