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It is October 18 2019 and this is an interview of Steve Coleman by Marin Orchard for the Meridian Hill. Park oral history. Project recorded at the Josephine Butler Park Center in Washington, d.c. across from Meridian Hill Malcolm X Park. Do I have permission to record this interview? Yes. Could you share with me a brief introduction of who you are?

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I'm Steve Coleman and I have lived in this neighborhood. My whole adult life. I came here from New York City. I was born in India and I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic States here and I've been working in the community pretty much. Since I moved here in my early twenties, before I got involved in the park effort from me, tell you how that began or sure? Yeah. So I moved to my house because of the two parks that are nearby Rock Creek and Meridian Hill Malcolm X. And one of the very first places I went in this neighborhood before I ever lived, here was the park, and I only knew it as a Malcolm X Park then because that was the name that all of the sort of organizers of rallies, used to refer to it. I remember looking at it and it looked like an abandoned place looked like a just sort of a once great but sort of Forgotten land and being intrigued by it and then when I moved to the neighborhood, people said whatever you do, don't go in that Park and I didn't go in the park at night ever until tragedy changed that boy who lived on my block who had moved here from Jamaica with his family and have a better wife was gunned down on dr. King's birthday in 1990 and he fell in the tree box next to my home and this drive-by shooting my housemate who was an emergency room physician ran out to try to save his life and Ricky Magnus died in her arms. And at the time we were the murder capital of America and the murder Center. Unbeknownst to me was his neighborhood in fact, right behind this, building was the homicide center of the whole city. In 1989 90. And the police came out and put out the yellow tape and said go inside. Lock your doors but more lights. Don't talk to strangers. Don't go out at night. Whatever you do, don't go in the park because Meridian Hill Malcolm X was seen as the center of all of the crime and violence in the neighborhood. That was the head of our neighborhood association men and they called a meeting in my home. To try to see if there was anything we could do beyond what the police were saying, which to us. Seem like not an answer at all. And 55 people packed into my house. The next night you had to violate the police request to stay inside, just to come to the meeting. So I was kind of an amazing statement and somebody said well why don't we start a crime Patrol? There's this group, it's done that. I said, I lived in New York. I don't want to do the guardian angels and be Vigilantes. They said no this Patrol is different. There was this was started by grandparents And I said yeah but that whole thing with the weapons and they said no they have some kind of rule about that. So we called them up and they trained us over the objections of the police. And their rules were 21 was you had to say hello to everybody that you met, because Community they felt was the most powerful force there is And the second rule was you couldn't carry anything that would promote lie like a weapon because they felt that weapons were the problem not the answer. So we have the third rule, we said that we had to be multiracial, because in this neighborhood, everyone is a minority to this day when I hear the word minority have to. Thank who are people talking about? Because it's used as a, I think often has a license to subjugate even as people pretending they're they're not furthering that narrative and in this neighborhood, at least as a white male and very much a minority So we started patrolling the park, we had nothing, but a CB radio, from Radio Shack for protection and whistle. I think and these bright orange hats that have the name of our Ooh, but we wanted there was modeled after what the grandparents did. But we wanted to be a little hipper than them. So we did a logo sort of StreetWise. Like graffiti, we call ourselves, the ram Patrol for residents of Adams Morgan, and we thought the kids would look up to us. They didn't because we looked ridiculous. They call this pumpkin heads, but we went in the park. I think it was four of us. And we were prepared for the worst. People said, tell her crazy. We going in there and they nobody goes in there at day. We walked in the entrance at the northeast corner. Northwest corner went up the steps held our breaths looked around and the police was so dangerous that it was safe. There was no one there as people thought to mug. So there were no muggers at night. There was no one there at night to buy drugs so there were no dealers. And there was a kind of Serenity about it, that's when he took a breath and looked around amid. The moon, laid, broken glass, and graffiti, there was something that was kind of powerful about it. We didn't know that the park had been an African-American feel logical. Seminary, the Union Army Camp and Hospital, the beginning of the first University in the city. An ancient Native American spiritual ground Gathering Place. We know any of that. There was something about it that pulled us in. And just as we were getting comfortable walking down the Esplanade, we saw two shadowy figures up ahead and realize we were not alone after all. Remember this rule was supposed to say hello and people say how Fearless I was fortunate Leo. and, Fortunately, there wasn't enough of a moon at to see that I was anything, but Fearless, but we walked up to the first shadowy figure and then I ran Patrol Regina think the neighborhood, a little safer. And then there was a pause and probably a bemused pause as I think about it now and then the hand extended from the shadowy figures. Hello? I'm Reverend Morris annual, welcome to Meridian Hill and Reverend Samuel have been coming to the park since 1954. Or when he courted, his wife Under a Cherry Tree, that still stands at the southwest corner of the park. He was in the park. The night that the riots broke out after the assassination of dr. King and even in that moment, he found peace. Even as he saw waves of young people in their Despair and rage sweeping at the across the park. Looking for something, some way to vent, their severe pain and anger. He saw when the Ducks had come and try to nest in the park when people dying of AIDS and come to the park for solace in their final days. He was the mayor of the park was an ordained Baptist. Minister bit of teacher here at Cardozo high school and a principal at Spingarn, the park was his Parish. The second person was little more complicated. He had my last name, but little in common, with my life, Howard Coleman had been an attic. The dealer been locked up, he couldn't read or write, but when he talked about the park, he had tears in his eyes, he said, this has to be the most beautiful place in the world that we got it. Howard was part of the waves of thousands of families who grew up in Old southwest DC who were ripped out of their homes for urban renewal which came to be known at DC as quote negro removal. Cuz that's really what happened. And Meridian Hill was his adopted neighborhood and he also had become in the park for 36 years since 54. Well, that little Act of saying hello that Nate was the beginning of this whole journey for me and to Neighborhood when I want. I thought I knew all this stuff, I was the president of the neighborhood association. I didn't really know anything. I didn't know anything about the park, I'd never met people, never been in there at night and no such a beautiful place at night. And in the ensuing nights, we started to hear their stories bit by bit Howard and Morris and their friends would share some of their, their memories of the place. And this became our inspiration for Just countering the crime but trying to lift up community and their memories inspired us to learn more about the history of the park and to go into the parking the day time and talk with kids and learn about and learn about their their memories. But also their dreams, it seems like a lot of the elders had given up on the dreams and a lot of the kids haven't had a chance to have much in the way of memories, but we found a real power in that combination of the memories and the dream. Mmmmm, and from those, we were able to start bringing some of those things to life, some of the memories back, some of the dreams coming alive. So that's how I got involved. That's excellent. Thank you. I love to hear in your own words to and I hope that we can kind of touch on all of those points as he keep going. What Drew you originally to Washington, d.c., I came here completely under enter uninterested and not caring about DC. I was here to save the planet. I had been working to Lobby in the New York State Legislature against the nuclear arms race, and I had succeeded in getting the Republican own state. To go against the Reagan Administration in unanimously voting against the arms race in calling for a freeze on their arms race. And so I was seen as like this guy who knows how to get Republicans and unlikely people to support nuclear disarmament. So, I came here to Lobby Congress, and organized business people to be a voice for Progressive. Change to stand up for what we refer to, as real Security in terms of community needs and human needs. And the things that we were disinvesting in order to pay for this endless arms race. So yeah, I didn't know anything about DC, and never spent more than a couple days here for a rally or they're, you know, passing through. How do you decide to live in Adams Morgan? So coming from New York, I really, I miss New York and I was looking for, where could I find the thing that's most like New York and Adams? Morgan seemed like it had some of the diversity. A little bit of the Vitality that I was missing in being out of New York. So it was really the diversity. And then also I really like the fact that Rock Creek Park was right nearby. And also I'm really Malcolm X. How did you become head of the neighborhood

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association? So, as I live in the neighborhood, I didn't know when I when I first moved to Adams Morgan, I was on the in the other quadrant which is lillywhite, it's called the colorama triangle. So I thought I was coming for diversity and was kind of shocked to see there really wasn't much diversity. And that part of them is Morgan and then after being your year and a half I moved in 84 to Euclid Street to What's called the read cook, quadrant of Adams Morgan which is one of the most diverse neighborhood. It's in the region. That's staggering actually, how much that neighborhood despite all the gentrification and displacement has been able to stand up for real and meaningful, diversity, and community. And so that was where I settled in and as I lived there the disparities the inequities really, really struck me. I'd never lived in a city of Disparity and such Division. I found much more. Diversity, in terms of interplay of people of different backgrounds and colors and cultures in New York than I did here. And one of the things I noticed was that there were people were really struggling just to barely hang on to their homes. They were apartments that had no windows, it just had sort of flaps. There were streets that had no sidewalks. There was housing, that was still labeled officially on the City Zoning pots as quote, colored housing Unquote. And it really, I mean, it changed my life that when I moved to Euclid Street, I didn't know about the history, I can know the Panthers had a house on my blog at the Tuskegee. Airmen have been in another house that you could Street out of this deep history and re-cook itself had always been integrated. At least there would be a black box and a white block the river jacent. Rather than whole neighborhood that was redlined and I was a tenant in a group house and we got notification not long after I moved in that the place was being sold and I didn't have the money to buy it but I was didn't like the idea of being forced out of our house and so my housemates and I decided to research what we could do. We found out about the DC-10 and laws, which were some of the best in the country and we use the Those two stall. And eventually, I was able to originally tried to buy it together and eventually I bought it and I could never have bought my own home. But for those laws and I became a little bit of an amateur expert in the tendon acquisition laws. Well, when I saw that, there were tens in the neighborhood who were trying to do the same thing that move me to get much more involved in the neighborhood. So, specifically, there were people whose homes were being rezoned industrial while they lived in them to force them out by Mort's. There was a group of people living at the corner of the southeast corner of kalorama and Champlain who had their landlord was trying to force them to have gotten their their home reason and Industrial the saying it was illegal for them to be where they had always been. It was doing everything possible to scare them. There were fires, being set in the stairwells that was happening at number of the apartment buildings in her neighborhood. And several people had moved at the Last seven tenant families decided to form the last holdouts tenants Association and they

