ABSTRACT
In 1975, my wife and I, five years into our 30-year stay in Washington, DC, sold a modest home we had recently bought in Cleveland Park for a three-story row house overlooking Rock Creek Park in the city’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood. A larger house, in a cheaper area, we thought, would support the children we were expecting while remaining within our income as fledgling academics. The choice of the new location was not entirely random. One of my graduate students lived on the block, and although the neighborhood as a whole had the reputation of declining precipitously after the 1968 riots, the housing stock was solid, and our block on Park Road had a distinct level of cohesion, dominated as it was by a cluster of households occupied by refugees from postwar Czechoslovakia. Eight years after the riots, Washington, DC was far from recovered. Corridors of devastation remained virtually untouched to remind residents of the physical damage. More deeply, psychological scars infused even the most common of social interactions with suspicion if not outright hostility, especially when such exchanges involved relations between those of different races.
