The federal military occupation of Washington, D.C., where I live, is finishing up its second week, with no signs of abating. Indeed, the plan is for more National Guard troops to descend upon the heavily Democratic District from regions supportive of President Donald Trump.
Trump, for his part, continues to let loose with unhinged, dementia-influenced rants threatening the city with armed Guard members and even regular troops. He’s also threatened Mayor Muriel Bowser and other city officials for the sin of pointing out that the occupation is built on a 180-degree lie about crime statistics, something even Trump’s own press secretary acknowledged before presumably receiving the memo.
(It’s important to interject here that the National Guard troops I spoke with last week were members of the D.C. National Guard. They live here; they know the score, and while they couldn’t tell me straight up “We know this is all BS,” their voices and half-smiles made it clear.)
I knew before I started helping with the editing of Georgetown University history professor Maurice Jackson’s Halfway to Freedom, a magisterial history of Black people in D.C. (coming out next year from the Duke University Press), that the capital had for most of its history been a largely-to-mostly-Black city run by open racists. What I didn’t know is that this kind of takeover by white federal officials is something many in the Black community have been anticipating for decades. There’s even a name for it: The Plan.
Essentially, the theory goes that whites sooner or later would simply not let a major city, the capital of the U.S., be run by Black people. As soon as Trump announced his invasion of the District, concocted a day in advance on the way to one of his golf courses, it sounded like The Plan was going into action. I had to ask Jackson whether he was seeing the same pattern I was, and he replied that the Plan has been in effect in some way, shape or form for centuries.
“Well, you know, ever since Blacks were brought here as enslaved people, there was always a plan,” Jackson says. “And the plan was to keep them in slavery.”
The entire cycle that ran in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s — the end of Civil War and slavery; Reconstruction and a brief glimpse of equal access to power; the revocation of that power — all happened in D.C. as well, Jackson explained. Enslaved Black people in D.C. were freed in 1862 by the Compensated Emancipation Act (the slaves weren’t compensated; the owners were, which is indefensible morally though it did result in a peaceful emancipation); in 1870, when Black people had the potential to vote, the D.C. government was reorganized so that instead of an elected mayor, the president appointed a governor and 11 members of the D.C. Council, while the other 11 members of the council were elected.
Even that didn’t last very long: By 1878, D.C. was overseen by three presidentially appointed commissioners and run by a committee of the House for nearly 100 years, even after the District became a majority-Black city in 1957.
The House Committee on the District was made up overwhelmingly of white Southern congressmen, who brought their Dixie racial attitudes to bear on the increasingly Black D.C. John McMillan, from South Carolina, who signed the Southern Manifesto opposing integration in 1956, was chairman of the committee for decades, starting in the 1940s. He stood in the way of all propositions to give the District’s residents, Black and white, a hand in the running of their own city, whether it be by having a vote in Congress or by truly electing a mayor and council.
President Lyndon Johnson undertook a reorganization of the D.C. government. Walter Washington was appointed as mayor in 1967, and finally Congress passed the Home Rule Act in 1973; the District held elections for mayor (Washington won) and a council in 1974.
‘Somebody Was Out to Get Them’
The Plan was first detailed by Doug Moore, one of the founders along with Julius Hobson and Marion Barry of the Free DC movement — which is having a revival in the face of the current takeover. It started in 1965 with a bus boycott and spread to protest discriminatory laws and business practices in D.C. Even some Black organizations weren’t on board, but it gave the District’s plight a visibility and a rallying point.
“African Americans always knew that somebody was out to get them,” Jackson says. “And now you have this president, and it's obvious that he has a Plan. It's obvious that in Project 2025 there was a Plan, and we see it coming out every day, especially as it goes to disenfranchise African American people and trying to overthrow the Home Rule Act of 1973.”
The Plan worked in economic ways as well: While the D.C. Chamber of Commerce was a largely Black institution for much of the 1960s and 1970s, the D.C. Board of Trade was a business organization dedicated to the preservation of white economic dominance, Jackson says.