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started holding bake sales in unity park at the corner of just a block up at the corner of Champlain and Euclid to raise money to buy their home. And that kind of captivated our whole neighborhood. It caught my eye and I thought this is ridiculous. You can't raise enough money to buy a house doing a bake sale, but it got the whole neighborhood involved and the association was working to change the zoning, to get it back to being zoned as housing. It just seems ridiculous to take some of the obviously was built to be housing that was always and always been housing and does Own It Industrial. And that was how I started get involved in the neighborhood association and we were ultimately successful in rezoning two or three different stages of rezoning that we want their home was rescued, they they're in their Spirit, inspired the whole neighborhood to work with them. And ultimately, they were able to not just be Zone the house, but to buy it the apartment building and it became the champagne cork cooperative and was recognized. Used as one of the most Innovative housing developments in the country by Fannie Mae. And as a result of that we started helping other people. I got really involved with my neighbors who were being forced to leave their home because the landlord had done nothing about the code violations. And so, here you have this large African-American family multi-generational and been there for decades. And this slum, Lord had over 300 housing code violations, on the property and was really trying to force them out. By basically terrorizing them scaring the heck out of them, places filled with rats and led pain. And you know, they're there kitchen sink drain. Into a bucket. I mean going in there was like going to you know, someplace in the developing world, I could not imagine that this was in the nation's capital and so ultimately they were evicted. The city came in, it looked like seen at of apartheid South Africa. There were motorcycle cops who had their helmets on as they driving this family out of their home, all the kids and everybody. And so I connected with a number of 10 and advocacy groups and attorneys, and got involved with something called Washington inner-city self-help, which was a low-income tenant organizing effort, and amazing. Amazing empowerment program that I eventually went on the board of, and we soon we sued the city and we sued the slumlord. And we want on both in court, we won the house for them to take over. Payments from the city to cover the cost of renovation. And they went from being evicted, tenants to me homeowners, who have a home that was safe and sustainable, and that was another limited Equity cooperative, and we help do that in other places in the neighborhood. So that's how I got involved and and then I got involved in some of the wider efforts to challenge some of the ideas about development that we're trying to tear down parts of the neighborhood and put up like big parking garages to have everything geared, towards Suburban eggs coming in and not really addressing the need for jobs for people in the neighborhood for housing and and eventually I became the president of the association back in 89. And when did you move to the house on Euclid? I moved there in October of 1984. Have do you still live in the same class? How far is it from here and walks? Can you talk more about the first time that you saw Meridian Hill Mechanicsburg? It was a rally to get the United States out of El Salvador. I had come here for a conference on, it was called the role of the academy in addressing the issues of the nuclear arms race. It was really a way to look at. Is there a way that colleges and universities could be More helpful and raising up the issues about unchecked Armament and all the ways that were disinvesting in people. So I was at this conference and then I heard there was this rally to get the u.s. out of El Salvador. And I went to that and there are about 20,000 people gathered on, the upper level of the park. It was in March of 1982, there was The Parc Des looked kind of Bleak like I said in for Lauren fountains were off, it was trash. And so it just looked like an abandoned place it was really strange. I lived in New York near Central Park when that was considered the worst park in the world even though it was never anything like its image. And I remember watching that come back to life as people stood up for it, people of the night together. They're the Russians and the dancers, and the roller skaters, and and everybody else. And and it really inspired me. And I remember looking at this parking boy, this really needs an effort, like what happened in Central Park, And so I just kind of put in the back of my mind and then I got a job. So, I asked to come down here work when I looked around for places to live, and actually, look for places that were near Rock Creek and near that part of this. So, that's how I ended up here. Do you remember anyone saying why the rally was in where do you know, Malcolm X? No, no. I don't. I just assumed that it was in the park because we wanted to, this was during the Reagan Administration and we want an assembly point where we could gather and from which we could easily walk out onto 16th Street where the March was and go down to the White House. So it seemed like a really ideal location to assemble a March when you had a message to send to the White House. Yeah. Do you remember when you first were here? So, it was in the context of the rally. But do you remember if there was a particular space in the park that you were drawn to? We're curious about something you were on the upper level when you all gathered. But do you remember looking around more than that? I remember thinking it was neat that we could see across the city, and you can see more of the city back then. So being on top of the hill that struck me, I remember feeling kind of this this power of the place and it wasn't a defined thing. But I just it's just seemed like a place that had a real story behind it and it made me wonder about that. It seemed like a place where a lot of a lot of Happened through the years. And you could see that just in sort of the ways that it that it was warm. It was more an obviously by a lot of use through the years, but also seem like a weird. Anachronism to have this, elaborate intricate concrete structure in the middle of this inner-city neighborhood. I've never seen anything like I'm like it you know it reminded me a little bit of what the Bethesda Fountain and Terrace looked like in Central Park back when that was forlorn but it was a much bigger Gathering space than that. And then when we started the March, we went down the Esplanade and down onto the lower level. And that was the first time that I saw the whole elaborate Fountain system, which is So

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where was it on the fountain? Yeah you're discussing coming down and say yeah it's just then I really was kind of blown away because I could tell this was a massive investment. This is a major major site that was like abandoned and it just, it just seems so weird. I didn't know whose authority it was under. It was strange because it seemed like everybody who Was there was there for our rally. There was no sense that there was some other life of the place and it took a while for us to sneak down through the lower levels, I really got it.

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it. Pretty close up experience of it. Do you remember then the next time you visited or maybe the next time it was for like Recreation or Leisure turn it off for a second L area.

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The next time I came was for one of the big events that happen in the park. So I was living here and moved in in the fall and I was busy traveling around the country. I was working on the 84 elections and other things and they came in for one of the big events in the park and it it may have been Malcolm X day or it may have been African Liberation they and And it was very different kind of an event from the one that I've been at. The one that I've been at was mostly why he have a sort of, like, do good protesters, you know, she shows her Lefty crowd and this was vastly African-American and much more rooted in culture and ethnicity. There were vendors who were selling things. You know, incense and fabrics and books, both in the park and next to the park. There was

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drumming, there was kind of dust rising from the space because there were so many people there and It just, it just made me realize Park, is kind of like a chameleon. It has all these different lives, depending on what's in it at a given time. How do you describe the park to someone who's never been there? I say that it's it's like the Village Green. For the most diverse part of the nation's capital, that it was built to be the America's first national park for the Performing Arts. But the best way to experience that as not through any kind of programmed event. But through the Sunday drum circle, I say that it's a place that embodies a lot of the judgments and the apprehensions, and the misunderstandings that we have about each other culturally racially ethnically, and how we often imbue the outside with our fears and our judgments. It's a place that the tour books would say it's a beautiful Park. Don't ever go there for decades. That's a little bit of how I describe it. Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that earlier perception. That it's a beautiful Park, but don't ever go there and I think we definitely want to situate the Parkland in the context of the community. So, did you see that connected to the surrounding neighborhoods in some way? And like, what was your way of thinking about? How people talked about the park and the communities, that surrounded it, the perk seem to be really disconnected from its surrounding neighborhoods, especially Really the neighborhood that I live in on the west side

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because the walls were so high on that side, it seemed to have a little bit more of a connection with the Columbia, Heights Community, to its East, the high retaining walls and so forth on the westside acted as a barrier line. And in many ways, the park seem to be situated, right? On the Maginot Line Between black and white Washington. I'm and the only thing that really pierced that was the diversity of my quadrant of Adams Morgan that we cook neighborhood. Was this one, anomaly. But other than that, going up, looking on the west side of 16th Street, it was large at that point, at least in the 80s. It was largely a

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mostly white neighborhood. It struck me as odd that the large families have been living on my block and in my neighborhood, I never saw him in the park, I would see them playing on the street, I would see them playing at the asphalt playground at Coke, but here's this big park with all this grass and everything and I would never see those families there and it wasn't like people weren't using the park. I would

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see, you know, all kinds of people. Guessing it was a place for big soccer games. There were, there were Latino pickup games. There were a lot of Caribbean folks Jamaicans, but I didn't see people from my neighborhood

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Crossing that line. And I also was aware that there were a lot of people on all sides of the park who had accepted this idea that it was a no-go Zone, that they would go there for big

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rallies and big events but they would not go there out of choice on their own time because there was an assumption that if you went in there, you would be hurt. There was a sense that it was a, it was a bad drug Zone. In fact, I looked into it, I found that most of the drugs that were being sold. There were pot. Heroin was being dealt down on W, Street crack was up on Euclid. The park was not where you went for the heavier Duty drugs. And in terms of violence, the park had this image of being a violent plays and there definitely were things that happened. In fact, the last murder that ever happened in the

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park, was one that happened on our watch that we had to help the police solve by working with Howard Coleman and the people of the night in the park, but that was really the exception. Nothing like the violence in the surrounding streets, the park it's interesting, I live next to Central Park, the largest police precinct and Far and Away the safest in all five boroughs of New York City was Central Park

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and the same thing was true here. The park was way safer than any of this, right? But people had the perception that I wasn't. Yes. And that perception became reality as people didn't go there, even the Park police wouldn't go in there. So part of the reason we didn't know that it was a national park. We think about it. As there were no Ranger programs in the park, there was no arrow and there was no sign indicating. It was a national park. There was no bulletin board in the Park, police had a policy that they would not Patrol inside the park unless they had two officers. In uniform or they were doing an undercover drug by with multiple offsets. So their way of controlling, the park would be the station Scout car on 15th Street to catch Speeders because this was a three-lane rush hour Speedway and they would, they would say I was at Meridian Hill when really, they were just out on the street. Do you want to move since we're talking about kind of monitoring and police. Think I'm going to. Pursue that line of questions a little bit and you're free to talk about them and kind of the 80's 90's and more now. But how did you use to see the everyday uses of the park looked after? The park was really for all intents and purposes abandoned and the perception of the community. Most people, the vast majority, people thought it was a city park and at the city just didn't have any money to take care of it. The graffiti was everywhere, broken glass lights that were out and it was just really sad. It was filled with garbage, there were the bathrooms hadn't been working in years. People went to the bathroom and parts of the park was we used condoms, the park in many ways was disgusting and it was kind of a classic thing where, I think that the community was blaming the government or generally the government's playing in the community and the park was dying and people were dying as a result of not having a place that saving for people could gather at the Hub and forge community. And I'd love to hear about how you saw that change through your own work through other yeah. Parallel initiatives in the city and all the partners by half if they were to say a little bit more of the fountains had been off for years, they were broken, they were filled with trash. There were skateboarders who like sweep out Basin and

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he is that, but that was seen as a bad thing because they're skateboarding. And at least by The Washington Post, which had written about that. There was a story that came out actually with galvanized us to connect with the National Park Service was that was a story on the front page of the metro section of the Washington Post on. I think February 26 of 1990 saying Washington's Jewel of a park losing its luster to vandalism. So it's the classic thing wasn't about what? What wasn't happening terms of stewardship and investment and programming. It was about people who are doing bad things to it and that, you know, so they had pictures of the graffiti and pictures of skateboarders and the in the empty basins and kind of what happens when there isn't stewardship. And but that article was very helpful because it was the first time that any of us had seen documentation of who owned the park, their work. Quotes in it from the superintendent of Rock Creek Park saying, all the other parks in my jurisdiction, people call me to complain. No one ever calls to complain about this park. Well, a bunch of us took down his name that was on a Saturday, the following, when they warning, his phone was ringing off the hook. It turned out, lots of people cared, and they never knew that call. And I was one of the people who call his name, was Rollin Swain and I said to superintendents Wayne We can you keep a list of the people who call and share it with us? The emails will invite them to the church where we have our neighborhood meetings, two blocks from the park and asked you to come. And then we can see how we can help and he said, sure that sounds great and that's exactly what happened. So, in early March we had a meeting in the, in the basement of King, Emmanuel, Baptist Church. At the corner of kalorama and Ontario Road and superintendents Wayne came. And there were about about 25, people who came. There were a lot

