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By Nicole Gudzowsky
Reprinted with permission from Enterprise
Quarterly Published by The
Enterprise Foundation
(Winter 2001 ©2001)
Darnell Bradford El grew up in an urban paradise. It's called Reed-Cooke, a section of Washington, D.C.'s Adams Morgan, a popular neighborhood, now known for ethnic restaurants and night scene on 18th Street and Columbia Road.
As a young boy in the '50s, Bradford El remembers those venues when they were home to streetcars, cherry Cokes, and the heavenly Bluebell Waffle Shop. He recalls times spent in Rock Creek Park, a lush forest bordering Reed-Cooke, where he and a Russian-Jewish friend would turn vines into swings and fly across the creek like Tarzan. "It was our world," he says.
Still, it was a segmented world. "We lived on the hill with other African Americans, old-timers whose families had left Georgetown and Foggy Bottom as they were gentrified. There was a large Puerto Rican community on one side of Columbia Road and a European-American community on the other side," Bradford-El says. "But in those days, you knew your place and everybody peacefully coexisted."
On Sundays, he would walk past St. Paul to get to St. Augustine, the integrated Catholic church. "I couldn't understand why God would have us pass this church up to go to another one to pray." He says, adding: "None of that was really painful. I enjoyed my life so much."
But around the age of 10 his sense of comfort and safety began to unravel, thanks to pent-up rage dating back to a racially inspired truck accident that killed his younger brother when Bradford El was just six years old. A second "defining experience" came when his father tried taking him to the amusements at Glen Echo Park. "We got to the gate and were told, 'Sorry, no colored allowed.' To see the humiliation on my father's face hurt me deeply, and I have pursued questions about the racial and social situation in this country all of my life."
At 55, Bradford El admits he's made and paid for some serious mistakes in his life. But his exuberant devotion to his community and its empowerment is evident, as he walks down the street and residents of all ages and colors greet him with smiles and respect. A single father of three teenage children, Bradford El is president of the Reed-Cooke Neighborhood Association. He's also the executive director of Around the Corner to the World, a community-based organization centered on youth that will open its revamped offices and new technology center later this year.
Bradford El hopes that the center will give youth alternatives to the area's drug and gang activity-and that "the techies who live in the community will come out and relate to the children and help to bridge cultural, economic and racial divides."
In 1985, Bradford El walked down 18th Street and noticed that his beloved hometown neighborhood-"the residential community, the place across the street where I used to get my fish sandwiches"-had vanished. "And I made up my mind that I wasn't going to lie down and watch it happen."
Since then, Bradford El has helped expand homeownership and win zoning battles to control density, heights, and commercial activity. In a neighborhood where ordinary $350,000 brownstones dot the streets, he helped organize residents in the apartment complex where he grew up to buy the building and form a coop.
According to an April 2001 Brookings Institution report, Dealing with Neighborhood Change, Adams Morgan offers a concentration of subsidized apartment buildings, assuring "the continued presence of lower-income minority households." The report credits Jubilee Housing-a nonprofit community-based organization providing affordable rental housing for nearly three decades-with acquiring and developing much of this housing. For his part, Bradford El has helped to organize a "collaborative front of wealthy, poor, Spanish-speaking, English-speaking and African and European descendants" that honors Reed-Cooke and wants to continue living here.
"One of the reasons neighborhoods are gentrified is because the residents are not unified. And in most cases, they're not educated to the dynamics so they see things happening and they don't sense that they have the power to make a difference," says Bradford El. "That's not true. They survive here because they stick together and form relationships with institutions that affect their lives."
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