“The whites had the Board of Trade, and the Blacks had the Chamber of Commerce,” Jackson says. “And the Board of Trade had these programs in order to keep political power within itself … not allowing African Americans to get loans, to get businesses. The trade unions were involved in it, which meant that they didn't allow any Blacks in the union movements.”
(In looking through Jackson’s references, I came across mention of The Plan in The Washington Post in 1997. It’s a remarkable piece, primarily in the way that the writer believes they’re disproving the existence of The Plan while in fact proving it — especially reading it now with hindsight. It was written in response to the federal takeover of D.C.’s schools and budget, and takes an incredulous tone at the notion that the District is being turned into the Manhattan of the area while Prince George’s County is being turned into the analog of Harlem — something that’s clearly coming to pass.)
Precedent
Jackson points out that this occupation of D.C. is not unprecedented. In 1919, D.C. was part of the Red Summer riots, in which whites attacked Black people in cities across the U.S. Jackson points out that in D.C., as long as only Black people were in danger, President Woodrow Wilson did nothing, but when Black people, especially World War I veterans with combat and weapons experience, secured weapons and began defending their neighborhoods, Wilson declared an emergency, “and then he called in the troops.”
In 1968, federal troops were deployed to D.C. in response to the uprising over the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., and after a few days they were armed, though they weren’t responsible for any of the eight or nine deaths during those days. The Guard was also called out during the search for D.C. Sniper John Muhammad in 2002. “This is not the first time,” Jackson says.
(He’s right, of course; at the same time, while you can debate and criticize the other deployments, they were at least in response to real events and not the desperate attempts of a rapidly declining president to make his supporters forget he’s a pedophile.)
So What Can Be Done?
As Jackson points out, Mayor Bowser’s hands are somewhat tied in this. She’s caught between the indignation that should accompany this occupation and the day-to-day needs of District residents under a president and Congress who aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Certain members of the D.C. Council — he singles out at-large member Christina Henderson — are rallying residents and officials in opposition.
The real solution, of course, is statehood. D.C. statehood has been on the back burner for decades — sometimes it’s been a platform plank for the Democratic Party; sometimes it hasn’t been — but it’s the only permanent solution for the problem. Of course, the path to statehood goes through the very Republican Congress that benefits from the District’s second-class status.
“Edward Kennedy was probably one of the greatest friends that D.C. has ever had in the Congress,” Jackson says. “He said don't want D.C. statehood because they think it will be too black, too Democratic, too urban and too poor.”
But there’s another reaction I hope can be put into motion.
I mentioned above that John McMillan ran the House committee that ran D.C. for years — about 20 years at a stretch, about 30 in total. That changed when Walter Fauntroy came along.
The District’s non-voting representative in the House, Fauntroy “developed something he called the arithmetic of power,” Jackson says: While District residents couldn’t vote in South Carolina, they could help organize, heading down in person when and wherever possible. And it worked: “They voted Macmillan out of office. And this had a big impact — with a new head of the District Committee, it meant that somebody was going to respect the rights of the elected mayor.”
Jackson points out that as long as Republicans control the House, the Government Oversight Committee, which even today has veto power over D.C.’s laws and budget, will be chaired by a Republican. But with control of the House on a razor’s edge and a president’s party generally facing headwinds in midterm elections, every seat could help.
Scott Perry, R-Pennsylvania, is on the committee and is widely considered one of the most vulnerable Republicans in Congress. Without a legitimate House seat for us in the District to run for or elect, our money, organizational skills and anger could be put to good use trying to unseat him. You could even call the effort The McMillan Project.
Just putting the idea out there, free of charge. Because the alternative is on display in the streets of D.C. right now, and as satisfying as yelling at masked ICE thugs must be (I’ve spent the last two Monday afternoon/evenings looking for one without success), it won’t suffice.
[Rick Massimo is the author of I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival (Wesleyan University Press) and A Walking Tour of the Georgetown Set (Lyons Press). He’s the assistant editor at US Chess and a former digital writer and senior copy editor at WTOP. He’s a freelance editor, working with book manuscripts, essays and articles from published and unpublished writers, as well as co-leader of two musical projects: The Canonical Set and The Empirical Brothers. You can get in touch with Rick at [email protected] ]