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of people have been involved in the crime Patrol, been helping out, and wondering what's going on here and others, who some of the people who had called. And we decided that met to form the save, the park task force. But it turned out in response to the article. There was another effort being mounted by a local apartment, building owner a guy named Malcolm Peabody and he found out about our effort and I think we were initially a little suspicious of each other because he was like a, you know, big apartment building owner and I was just a neighborhood activist person but he invited me to come to a meeting. He organized a property managers of buildings that surrounded the park. And I thought, well, this could be a chance to bring everybody together. The people who are concerned about crime, people are concerned about safety, about housing, event, neighborhood and advocacy. And ultimately, he came on the board of the organization that we found it, and he became the first chair of the friends that we formed as the friends of Meridian Hill because we wanted to refer not just to Meridian. He'll Malcolm X her but to the whole top so that the that ancient Hill would be galvanizing and unifying second too loud. You can keep talking. And also there we found that there was a lot of debate about what the park was called. There were people who called at Meridian Hill, like the elders, who we met that first night, most of the elders, in the park, the longtime residents called it Meridian Hill. There were activists who called it Malcolm X. There were Latino soccer. Players who called it? El parque or Euclid park. It was often known this because there wasn't a sign. And they came at it from, you could always. And so, we decided that we should whenever referring to the park. Natural Meridian, Native, American tribes saw with the hilltop being on axis with the self-report atomic River. And that just seemed amazing that this idea of a Meridian, had it sort of eurocentric idea with Being zero degree, prime meridian point for the world and the US wanting everything to Center on the United States in the wake of the War of 1812. Not wanting to accede to Greenwich as the center of the world of Paris had its center of the world. But then here's this other completely different idea of a Meridian that came through Eastern culture, ancient Chinese idea of an energy Meridian that it seems that native people carry with them when they came across the Alaskan. Ausmus and to this continent. I just found that fascinating. So here's something that can be. It often was seen by people as a sign of disunity. There were ways that the Meridian name actually could be a way of accessing a deeper sort of unity and the land. Let's talk about the name of the Park. Yeah because as you know it is devices and that's part of this project. Sure. So you said that you referred to it as Malcolm X originally Yeah I only knew it as Malcolm X because that's how rally organizers always referred to it. And so when I moved here, it was interesting. I saw that usually the rallies that happen in the park were organized by people who had nothing to do with the neighborhood. But when I talked to the Old Timers in my neighborhood, they always refer to it as Meridian Hill. So the Elder African American folks who, you know, Like, really love the park. I remember mr. Bradford, who used to tell me about back in the day when he didn't have air conditioning? If it was a hot night, he would take his hammock and string it between two trees in the park, on hot nades because there always was a breeze there. And the only thing he said he had to fear was mosquitoes and later on. I learned that in many ways through the years, the park. Became in its earlier history. A white park by day and a black park by night. So, the park was built by white people and black people, but it was not a place where people could come together for years and years and there were racist elements in how the park was considered and policy back. Then, the secretary of the Fine Arts commission wrote in the letter that we found in the National Archives that

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Um there should not be Lighting in the fountains because that would create a Hollywood atmosphere. They would attract too many of the quote colored element to the park. So they were very clearly reasons why

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people of color did, not feel welcome in the park, even though they helped build it. Even though many of their homes of their

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ancestors were removed as part of the acquisition of the land. For the park even though it had been a place of the Wayland Theological, Seminary this early African American cemetery, in a a place of Native American culture, going back, thousands of years, So it was interesting to me that

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people who saw the racist aspects of the history of DC and I'm these neighborhoods still refer to it as Meridian Hill because they thought that's the name of the hill and that's what they call and the Malcolm X name. You know, was something that was very, very popular with rally organizers. Because it went back to when Angela Davis said come into the park, had a black united front rally, it was a time of real abandonment of the neighborhood of the white flight and disinvestment and the way I heard the story was that she had suggested that the name be changed so that it would be a symbol of not abandon in this investment, but a black pride. And black power. And so, as we looked at it, we we thought that both of those things are really powerful. But when we started work with this, interesting, the official name listed in the blue pages of the phone book and the government blue Pages, under the National Park Service, the official name for the phone number, here was Malcolm X Park. So NPS itself Was so disconnected from the park. They hadn't even been stewards of its name you know Adam Clayton Powell had introduced the legislation to change the name Back in 1970 and that requiring an act of Congress because Buckhannon is sitting there because it wasn't there that can just be changed administratively. But it took an act of Congress and that act of Congress didn't go anywhere. So, in some ways, the confusion about the name, Was another part of the commitment. The disinvestment in the park as a whole, by the by the federal government. That the piece about like black pride in the connect, the kind of historic connection of the use of the Malcolm X name to rallies. And protests is why people still feel that? It's so important. Yeah, I think so. I think that it's a natural connection. I think that it goes deeper than the Rally's. I think that there's so many ways that the park is a symbol of black power. You know our effort was led by African Americans, you know just be mother ever. Samuel Howard Coleman, you know, all these people through the years who stood up for it and although it's interesting when Josephine Butler was introducing the president of the United States when he came to the park to recognize our work on Earth Day, as a, shining example, for the nation, she referred to it as a Meridian Hill Park because that was what she always had known as and she felt bad afterwards if she forgot to say Malcolm X. This is what happens. Any time that. You try to change a name of someone. There is there's a history to both. There's a parking far Northeast d.c. that we've been involved with that was named after a slaveholding family. They W family it was called W branch and the stream the way through it is called W branch and we were able to change the name of that to Marvin Gaye. Well that's a name that has worked. But the stream is still called W branch and the trail is often still referred to as well as friends. So it's this, you know, these old names. Don't generally just go away. And there's, there's some value to that there's history that needs to be not swept under the. So we think that the whole sweep of history is best Honor by using both names and we're proud of the fact that the city agreed with us and started calling And ringing. Hello because you know referring to it as Meridian hill by itself is Meridian Hill Park is to disavow generations of history and so we never do we always called it though. Do you ever get? Do you ever get any pushback on using both? Yeah, it's funny when, when we We're coming up with the name of the organization. There was an activist living on living a few blocks away from the park who got very upset with us that we were not going to call it friends of Meridian Hill Park. She was a very vociferous activist and she was offended by the Malcolm X name and she felt that it was demeaning to the neighborhood to have anything referring to Malcolm X and she wanted to affirm that. The official name is the only name and she pronounced us when we refuse to do that. And actually try to really prevent the formation of the organization. When we refuse to, to be only about the official name of the park. And more recently it's been strange even though I think we're the ones that kind of like really, you know, sort of lifted up, the idea of

00:48:05.900 - 00:48:27.000

both names. There was a column in the Washington Post by Cortland Malloy that said that the the name of the park was officially changed to Malcolm X and it was changed back by newcomers to Meridian Hill which glosses over. So, So many parts of the history and its really sad. Because

00:48:27.900 - 00:48:49.200

the Meridian name actually is a chance for us to connect with both, the Injustice has and the the Deep power of the real history of the land. Because we're, you know, we're so bound up in what we do, and what we see, and what we know. But before Europeans ever arrived here, and before African Americans were forced

00:48:49.200 - 00:49:09.900

here, there were 1,000 Generations. Nations of people of tear going back, twenty thousand years. And, you know, this was, this was in remain sacred ground for native people. In fact, this building here sits on the very top of the

00:49:09.900 - 00:50:53.600

hill. It goes down in each direction from here and it has its own sort of powerful story to tell back in the day, this Hilltop What's a wild place? It there had been homes here that had been removed by a developer then that didn't happen right away. So, it became a wild place with Wild Roses growing. Well, black and white kids growing up in the 20s, didn't feel comfortable playing together in the park, that was being built, they were made to leave the park. If they wanted to play together, they would come here and they car. Carved Conestoga Wagon, Trails through the wild rose bushes. In this place. That was a part of their, what they call Dawes. And I we have that an oral history that we gathered from the sons of the architect of this building. That's amazing. Yeah. Do you think then that it's as important to hold up, the Meridian Hill named as the mometrix name? Yeah, I do. I do because of its native history. When native tribes walked across the continent from Panama City and San Francisco to mourn. What had happened to the country to continent to the continent in the 500 years since Columbus, they chose to end their walk. Nah, At the White House, not the capital, but at the sacred ground of Meridian Hill where they met Justin Butler on October 12 of 1992, and that 500th anniversary and they presented her with Native

00:50:53.600 - 00:51:19.900

blessings and peace cranes to celebrate the deeper Heritage of the land. So, I think that we need to recognize the Deep past of the land. And it doesn't have to be recognizing the Deep past doesn't have to be at odds with recognizing the recent past recognizing the wrongs that have happened.

