Join the DC Legacy Project for a screening of Barry Farm: Community, Land & Justice in Washington DC, followed by a discussion with the film’s creators.

From the film’s producers:

Take a left off of the Anacostia Freeway on to Firth Sterling Ave – what do you see? You see empty fields. You see shiny new buildings just breaking ground. Construction equipment. Sweeping views of the capital. As one community member states in this film, if you are a developer, you see a gold mine.

But these empty fields hold powerful memories. Enslaved people once worked this land. Later, during Reconstruction, the formerly enslaved purchased it, and built one of DC’s first thriving Black communities.

Here, the city constructed a sprawling public housing complex in the 1940s, beloved by insiders, if notorious to outsiders. Here, the movement for Welfare Rights took shape. Here, the Junkyard Band honed its chops on homemade instruments before putting a turbocharge into the city’s Go-Go music. Here, residents lived in the Barry Farms Dwellings up until 2019, when the last remaining community members were forced to move so the complex could be demolished and redeveloped.

Barry Farm: Community, Land and Justice in Washington DC was co-produced by The Bertelsmann Foundation and DC Legacy Project with the support of Empower DC. Funding was provided by Humanities DC and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.