Barry Farm-Hillsdale in Anacostia: A Historic African American Community - Paperback

by Alcione Amos (Author)

Discover the history of one of the oldest Black communities in Washington, D.C.

Barry Farm-Hillsdale was created under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1867, in what was then the outskirts of the nation's capital. Residents built churches and schools and the community grew throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1940s local youth courageously desegregated the Anacostia Pool and Barry Farm Dwellings was built to house war workers. In the 1950s community parents joined the fight to desegregate schools in Washington, D.C. as local leaders fought off plans to redevelop the area. Residents of Barry Farm Dwellings, then public housing, were at the forefront of the fight to improve their lives and those of their neighbors in the 1960s, but community identity was beginning to be subsumed into the larger Anacostia neighborhood.

Historian and Anacostia Community Museum curator Alcione Amos tells these little remembered stories.

Author Biography

Alcione M. Amos, currently a museum curator at the Smithsonian Institution Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C., is originally from Brazil and has lived and worked in the United States for almost five decades. She received an MSLS from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Among other works, she has published two books: The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom Seeking People and Os Que Voltaram: A História dos Retornados Afro-Brasileiros na África Ocidental no Século XIX (Those Who Returned: The History of the Afro-Brazilian Returnees in West Africa in the 19th Century).