00:51:20.400 - 00:51:53.500

I think we need that full embodied approach of owning all of our history. Very well. Do you consider yourself to be an activist? What causes or how would you kind of categorize your activism? I have, I guess the core of my activism has always been about equity and particularly about racial Justice at something that I started

00:51:54.300 - 00:53:31.200

and peace. The two things going together. I first marched in the moratorium for the Vietnam War, when I was seven years old. But I also got really involved at a young age and challenging capital punishment challenge. Seeing the incarceration rules and bail rules for people of color. And I was just, you know, very much my father and Mother's Son. My dad worked with dr. King as he was the affirmative action officer at the Ford foundation and dr. King actually came and met with him. And at the point, when she had her Hoover was getting ready to come down on King was an amazing meeting. That might Just treasured his King. Had to come to the Ford Foundation, to talk to my dad to say, I'm not a perfect human being and not a God, I have not always been faithful to my wife and I don't want my being a human to destroy this civil rights movement, and my dad was so moved by his courage and his Humanity. He saw that dr. King was not the god that the statue down in the Tidal Basin. I It makes him look like he was something much greater than I God. He was a man. He was a fallible simple. Humble passionate, man. And therefore somebody we all can emulate, you know, we don't have to say, we're not God, so we can't learn from dr. King and my mom was

00:53:31.200 - 00:54:13.200

also an activist on all kinds of things on N, double ACP, you name it. So those are And then the other thing is environmental action. So, I was a early on got involved in community, cleanups. I was a chief Ranger Rick for the National Wildlife Federation. I was working on cleaning up parks and stuff like that. So but I I guess the I just I've been moved to see how much one person How much how much power each have. And so

00:54:13.500 - 00:54:58.600

for me a lot of my work is around trying to help other people, see the power that they have and it's not a matter of empowerment which I think is a somewhat top-down term. I don't have any power to give to anybody else. I only have a chance to perhaps be a little bit of a spark plug and inviting other people to see the power that they already have. And that's a lot of what our work has been. We go into neighborhoods that think they have nothing and they may not have official power and they may not have big bank accounts, but we found again that the memories of the the elders and the dreams of the kids can be transformational if they go with a sense of the possibility of what people can do for their own

00:54:58.600 - 00:55:25.600

action. Do you think in terms of your work activism locally nationally globally? How do you see those things fitting together? Yes. Yeah, it's funny because I came here completely and Global person just trying to like change policy in the u.s. that would save the planet. And that's what is lobbying on Capitol Hill and it was not as

00:55:25.600 - 00:55:53.000

good at it. I was able to turn around key votes on big Weapons Systems as a Help divert money from the arms race to get Republicans and others voting against the Reagan arms build-up. But at the end of the day to reduce the MX missile appropriation from 48 to 23, still loved us with an insane number of weapons that we're going to destabilize and potentially destroy the whole world. And I realized that real

00:55:53.000 - 00:57:19.800

change doesn't begin in Congress. It doesn't begin at the global or national level real change, begin. Ins and lives at the local level and I realized that I was not doing anything about disarming. My own neighborhood that kids were dying right around me and it was that moment when Ricky died that, you know, I've been, I've been doing, you know, I've worked for Ted Turner at global, television programming an arms, race environment, lobbied Congress and interviewed heads of Of State for CNN. I do and all these different things, but kids are dying in my neighborhood, and the beginning of that was when I got involved in affordable housing, but it really I realized that it couldn't just be a side Thing. Once I saw that to have this boy died at the very hour on dr. King's birthday that. He'd been born many years earlier at noon. just, Broke our hearts. And you know his family went back to Jamaica. They gave up on this country and it wasn't until years later, I always invoke. Ricky's name, when I tell this story, I was giving a sermon up at the Baptist Church up here in 16th Street and I invoked Ricky's name and all the way from the back of the room. There was a

00:57:19.800 - 00:58:24.600

a crime and it was Ricky's aunt and his family had they had not known that good. Come out of the evil, his killing. And so you know, I think that it is I don't know in a way, I see my work as helping to show people that their dreams can come true. And as somebody who's had privilege in my life, that's a privilege that I think comes with a burden with a responsibility that I have to show other people how even without privilege people can access power to make their dreams come true. How what let's talk more specifically than about your original work, in the park and then how it's become what you do now. So it was originally friends of Meridian Hill Park was, okay, friends of Meridian Hill, friends of morning, there was a

00:58:24.600 - 00:58:59.800

huge difference. As I said that there was a person who really wanted to try to force us to shut down because we refuse to use The official name of the park by itself that was our policy and it is to this day, we were just meeting with the Park Service, the other day about that very thing that there was a document where you know, it's going to have a Park Service volunteer logo on it and it's it's going to use our phrasing of the park which is already on / Malcolm X and they're not allowed to have any document

00:58:59.900 - 01:21:14.300

that has Malcolm X Malcolm X name on it. And but they said since this is a volunteer document in a partner document and not their document, they think that that might be okay. And I said, well one thing you could do is we could have a disclaimer that says this is not the official Thing from the National Park Service because they are the federal government and they're not allowed to change the name of that an act of Congress, which we haven't had yet, but we will always use both names. Yeah. And so, what was your vision for the park with that initial friends of Meridian Hill group, our initial Vision was to stop the crime to stop the violence. To but as we got into it we learned that the park was nothing. I said was nowhere near as bad as the surrounding streets. So then our mission became to change the narrative about the park to to show people what a beautiful place at was, and to have it be an anchor of to use Gandhi's term. A zone of Peace in the neighborhood as we studied the park, we learned that it has been designed with pageantry in mind. And with Performing Arts that in the sense it was America's first national park. That was built with the Performing Arts in mind. That was unlike wolftrap which claims to be the first national park for the Performing Arts that actually was Meridian Hill. No. Max. And, you know, so that that kind of galvanized us with this idea that the park could be, not only a Village Green, but also a stage for artists of all kinds. We found that we had our very first Cleanup in the park on Earth Day of 1990. We didn't want to just clean up, we felt it was important to do something more than clean up, so that would be changing the way people thought about the park. And so we found a guy whose stage name was Bo Diddley jr. He was Bo diddley's nephew. His real name was Ricky. Jolla vet, who lived over on the 100 block of our street, but, you know, Bo Diddley jr. Was a good name to draw a crowd. So we went with that and he came out. It was a rainy day. We collected, a hundred and twenty five bags of trash. Mostly from in the Cascade itself which just become like one big trash bin. And but then the sun came out around 1:00 and Bo Diddley jr. And his band showed up and we have this amazing Gathering and that was the beginning of programming the park and later on July, Fourth of that year. We thought why don't we get Ricky to come out at night when we can see the fireworks and get a big crowd to come and we had 1,200 people. Come that Joy. It was the first Starlight concert in the park and about 18 years because we had seen that back in the day. The national symphony is to play in the park Balinese dancers Pearl Bailey in the summer in the Parks program saying before 20,000 people in the park. In fact before they shut it down. The park service is summer in the Parks program was amazingly transformational in bringing the park alive. So those were some of the things that fed into that vision of the park as a stage. And and we thought it over time. It's gotten bigger than that over time. We've realized that it isn't just about Parks countering violence. It's ways that we can have what we call Park based Health that Parks can be anchors of physical health of countering violence of countering inactivity and heart disease of mental health and emotional health. Of educational Health, the cognitive development. That's key for young people. If young people aren't connecting with the outside, their cognitive development is profoundly impaired of Nutritional Health. The parks can be a place to grow food. So we've helped 30 Community Gardens, and many farms across the city. The parks can be anchors of environmental health of sustainability and countering the climate crisis. And the heat islands and the cities and The Parks of the anchors of economic health. They can be a base of job, training and job, exposure and housing investment that. In fact, if you really want to have affordable housing, you have to have density because you need the tax base to support, truly deep, affordable, housing beyond the, you know, individual buildings where we were doing tenant purchase. We saw that there was massive displacement. Think massive gentrification and what we found is that the key in countering that is making it possible to have density. And we believe great Green Space is the key to having great density. Like I saw when I lived next to Central Perk Manhattan would be unlivable without the big parks like Central Park and the same goes for DC so we can be a much denser place. We can't expand outward, beyond our 63 square miles. But I'm with Josephine Butler. Sir, I think we should be the state and I think we need to keep building our population and building sustainability and equity for everybody. And so, for us, a key, part of the vision, is that Parks can give us equity in housing. So this was weird because a lot of people think parks are a part of gentrification, and they can be used that way. But we found that actually Parks can be anchors of equity and affordable housing for all I appreciate that perspective, relax. We've kind of run into that in this project, some and other discussions of like farmer's markets and things of that nature that I'm really curious about the fur Market is an interesting thing because that's often what's brought in people, they know this is great, but most of the farm markets in, the city are unaffordable for residents. So instead of a farm market like that, why not develop a farm? Why not make it? I mean, food does not have to cost much. At all. I mean basically you're talking about the cost of a seed, which you could actually save from your salad and plant that and then it's just Water and Light and care. If you have good soil and good soil, you can get for free from garbage compost. Can make does make the most beautiful soil there is if you have access to the land and this is the key. So when Joe Butler died, I was the last one to speak at her Memorial and congresswoman Norton had Smoke. And then she said you know, perhaps only Josephine Butler. Some of the connection