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For once, Katherine seemed defeated, but Nancy vowed to fight. "I was determined that whatever it took we were going to stay here," says Nancy. She found an ally at Washington Innercity Self Help, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income people buy their own homes. With advice from WISH, they set up the Malcolm X Court Cooperative Association to take over two adjoining row houses containing six apartments, assuming they could come up with the money. Nancy became its president.
While WISH searched for major sources of funding, the women scrambled to raise $1,000 each to use as downpayments before the Dec. 31, 1991, deadline for buying the buildings expired. They badgered neighbors and friends for donations, sold Christmas cards and organized an excursion to Atlantic City.
Meanwhile, WISH put together a complex finance scheme to buy and refurbish the buildings using funds from a local government agency, Washington's New Columbia Community Land Trust and the Massachusetts-based Institute for Community Economics. The total cost: $500,000. The deal was closed two days after Christmas in 1991. Said Katherine: "Thank you, Jesus."
The Federal Government's Section 8 housing program will subsidize the mortgage payments so that Nancy, Katherine and Teresa will only have to pay 30% of their monthly income -- whatever that may be -- toward paying back the loans. Work at the building is now nearly complete, and the families will move into their new homes in May. "The best thing about them is that they're brand new and they're ours," says Teresa.
Many others have not fared so well. Despite numerous promises from the district's government, the section around 14th and U remains a disaster area. A city office complex has been built on the corner where the uprising started, and there is a new subway station just a block away. Nevertheless, few of the businesses that were burned out have been replaced, and many residents have given up hope they ever will be. Almost everyone with the means to escape has fled, leaving behind mostly those too poor or broken in spirit to make a difference in the neighborhood's fortunes. Says lawyer Stanley Mayes, one of the few middle-class blacks who still live there: "In some ways the riot was the demise of this community. People who had lived here for generations suddenly saw themselves as 'residents of the ghetto,' words they had never used about themselves. They began to feel that the neighborhood was expendable. They got about the business of moving up and moving out."
Yet if all goes well for Katherine, she plans to live on nearby Euclid Street for the rest of her life. While it is perilous to draw broad conclusions from a single example, some lessons from her story seem unassailable. One is that with enough grit and the aid of private and government organizations that are willing to invest in them, the poor can rise above the most adverse circumstances. The other is that in Washington and elsewhere, there is not enough of either commodity to fulfill the need. If there were, the aftermath of the city's riots would not be such an epic tale of suffering.