Lauren Pearlman - Democracy's Capital: Black Political Power in Washington, D.C., 1960s-1970s & Brandi Thompson Summers - Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City - Audiolibro Gratis

Founded in 1790, Washington, D.C. was governed by mainly white federal officials and unelected representatives until 1974, when it finally gained the right to elect its own city leadership. In her detailed account of the District’s struggle for self-governance, Pearlman, assistant professor of history at the University of Florida, shows that this was both a major and a partial victory. While the District’s Black citizenry gained a measure of self-determination, true home rule was blocked by the government’s anti-poverty, urban-renewal agenda and its wars on crime and drugs, which it prosecuted especially zealously in the streets of the nation’s capital.

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Focusing on D.C.’s H Street corridor, Summers, assistant professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, traces the social, economic, and racial shifts that over the last decade have profoundly altered the District’s demographics. As the Chocolate City’s Black-owned businesses have given way to the cosmopolitan metropolis of fusion restaurants, art theatres, and rising property values, Summers draws on visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research to show that the foundational ideas of Blackness have been aestheticized and marketed to brand these newly gentrified areas with a particular kind of progressive “cool.”