between statehood and Parks. Well, yes she did, she saw that we can't have freedom unless we have a say about the land, we call home. We can't have real self determination unless the land that belongs to the public belongs to us, and we can be a full partner in that. And so that's what we strive to do, with the park service and the city, and with other agencies, Is to give the public a permanent and full seat at the table, so that communities can run their parks in a way that's deeply sustainable and far, more holistically, beneficial for all for all life. Not just humans because they're actual people working together to sustain those places. How did the friends group become Washington parks and people? Or how did you make that move? If you wouldn't say that it became it. Yeah, so we, we found early on that. This was not the only Park that had been dissed. That was the hell kinds of bad things, done to it or said about it. And we found there were people all over the city who really needed the same kind of help that we give in the park. Our neighborhood and so Joe Butler had the vision that we would ultimately be about Parks. Not only all over the city, but all over the region. Not long. After we were recognized by the president on earth a 94, we were asked to go out to Shenandoah National Park and we helped form what became the Shenandoah National Park Association because we recognized that that was built as An urban park, it was built because of its proximity to the people living in Washington Baltimore Philadelphia and started by a guy who lived at 1426 Q Street. People forget that and it was hurt when I proposed busing children from d.c. after Shenandoah, I was kicked off the board of the thing that we were helping to start because there were people just didn't want to see people coming from d.c., Who look like the people in d.c., there was a real sense that the Civil War had never ended, but we had this Visionary idea that the same idea of parks and people, small P could could be beneficial to other communities. Actually The Washington Post ran an editorial to that effect. Talking about what we had done here and have this could be an inspiration for other places. And so there was a guy Guy who had started a thing called friends of DC Parks and Recreation. His name was tip faucet. He was a park planner a lawyer probably knew the playgrounds and city parks of the whole city better than anybody had been steeped in that for decades and we suggested to him that he changed the name of that to park. Some people we went on the board there and then ultimately decided To merge his effort in with our to form this wider thing. And the, the new entity is actually the same one that was friends of Meridian Hill, it morphed to absorb that, and then become parks and people. And it was the name that was used in Baltimore. There was a, there's a park. Some people Foundation in Baltimore and we love the name and we got their permission to plagiarize their names. We think every city should have a parks and people. What's the relationship in like, with the National Park Service then so it's been, it's been mixed now. It's excellent because there I think there's been a lot of learning about Partnerships and the importance of community. The National Park Service has gone through a lot of change and I think we've shown that we're not going anywhere that we were a permanent partner. And So, there's a real Visionary superintendent of Rock Creek, who actually grew up playing in these Parks, who we work with very closely back in the 90s when she was the chief Ranger for Rock Creek, and she's just very passionate. Her name is Julia Washburn. She's very passionate about equity in the Parks about relevance about story and culture. All the things that were talking Bad. But there was a time when we were barred from doing anything when we basically had to kind of stop, most of what we were doing and go to the other side of town to show what we could do over there. What was called W Branch became Marvin Gaye park because there was a superintendent who was so suspicious of us, you know, just kind of an assumption that if, if you're not part of the government and and you're sort of suspect and You know, there were things that we did like we hadn't had an audit done because we never had much money and the previous superintendent said look, don't spend the money on the audit, spend it on the good stuff, just share with me, be transparent about your finances and she blamed us for not having done an audit and, you know, it's difficult. I think that there was a literacy issue, a sort of a organizing literacy issue that comes into play, where are the challenges of You know, working with non-cash assets which is what we mostly do, the vast majority of what we do is with sweat with passion with the heart rather than you know, cash. It can be really hard for somebody who's just looking at the bottom line. Say, oh well, you you didn't spend two thousand five hundred dollars on audit. And I think that Julia understands that and also, we're more mature. So we now have more capacity and we now own this building free and clear, not thanks to any, you know, big, huge millionaire, big Grant from the government, but really because of sweat Because we mobilize ultimately over 50,000 volunteers to reclaim this building the same way we mobilized over 100,000 volunteers to help on the park Through The Years. So this building is an away of tangible Testament to the power of what people can do when they work together. And that's really what the park is. And the story that I think, hasn't been told anywhere near the way. It needs to be told is the story of the massive Massive Civic effort that went into the so comprehensive to transforming the park. It took everything I've ever learned about it journalism. About Civic action about advocacy about production program. Development citizen engagement. You Name It. We lobbied at the federal level level, we lobbied at the city level. We went to every newspaper. Every radio station every TV news program. And we worked on all fronts. We realized if we did any one thing that would not work but we specifically said, we're never just going to clean up because that won't change the way people think about the apartment. And it was that holistic approach that Julia really appreciated and that was key to the success that we had at Meridian Hill Malcolm X and the success that we've had Citywide. And now we tell these stories all over the world, their people and You know, all five major continents who've learned from some of what we've done. We've learned from from what they've done which is why we're now Transforming Our headquarters here in to the Embassy of the Earth. Because this was built to be the home of the vice president, which never happened. That was just on spec, by the woman who got Congress to build the park Mary Henderson. Fascinating woman way ahead of her time, in many ways, her husband introduced, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, she was quite Progressive. She left a significant part of her estate to her Japanese Butler, / lover, but because he was Japanese her distant relations, I sued and won in court because this was 1931, but so it didn't become the vice president's home became the embassy of Brazil later on. It was the embassy of Hungary China. Had it India wanted it never accessible to the people until we moved in as legal squatters in 1998, when the place was surrounded by barbed wire peeling, paint kind of falling apart physically and financially And we were just looking for free rent somewhere because we were down in a basement behind the trash fans at the Washington house. At 21, 2016, 12 R&R, Malcolm Peabody, own that building, and we heard from somebody that they were looking for someone who could be in here and keep the vandalism away. And they knew we were kind of creative and how you engage the community and stuff. And so we were to move in here. Rent-free as squatters as long as we didn't turn on the heat. So we were coats. This was right about this time, 21 years ago. And I remember as Halloween approaches that seem like anything that could go bump in the night did kids in the neighborhood, called a crazy house, and a spook house. So, we invited them in the first program. We did was actually a Halloween thing. Which is a little scary because there was a kid who disappeared for like an hour and a half, and there were so many little compartments and strange. Recesses of buildings, couldn't find them. But by Christmas of that year, we had this idea that we would fix it up and acquire it. And we worked with volunteers from the Jewish Community Center. I was the only boy who came out to work on it that Christmas Eve of 1998. We had 25 volunteers and by the first week of 1999, we had to nonprofits. We had found to move into other spaces in the building. We had just fixed up and we got permission from the banks to hold off on paying the mortgage and eventually, we were able to get the city, the banks, the owners, the community, all together to say this, this should be acquired by Parks and people, and the vision was that, it would be this greenhouse for supporting part based Health supporting Community transformation of parks that can transform communities. And now we realize that the earth needs an embassy not so much in the sense of the UN but in terms of the earth that's right wherever you are and in terms of the Cultures the Heritage from all over the Earth that come together and Community here. And so, we want this to be a permanent Living Museum and Training Center for these ideas of part based Health Equity and Justice that can Inspire others, that can lift up the possibilities. We think that with reading Hill Malcolm X being across the street we barely scratched the surface of what that could be native. People taught us. Some of what it could be about the working Americans through the years and Latinos other immigrants coming in and taught us. Other things. We've shared some of the stories of what we've learned but we think we can go a lot further with that. So it seems very fitting that we now have a home that's permanent owned by the community, not the government that can work together with the government at all levels to have this lasting approach to lifting up, people in the land. What's it been like to be in this house as the neighborhoods around you change? You've mentioned CC gentrified eyes and the displacement that's happened in these neighborhoods. What's it been like to kind of be here for the last 20 years? Well, it's it's busying, it's confusing. It's painful. Sometimes it's all their things that are good things that happen crime and violence are way down from what they were. But that isn't because of the displacement, there's an assumption, a lot of people say that we only turn the park around as people were displaced and I'm really proud of the fact that the massive reductions that we had. In crime in the park happened before massive displacement that there that was owned by the people in the neighborhood and we were in 1994, we have reduced crime, 95%, and by 96 it was down 99% the park was still being labeled as a no-go Zone, but it actually was safe by 96 and You know, so I think one of the things that's difficult is when newcomers come and think that, you know, and don't really connect with the past of the, the land of the community. They don't, they don't know what they're displacing because they just got here and it has been good to see that. A lot of the Millennials coming. For instance, are actually really cute. Both curious. about what's happened before and wanting to connect with it, learn about it and take action to ensure that the lessons of the past are not forgotten and that their ways that Community can be lifted up on a deeper level you know, in one sense, the improvements in the park and then the neighborhood and our building, or things that we're proud of, you know, it's amazing like just to go out in the park and, and see people Gathering and peace in a place that was a no-go Zone to see the drum circle bigger than it's ever been to see the music and the park and the yoga, you know, acroyoga,

01:21:15.900 - 01:38:44.700

it's like going to the circus on a Sunday and It's amazing, but it's also sad. And we think of how many families have been forced out of the neighborhood. And that's where I think that's part of why we transformed being parks and people. We wanted to address Equity part, based Health and Justice for the entire city. And in some ways the region because, you know, if somebody dies in Ward 8, you know, that that needs to matter to us. Just as much as if somebody died. Dies in the tree box next to our home. So I think the key challenge when there's, when there's displacement is, how do you make sure that the history isn't lost? How do you make sure that the story is, which Josephine said could change the world. The story is get more power rather than less. And that's why even though we never planned this with Joe before she died, we think that having this Living Museum here to permanently tell those, Stories is so important, not for academic purposes, but to inspire new generations of activists and new generations of people who care about their communities. You know, I think that we've shown that parks and communities are not transformed by money with what breathes life into parks, and communities, is people and culture, and play, and art and music. Drumming, and we have an inside culture, we're incredibly separated from each other. Other. And so, one of the things that we did was to create a think outside campaign that stretches back to that very first day, when the police arrived after Ricky had fallen and told us to go inside. And so, you know, this is our motto, they got side and we say that, Everything. All the funding, all the power, all the parity, all the investment in our world is prioritized inside. The inside is deemed to be the safer, more important, more valuable place to put everything. So, when we talk about health, we're talking about emergency rooms. When we talk about crime, we talk about prison. When we talk about learning, we talk about classrooms or we talk about food, it's about supermarkets. When we talk about policy and sin hearing rooms play, it's in the rec centers. The Arts, it's inside Galleries, and museums, and theaters, and we think that none of those are the best answer that, you know, prisons, promote, and entrench the conditions of crime, they don't prevent crime, they often make it make it worse, classrooms are not the best place for the majority of people to learn. They need more Expeditionary, Learning more experiential learning people, learn kinesthetically, most people. And if Are stuck inside their profound. Cognitive development is going to be impaired and emergency rooms. Don't make people. Well, they put bandages over the problem but they don't prevent the illness in the first. Place Parks do nature. Does community does supermarkets, leave us illiterate and, you know, tied to agribusiness and not knowing how you know, where we can access real nutrition. Mission for ourselves. So we say think outside the prison cell think outside the classroom think outside the emergency room think outside the rec center kids are not safer. When they're playing inside, there was saved. They get addicted to video games that it hurts their, their physical health. It hurts their mental health and their cognitive Health in hertz Community Health when kids are stuck inside. And so we also say, think outside your heritage Think outside what you know to what you don't know, think outside your comfort zone at a time when the very currency that we're working in here is under attack by the regime in Washington by, you know, when the very idea of diversity, of community of justice of democracy itself are all under attack, even the idea of idealism, or even of Truth, or trust, every one of these things is being pilloried as something. That's some sort of Of airy-fairy liberal scheme or something. And we feel that we have a job to do in the spirit of stubborn joy that you see on Josephine Butler space in that photo downstairs to lift up the Deep abiding power of those elements of people coming together in the land, that photo was taken by the Washington Post the day after the United States Senate were soundly defeated voting rights and statehood for the people of DC and Want to get a picture of poor old Josephine Butler. Giving up, you look at that. Photo is the most broad beaming stubbornly joyful smile I've ever seen in my life, I was with Jo the night that she died. I have never seen a more determined face in my life. Her work was not done. She was felled by the poverty of our health system and she should have lived 20 years longer. And so she would talk about basic things that need to happen to make the world a better place. Yes. And people would say, well that's going to take a long time and she would say, exactly that's why we don't get started. And so that's the spirit of perks and people and that's the spirit of Park Center, that's named in her honor and that is becoming the embassy of the Earth. And I think that it's very difficult to be optimistic in the face of the climate crisis, and the corruption in our world. But I'm really thankful that I had the chance, thanks to Ricky's death, I had the chance to go in this journey these past 30 years to learn and see the Deep moving power of what happens. When people, who are different from one another, come together in. Peace in the land and see what we can do together to live differently. That's what we need to be doing globally. Said to your question about what kind of activist I am? I don't, I now know that I can't change the world or the country, or my community, unless I'm changing myself. And if I can change myself in the way that I connect, like, just last night, I was knocking on doors, as I've been doing for 30. Well, really 40 plus years, I can change everything, I can be part of that, and Those of us who were born in privilege like me and I was keenly aware that looking at the neighborhood in New Delhi where I was born. We have all the more both opportunity and obligation to ensure that that privilege is both undermined and used to give everybody the the equity and the power of the that they they have. I want to talk a little bit about related to like use of the land is kind of just people's like recreational activities in the park. How have you personally used the park for recreation? If you have, I've used it to walk and play with my dog. I've used it to have picnics. I've used it to run, I've used it for yoga. I've used it to play music to dance to drum. A visa to nap. Have used it for my son's birthday parties. Gatherings. I've used it to have to tell stories. I've used it as a protester as a martyr or a lawyer. I've used as a student. I've been in classes in the park. I've used it as a place to take photos as a place to read, poetry to listen to poetry. I've used it to play with model sailboats and reflecting pond. I've used it today doing. I've used it too. Take friends through and show them the views of the city. I've used it to I've been dressed up as a green man to use it for the Washington Rebels May celebration. And then do I say programmatically how it? Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. So programmatically, we've LED tours through the park of all kinds including one where I was dressed as on the 40th anniversary of the 40th, and 50th anniversary of D-Day. I was dressed as a Canadian lieutenant and because that was the only costume I could find in the costume shop. And as we walked into the park, we entered a Time Warp where it was no longer. June 6 of 1994, it was June 6, 1944 and I was pointing at things in the park that were there in 1944 as if they were still there and Views that were there. So it was pointing through the ugly building. That was built to stories over code to say, look at the view there and what was great as I was telling things in the present tense was, there were people on the walk. This was museum walk day. Who had not been in the park since the time of the war and they started speaking in the present tense to and they said, oh yeah, there are that's the house of a Thousand Candles playing to this baby former Howard Norm here and that's where the men are not allowed in. It's a hotel for single women and each night, they put candles in the windows to pray for peace, for an end to the war for their fiance's and brothers and fathers to come home. From the war. So that was one thing we did we did a lot of things with history. We did a thing where we trained kids to gather, oral history of working, with Katie Davis, who used to be the host of weekend edition. And then we went out in the park and introduce them to the spirits of the hilltop, I had this Treasure Chest. I said this has the spirits of the hilltop in and they're like, don't open it. So I opened it. And in it, we had these hats and we take out out a hat, put on kids, say, you are now a Native American from the past of this park and you are now Thomas Jefferson and you are welcome Max and you are Angela Davis. And the very last hat was just mean by others actual hat, which had her causes and Blaze in the land of the jobs and freedom March from 63, and so forth. Put this hat on this little nine-year-old girl and said you were having just few Butler. You're the daughter of sharecroppers for the granddaughter of enslaved, people. You're probably Leader. Change in this neighborhood in this world. The kids went on to produce a play from the stories. They gather called holy ghosts about the spirits of the hilltop. And I still cry, whenever that is performed. It's amazing. We did a thing where we brought in the re-enactors from the 54th, Massachusetts Civil War, regiment who were featured in the movie Glory and connecting kids in the neighborhood, who had seen guns, being used for bad things and to see proud African-American. Soldiers holding these weapons, talking about the fight and the struggle for freedom. In the Civil War was amazing. We've done a lot with music through the years, we partner with the Levine School of Music to bring in the world music youth Ensemble, where the conductor was playing a conch and we brought in two pianos to tell the to do one thing and then we did the Peter and the Wolf thing with little bean School of Music. And we had Henry Cisneros, though, secretary HUD come in to narrate. We brought in Symphonies, we brought in dance, we had the poets corner where Dante is come alive. People didn't even know it was meant to be for poetry even though he's holding the Divine Comedy. And we got a woman who actually had been our Crime Control to do. Poetry in motion there. We did a five hundred and eightieth. Birthday party for Joan of Arc, dedicated to the modern-day Jones of our growing up in the inner city. Paul. Robeson, Josephine's Mentor, the great activist and actor and singer had written an essay called our children. Our world about little girls who had the Joan of Arc, like, courage to change the world. Like Sadako Sasaki, the hibakusha Hiroshima victim who made a thousand origami piece screens before she died, or Linda Brown, who was the seven-year-old girl, who produced Brown versus Board of Education. We forget she was seven and so, we did a whole thing there. With this brass quintet and African-American actors who portrayed Saint Joan and the shop play. And we brought in that goes to Joan of Arc on Horseback. We found the only woman in Maryland who rides horseback in armor. Nobody knew she was a woman till she raised her visor and we created a 10k race where we wanted to physically and sort of mentally linked the hill back to the mall. Because the mall is like, This other world. And so we created a 10k race that started here and went up into Mount Pleasant down 16th Street around the White House Down to the Washington Monument and back up that was cool. We created a parade to celebrate the friends of parks movement Across America for the 25th anniversary birthday, and we marched 2,500 people led by LeVar Burton. And Senator Gaylord Nelson who had created Earth Day to March down to the White House and the capitol not as a protest but as a celebration of what people were doing for the land and Community, we created a concert with lights and the fountains that told the story of the hilltop through music through the Millennia which was kind of amazing. You know it just goes on and on it's And yet again I think we've barely begun to touch what we can do in the park to tell the story, The all the stories that you know that it's about. Do you ever see or hear of any conflict or tension in those different ways that people use the park? Where do you think it exists? Fairly, obviously. I feel a conflict in those who don't use the park. I'm always aware of who's not there. So I used to be aware of how many people were afraid to go into the park now in so many people joyfully using it. I'm keenly aware that when you have a critical mass of white Millennials there, people who don't feel welcome in that critical mass. And so I see far fewer of the large families of color that used to be in the park. There. Already were people who felt an invisible boundary as I said from the west side of the park, the large black families in my neighborhood. But I think that you see, even less Diversity is of the park today, even though it's still there, it's being dwarfed by The Surge of the white Millennials who, you know, I mean, it's great that they're here and the population income and everything or growing in the city, but we have to bend over backwards to ensure that the cultural identity and programmatic life of the park. And the story is told about the park. Lift up that full breadth of who was built by 4 and inspired by absolutely. Does that answer because I sort of went to the opposite. That is, that's exactly kind of

01:38:44.700 - 01:41:50.800

what we're hoping to get. Okay, I think what that question, it's phrased differently in another way of, like, have you seen who gets to use the park change differently over time and I think that's yeah. And I guess I think we need a little more room for conflict about the use of the park at the moment. The National Park Service is permitting system. I think is an abstraction that does not work in the context of the vibrant, diversity of people who could and should be using the park. And by that, I mean they only can issue one permit at a time for people to be using this whole beautiful Park. The park was designed to be like 20 different worlds. How can a park this complex have only one thing happening at a time. I understand why they need to do it from the bureaucratic standpoint. That's part of why. I think things like that. Ultimately need to be managed by the community. And we need to have a mechanism so that, you know, No government standards can be met, but it can be run by people in the community because there should be far more things happening the park. The park in my view is really underused. And, and in saying it should be more used. I think it also needs to be more cared for. I think we can do both. There's an assumption. Oh, if more people use it than it will suffer. Well, you can look at the mall which gets far more used but because they've invested in the turf and they've invested in standards and Care. The more of them all is more sustainable. Now, even though their millions of people You and that's, that's another thing. I definitely want to touch on it that you've brought up naturally in the conversation is the difference or similarities between the National Mall being south of here versus Meridian Hill Malcolm X Park. How do you see them existing in the city together? Do they are? They separate worlds. Should they be They're very separate worlds. You know, the mall is considered our Central Park or our Main Street. Pennsylvania, Avenue is our Main Street. That's our Central Park and yet most people in d.c., don't use them all. Don't feel the mall is relevant to their lives. The Smithsonian has a massive challenge with people not going inside and not connecting down there. The mall does Does not convey a sense. Most of the year the Folklife Festival, sometimes really does but outside of the Folklife Festival, the mall does not do much to convey a sense of relevance to the lives of diverse people and communities. And so there's their administrative physical, and cultural separations. Just the way that it's difficult to use Bike, Share, download them all, because that's something that hasn't been sort of divides. And that's why we did that

01:41:50.800 - 01:55:23.200

10K race. That's why we're actually meeting now with some of the smithsonian's institutions to look at how could the embassy of the earth help to make more cultural and physical programmatic connections between the mall and here, you know, from an economic standpoint, there are parks all over the city that have amazing stories. That tell our communities all over the city, that most tourists never learn. And because they don't learn them, those communities are benefiting from tourism so you get 25 million visitors a year down on the mall. If you go to Kenilworth, Aquatic Gardens, you get 25,000. It's the least visited national park site in the capital and yet it's magnificent but it has one one thousand the visitorship, that's wrong. If you look at other great catch, Capitals, their whole country invests in the capital, you know. Look at Paris people all over the country invest in in the capital and the mayor of Paris, you know, often goes on to become the leader of the country because there's a sense, this is a capital and this belongs to all of us and we all have pride in it and they all have a vote. They're all represented on their floor of their Parliament. We are the only capital in the in the Free World that isn't free. That isn't represented. Only place in the United States of America that has taxation without representation and that all comes out in the Deep disconnect. With the mall, there's a deep disconnect with Capitol Hill because we don't have any vote in the house and we don't even have a senator. We don't have sovereignty or our budget is decided in an advisor Way by our city council everything that we decide can be overridden at any moment by someone from. Aska. And yet the residents of what used to be the District of Columbia in, Arlington have Congress, people have Senators have a governor house. Taxation with representation have sovereignty because they had slaves. Arlington had had slavery that they did not want Congress to Ottawa and so they retro seeded in the mid-1800s back to Virginia and they have that sovereignty solely because of slavery that's wrong. And so d.c. just had its first hearing or the Congress just had its first Hearing in 26 years and Elijah Cummings is committee. He was not able to chair because he was in hospice. I didn't even realize that Um, and we lost him yesterday, but I think there is now a chance that the next time there's a Democratic Senate and House and white house, that DC will finally become a state. And in fact, the American find that we fly at the Josephine Butler Park Center is not the flag of today. It's the aspirational faggots, the 51 star flag, this also applies to that disconnect and that so it's no accident that That just mean Butler. Stood up for votes created, the statehood and voting rights movement and stood up for Parks. She saw that you, you know, Parks need to be the Village Green, where democracy really happens. Real democracy, not just representative sort of disconnected, government, where you pull a lever, every two four or six years, but where we all take a direct role in government in public space? This part would not have been transformed. If there was just some government program to do it, it needed people and he did Passion, it needed programs, to have it, come alive. And so, I've learned the power of direct democracy that whatever you can do, or dream, you can begin. In boldness, has genius power and magic. In it, you know that great saying it's attributed to go through but I don't think it actually was girl to who said that and so So when I look at the mall to me, it's sad because they're such a great history to this land going back, thousands of years before we ever got here. And it expresses why the chief of the pescado, a tribal, not even come into DC because it's so painful for him to see what's happened to his ancestral land. We have an obligation to change that to make them all place that we're proud of that. We, that is a place that lives. The sorrow and the joy. And so it's not right. That the mall gets one set of standards and investment and programming, and everything else. And the rest of the city, gets a different standard. We should be treating all of the park lands with the same standard. And we should be all the park should be required, to be interconnected administrative. Only physically programmatically, there was a vision of the seamless system of national parks at various National Park directors, through the years have talked about, well, DC should be the model of that. And so we want the embassy of the earth to lift up that power of all the ways that every Park can can can connect to everyone. We get our motto from Maya Angelou. When she wrote the poem that she read at the inauguration? 1993 on the pulse of morning. I believe she wrote some of the powerful words that have ever been written about the power of the land and culture to bring us together. She wasn't talking about some idealistic fantasy idea of the land and Truth. She wanted us to fully phase where we've been so that we can face the morning face the new in a way, that's grounded, you know, every language on the face of the Earth, It has some version of the word to ground by connecting with the Earth that you get that reality check, you get your base by being connected with the earth and the mall could and should be a place to do that. So it's neat that the people in the Smithsonian really see that. They realize they're not getting the demographic inside. The Smithsonian, it's a very different demographic, they're not reaching in a city, the not reaching the cultural diversity. They want to and And I think that the embassy the Earth and parks and people can help with changing them on, what's the role of the National Park Service to kind of create that model that you're talking about to wear, what should their role be? So we have a tendency to think of everything in silos, you know, world. And so we think, oh, this will be done by this kind of agency, or this kind of expert this pot of money here. I'll write a check for that, and The national none of our public functions work without people, you know, you can't just phone it in. And we've been doing that for a long time. And I think we've learned perhaps these past three years that there are real issues with phoning in democracy there. A lot of people didn't vote in 2016 and you saw more people coming to vote in 2018. I think people are beginning to realize that democracy is not a spectator. Taylor Sport. And you know, there's just so much more that that we can do. So it might my response is the National Park Service needs to be something that we all our own that we all support and challenge that we help it that we advocate for it, advocate against it, if we need to. But that we recognize that the parks, we are all Park owners, and we all have both the opportunities and the obligations. That come with land ownership. And the park service can be an agent of that idea of deep ownership. You know, the ownership that the native people understood where it wasn't so much a matter of property but a matter of responsibility of being lasting stewards the enabling legislation of the National Park Service. The organic act says that its mission is to, you know, Preserve An impaired, the natural and cultural values of the nation's perk system for the education, inspiration and enjoyment of this and future Generations. I think we often forget about this generation and I think we forget about the enjoyment and inspiration. If we're only educating for the future, we are going to lose. And as you can see there, the constituency for our parks in America, is not anything near, what it needs to be because people haven't made Parks a deep abiding part of their daily lives. You know, it's one thing to go to Yellowstone once. Every 20 years. It's another thing to have Parks, be part of your life, morning noon and night. And that's where Community Parks come in, whether the National Park Service or Regional entities state parks, or in this case, the DC parks department at. So that's where we have to think about. How can the land be coming alive, more for us. How can Urban agriculture be more than a novelty right now? The city has a goal of 20 new Acres of Under cultivation by 2030. In a city, that's driven by gross food. Inequity and insecurity, when the life expectancy on the east side of town is 20 years earlier than on the west side of the east side. It's equivalent to the worst places on Earth to Bangladesh on the west side. It's equivalent to the best places to Tokyo. And a big part of that is about food. Insecurity of people only having access to high fat high sugar, high processed junk that contributes to diabetes or Arturo sclerosis, stroke, heart attack unit and stress, that comes from all the violence of the way that land and people are being treated. And so, I think that our job is to Help make the National Park Service and all the parks agencies, the center of our public glass that aren't just those agencies doing things by themselves. But they become galvanizing forces that bring all the agencies together because we have to retrain, how we police. For example, we're training our police to be afraid of everybody to ask. Everything is a military situation to be armed and act in a military Manner and we're not training you in the community. We're not training in Parks, the academy for the DC. Police department, doesn't even have any program to tell people how to patrol a park. So they drive in and they don't get out of their scope car. They don't listen, they don't learn, they don't connect, they don't human eyes and Small Wonder that people. Then end up getting shot when they shouldn't be. I had, I was knocking on doors in the neighborhood. Trying to promote a program in the park. And I turned around, I just been talking with the ice cream truck driver. And I got his phone number, so I could tell him the next time. He was a program in the park in a neighborhood, that's low income housing. That's almost all black And it jumped out Squad came along, you know, just for the engine drove up on the curb for guys popped up pointing their semi-automatic revolvers, it means of down on the ground. What did I do? I was a white guy in a black neighborhood who took awake thing weight was just a phone number, but a white thing from the ice cream truck driver, and they assumed I was, I was either getting or receiving crack that. The why else would awake I be there. This is the illiteracy of our time. We tend to blame police, but really it's because of our politics. It's us. It's how we have profoundly disconnected from each other. We're illiterate. And about how we connect with the land. With the people with anyone who's different from us were afraid of everything, we don't know. And the fear leads to ignorance and disconnect where we're stuck inside and we as we come more ignorant, we become more Prejudiced and we become more of a divided, country and world. And so, the perks are the center of those. I mean bias. But I've seen how much we can do. I've seen the magic of when you get just this idea. Asking the

01:55:23.200 - 02:17:34.600

elders, what they remember and asking the kids, what they dream, the kids didn't even know that their dream and ever been real, because that hadn't heard from the elders. The elders didn't even know. The kids really wanted that because they had given up the elders. Were just talking amongst themselves, because we weren't honoring oral history. We weren't honoring the oral tradition that needed. People tried to teach us. And so, So this is what it's all about and and the enabling legislation, the National Park Service says it all, but we have to listen to every part of that organic act. We have to yes have to preserve these values unimpaired. But it has to be not just future Generations. It has to be this generation has to be not just education but has to be inspiration and enjoyment. We're until Vietnam copied us. We were the only country on the face of the Earth that had the pursuit of happiness. Enabling documents, the only one and yet we devalue play. So, here in the capital, we take a very serious sort of. They were just plant, they're playing. That's not really serious plays. The most important thing we can all do because play is how we learn. That's how we grow. It's how we find joy. It's how we connect with the Earth. Are we learn about nature? Play is absolutely essential and too many of our children are growing. Going up, not able to play, not able to connect with nature, not able to learn not able, especially to connect with people who are different from, who from what they are. So that's what the National Park Service needs to be and we should all be part of that. There should be mandatory national service where we all have the choice of doing our service. As you see will be, we have an Americorps program team. Coming next week, we're big Believers in volunteerism, not volunteerism. To replace jobs but volunteerism as a part of our responsibility to each other and part of how we learn and grow. How? So we've definitely talked about my talking too much. Oh no, you're not. It's you touch on, you just touch on questions differently than we structure them and I think that's more than that's better than ask a question. So that's perfect. But one thing we've talked about is the ways that the neighborhood changing has and has changed the park. And I'm wondering if you see the changes in the park have changed the neighborhood, or the community at all. Like, is there any back and forth? Or do you think it's One Direction? No, it's definitely back and forth. I think that the park as it came back to life. Really did help give more identity to the surrounding neighborhoods. It was a radical idea. We suggested that the whole hill top of Meridian Hill needed to come together outside and so when we worked on Unity Park, which was a tribute to the the Adams Morgan, Being the model for the came out of Brown versus Board of Ed Adams was all weight School. Morgan was all black and they came together actually led by Josephine Butler when she was the head of the Morgan school board and got the parents at the white school at Adams to agree to be this National model integration but when we worked on Unity Park on Pierce Park where there are 8,000 428 African-American men women and children buried underneath the park from the Reconstruction Era. It's the largest Previously Uncharted African American cemetery in the city, but nobody knew that, you know, all these parks around here, there's been a way that the community's efforts to reclaim the Parks have its returned, all kinds of benefits for the surrounding neighborhood, in terms of identity, in terms of just getting to know each other and having a way of having real and not hypothetical community. So it absolutely has Really helped the surrounding neighborhoods but I believe that each of these Parks has done far less for the neighborhood than it could. I think that to me ready to help Malcolm X is still a fraction of the park that it could be. We are just now 20. Well, almost 30 years into this partnership putting up the very first program bulletin board in the park. It's taken us down to get to do that simple. The thing and we're excited about it. We're honored really, it's great but and we have to walk before we run. So we're grateful for that. But that's just one small measure of what's not happening and basic kinds of things. You expect to have happen in the park. It's also a challenge that as we raise the visibility of the park there, there it's funny. We had more ability to innovate back when the park was in desperate condition. So in a lot of ways, the community was actually doing more and more substantive power to be creative in the park than we do today. So there's a downside of getting government more engaged and I don't regret that, it's just something that, you know, we didn't realize and and I somehow we have to transform that so that we have better ways of Everybody being informed by what the park can really mean for people. Oh, you know. Yeah, so it's like some of the things I was talking about with the permit requirements that stuff never would have come into play back in the day when it was really just a question of or people going to live or die or something like that. Do you think that people value having the park there? And if so, how did they show it? They show it by using it. They show it by just embodying joy and a public space. They show it. Show it in some ways by love. Being the park to death because there are some things that are really suffering. We learned that just this week, that the White Oaks that are up here on the upper level or being. So severely compacted by all the heavy intense, use that they may be dying, which would dramatically change the park, even the string of hammocks between the trees. There are people who are saying that, that is really hurting them and we have to like, look at that. So is it really? Because you know, sometimes people in the government will say well you can't you can't do anything that would hurt the grass and you look out there and there's large areas where there is no grass because there's no crown on it. It's not given the right kind of turf for intense use. It doesn't have the right irrigation. It's not given the rate resting periods. There are contractors and police who are driving on it regularly. So there are a lot of ways that the permit system Is disconnected from the reality. But was that answering the question? Yeah. And then the ways that people show value. And yeah, so they show it by loving it. They showed it by playing in it. They show it by finding joy in it, but they don't show it so much by helping it directly. And we have to do a better job of showing people how you show your love for the park, how you helped it. So we have regular service days that we do. And we invite people to help advocate For the park. But this is part of a national conversation where we have severely defunded, the national parks and parks in general. And we have to change the way that we Advocate and that's why we have our think outside can't. Because we think that, you know, we need more, you know, money doesn't solve everything. But we need money as an expression of what we value. And we're not showing our value for parks, with the levels of funding at the local, or national level that we're Now. How do you feel when you're in the park? Sometimes I feel such joy and sometimes I feel such Sadness. The joy comes from seeing dreams come true. You know I said I don't want to help people make dreams, come true, people said we were crazy to suggest that there could be weddings in the park. Now their weddings in the park, you know, there's all kinds of things, there could be music, these were just pipe dreams. When I see how huge the drum circle is now. And I know there were times when People tried to force it out of the park, and we had to intervene to save the drum circle, which a lot of people don't even know, that gives me great, joy. There's so many things that happen that I know. I mean, I carry with me those who are no longer physically with us, like Joe and Reverend Samuel and Howard Coleman and so many others. And I know that there there's a joy in my heart and seeing their dreams come true and their memories. Totally. The sadness is in thinking of all those who haven't yet benefited from that of how much violence we still have in our neighborhoods of how much the park is, how much more the parts can do to change how we treat each other, and how we live from the, the ways that the park still isn't what it could be, what it should be. And the ways that, you know, it's still is a place that People people connected with the park, don't feel is fair to everybody, you know, I was, we had a conversation here recently with some of the people who helped to launch the drum circle way back when and they were talking about the drummer's being moved around and they didn't know about how the moving the circle around. Was the work that we did. Save the drum circle. When they were, there were people who were pushing to just close it down, so it just makes me aware of all the disconnects that we have in our world and all the divides and just in terms of the programming of the park, I remember what Central Park became and I know, we still have a ways to go to have it be as vital as Central Park became four people. You know? And so we recently had a concert in the park where we had, like seven hundred people and I was singing. He has great but it'd be great when there are 5,000. You know I mean I look back at summer in the parks with the Park Service did then and I think they should do that every year. You know, and they haven't had that kind of a commitment to and funding that they had back then in a long time. So then someone I feel ya. Hit the glasses, both half, empty and half full. Absolutely I guess. I mean I think we've definitely talked around it but just like well like why this park for you like? There's like it's close to home, there's so much passion here, but like this park. Why? I look at this Hilltop and for me, it isn't just a part of, its kind of inner woven, with the whole Hilltop, as a microcosm of the world and its geological story, it's natural story. It's human story for me is woven in, with the story of people in the land everywhere. And I am, I feel so blessed to be part of this community because it's been a place of such learning for me. I didn't end up being that Capitol Hill lobbyist you know I didn't end up I mean I did that but I didn't end up there. I didn't end up being somebody who's saving the planet and not really connected to where he lives. I have had so much to learn and to gain from just walking in the park and listening, same. As we still do the same thing. We still say hi to people to everybody, we see in the park, I learned so much from those And I think that this hill has a lot to teach me and the world. I think that the stories of that connection with the land of all those different cultures coming together, it's really powerful, it's really rich. And it's been interesting telling some of our stories around the world because I found that no matter what kind of community or part people have they've seen points around elements that they can learn from. So we have things to learn from people all over and in the people over of things that can learn from the hill and the park at the center of it is a work in progress, you know, it's like democracy, it's messy. There's some things about that are wrong or painful, but we have a chance here to show it to kind of model. What does it look like to live on the world live on the earth in a way? That is just, that is Equitable, and it is sustainable for All Creatures. You know, Joe was an activist but she was an educator first and foremost, and she saw there was so much to learn in the land. I remember one time when we went out here to plant flowers with kids from transitional housing kids, who, whose families were homeless. And we had the little trials to dig into the dirt to plant bars. And as we dug in, they saw these squiggly little snakes in the dirt, and they recoil because they never seen it. Never seen earthworms before they were blown away and just me not to say no, come on back here, he's not going to bite you. You know. See I can hold him in my hand and kids got intrigued, and one kid said, oh I'm going to take him home as my pack and Joe said, I don't know you do because he has work to do, see this little guy. I hear he's making the soil Rich to feed the roots of this tree. Free to make the leaves to make the air for you to breathe and the kid was, like, carefully put the earthworm aside, you finish planting and they put the Earth run back in his home. That's the wonder that our kids are not getting a chance to have, and that's what the park really can be any perk and every Park is special. If you if you make it that if you if you can create that kind of Wonder there and that's the nature of the magic of life, you know? And and so when we get stuck inside, we forget about all that and we end up making really bad decisions because we forget Get about the power and the beauty and the Transcendence of all creation. So being the dentist, most diverse part of the capital, having This Magnificent International Park here that draws its design from all over the world. And yet is distinctly an American space. I think as an amazing amazing opportunity to really be a laboratory of what kind of Aqua CB, what can major, what can Urban nature be, what? Could community be and we need the laboratory more than ever right now. Something you mentioned to those. Like there's some people that think that like the design kind of the built nests of the park, is what makes it special? What do you feel about that? Yes, I know. Yeah, the hill was special before any humans arrived, it's an amazing geological feature. So here. Imagine this 100 million years ago, the Potomac was a vast, Inland Sea. The edge of it was the edge of this hill right over there. And as the waters receded and River Terraces were carved out, then you saw this great river that in for Native Americans. Placed means place where worlds come together, which is really a trium of the Museum of American Indian is called the Potomac. And we're worlds come together and so the park the hilltop brings all of that together and sorry I lost track of your question. It was specifically about the built - of the park in relation to the know what you're talking about with the importance of the Hill itself. So Native Americans were gathering here. We know from tribes this has been seen as a sacred spot for Millennia. It is the natural intersection of the Southward flow of Tomac and that ancient escarpment that Ridgeland of the Inland Potomac see and so there was music going way back there were into European times, there were revivals music, revivals early in the 1800's, people would come up to get out of this Walter and the stench of the city where they could even on the hottest most humid days. Find a cool breeze on top of the hill. And that's why Why you had George Washington diversity? Which was then called Colombian College building right here. The street right behind us is called University Place. It's why it was a place to put the hospital for the Union Army. It's why it was a, it was a Theological Seminary, all these different things. And their ways that in ways, people don't even realize, they're carrying on the history of the land without knowin. Native people tell us that the land has embodied in at the past, the present and the future. Two biologically, but they tell us it's true in the morning tangible level. And so in the same place where people used to graze their livestock, they graze their dogs. Now you know, in the same place people came for ceremony and ritual and music going back. Millennia people come for concerts up here in the same way people you know, came to get out of this, Walter they come up here to be up in the breezes of the Hill. So the sighting of the park on the meridian line tied into all those ancient stories of the land and the land has a way of speaking to us in new ways and then in general the design of the park kind of sprang from some of those antecedents of the Hill. There was a stream that used to flow through your called Sasha's run. It didn't look like the Cascade but it flowed down. What is now called? Belle River Road and it fed the whole swamp that we know as Foggy. Bottom and it was a place for large trees and there was a beautiful canopy here. Walking Miller, the poet of the Sierras built, his Log Cabin here out of those trees and you can see it up a picnic Grove six in Rock Creek. So, the designed the design of the landscape is it's a lot more intricate than I would have done for it. I'm more of a naturalistic romantic type of Park person. I really love Dumbarton Oaks / the while the mark next Park in Rock Creek, for that reason, because it's the woman who designed it was one of our first woman Landscape Architects, Beatrix, Grant. Really wanted more of that natural sense of space. But I think that this ends up being a really appropriate design for this space, they really played off of the meridian idea. They use the Meridian theme. This idea of Worlds, coming together in the park, in a lot of different ways. So you see the compass rose has done in Lee exposed aggregate. You see the orbs set on top of the obelisks, so the ovilus were from the Arab, influence on the Italian Gardens are very much of Africa. An underpinning that you see within the orbs are about the Earth and they have on them, these Pebbles embedded in on a, on the meridian line set on the 23-degree axis of the rotation of the earth. And then up here at the North End, you have cast iron spheres. They are also showing the meridian lines. So you have all these little hints of that idea of Worlds, coming together in the park and You can look at the patterns in the aggregate. If you look at places where they have done, these kind of geometric, very modern art deco types of patterns and different colors of the Aggregate. And you can see, they weren't trying to do an imitation of a Renaissance Garden. They were very much doing a twentieth-century thing that was having some fun and you look at the stylized fish that are in the portals at the Item of the Cascade and that pool. You see? A real Asian influence. So you can see how the designers actually went all over the world to design this part. That is the most International Park in the city. So how fitting have that in the part of the city where more low-income immigrants than any other have settled through the years? I can just talk your ear off. I love

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those why we knew you were perfect person to interview. I think we'll wrap up a little bit and we can always revisit do a follow-up interviews. We decide to. But is there anything else you wish that I had asked you today that I did not. I think you've been very kind of coming into, there's just so many stories, I think it's great to be gathering the stories. If you have thoughts about how the embassy the Earth can help be a vehicle for Gathering and lifting up and celebrating the stories. We have exhibition possibilities here, that would be helpful. I just think these things we need them. I think we can, they can be so destructive for all of us. I think about just one example of its kind of a silly example but it's an example of the power of people. So I mentioned how people have been grazing their animals where they used to grieve their grades. Their livestock, there was a time in the 90s when a congressional aide decided it was wrong that his dog sometimes had to be put on the leash. And so without talking with his boss, he wrote Into the federal budget designated language saying that Meridian Hill Malcolm at well in the language of Meridian Hill Park shall have a fenced off Dawn, run area and he was going to put that on. The Sycamore slope next to the Cascade, the most beautiful part of the park, and the dog owners revolted because they did not, they wanted to be able to play with their dogs, but they didn't want Their need for a dog play area to destroy the park. And this all became huge controversy which ultimately got on the front page of the Washington Post with a photograph of my dog celebrating. When the thing was defeated and the headline on the front page said mutts Ado About Nothing and there was another headline in the local, the sort of neighborhood paper called the end. Downer that said, fur flies, when Congressional aide runs amok. And I just think back to that because I love the way that people acted not in their own self-interest, but in the interest of the community and the park to say, no, we don't want a dog run, we don't want to destroy the park for our self-interest, because there's a wider Community interest in having this beautiful park for all. The some reason that came up, some excellent. Is there any any final thoughts that you would want to share if you have any thoughts about how we can turning it back to a question in how we can share the stories that you gather? What's that we have? Other ways that we can have these come alive. I go back to one time. When we were trying to get people fired up about the park, there was a competition happening. The National Trust for historic preservation Act created where we had a chance to get some money for the parks and needs and the 16th Street stairway it's called Herculean. Sterile in the middle, the upper level had been fenced off for years because they didn't have the money to finish it, finish the restoration and so the money was going to go for that. And we thought well this is how can we compete with all these more famous sites like Iwo Jima was on their the Iwo Jima memorial at Arlington Cemetery, we can't compete. With Iwo Jima that's world. Famous So on a given Sunday was Cinco de Mayo. I went around from picnic blanket to picnic blanket, to invite the people in the park to use the QR code and showed them to vote for the park. And it was amazing. What happened that day. We saw the votes online just soar past Iwo Jima. And ultimately, the park, the Park Service got fifty thousand dollars to Rio to finish the restoration and reopen that that entry to the park. And what it showed me. What's the power of story? The Power of really reaching out that we found a lot of the new. I didn't realize that so many of the newcomers who were coming, the Millennials, the others who were using the park were so excited and eager to know that the park needed help. They were amazed that I was part of the ancient history when we reclaim the park for everybody and it just made me realize. We have to be a lot more creative and how we tell those stories. Well, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for sitting down taking the time. We think that your contributions and experiences and understanding of the park will be really important to be told in this story. So thank you for sharing your welcome. Yeah. If I can fill in any way.