Dr. Denise Haskins is a native Arlingtonian. An IT professional, she is a resident of the historic African-American Johnson Hill Hill/Arlington View area, and active in both neighborhood and County-wide task forces.
A joke one of my friends says, is
that I have lived in Arlington since before birth, since my mom carried me
during her pregnancy. My family is from Arlington, Virginia where my parents
wed and resided in the Nauck community. My mom, Mary P. Haskins, is one of 12
children. She had six brothers and five sisters. The majority lived in close
proximity in the same neighborhood. Other siblings
of both of my parents, Charles and Mary Haskins, were residents of Arlington View,
also known as Johnson Hill, just off the eastern end of Columbia Pike. I am now
living in the house of my dad’s sister, and brother in law. Mr. James Townes and
I redesigned and renovated the house in 2006 into my dream abode.
During my younger years, I visited the
Johnson Hill area a lot. My church, Mount Olive Baptist Church, is literally
positioned up the street. I enjoy walking to church on Sundays and many of my
friends and family members are still members of the congregation. After church
on Sundays, one of my beloved traditions would be to visit my parent’s home and
watch the football game or attend the ‘Skins games at RFK. Gatherings in the backyard
became familiar activities with neighborhood folks, because a lot of the
African Americans were stalwarts within the community. The builders, the
lawyers, the attorneys, and the doctors, we all lived on the same streets. During
our upbringings, my neighbor next to my mother built my cousins’ homes and lots
of the other neighbors’ kids’ homes, which allowed everyone to stay close to
home. Even my mom's house was built by the builder from my church. People knew
each other, and they were professionally accomplished. For a while my father built
homes before he went to work for the Department of Transportation as a special courier.
My cousin still lives just blocks
away. What was nice about this community
and all of the black communities in Arlington, you always felt at home. My
uncle would invite all the other cousins who lived in Nauck and across the
street and we would entertain picnics at the alternate homes on Sundays or the
weekends. We were kind of like our own playmates with our cousins. The
neighborhood was a real mix growing up because the community that went to the
church, they migrated here from different areas - Falls Church, Arlington,
everywhere.
This neighborhood is the only remnant
of Freedman's Village. It was closed around World War I. It is the same with
the church. The church was on the site of the Pentagon, and it moved so the
Pentagon could be built, in the 1930s. The church is over 120- years old. It has
an entire heritage, based on parishioners from the community.
I have known many of the people here
throughout my life. I know them from Jack and Jill. I was in Jack and Jill with
their kids, and the parents still exist here. With some of them, I work with
the daughters now. It's that kind of connection. I have cousins up the street,
both sides, on my mother and my father's side, and they go to the church. If
they don't go to my church, they go to my sister's church, or go to a cousin's
church. Everybody kind of knows everybody.
Folks mostly still call the
neighborhood Johnson Hill, and not so much Arlington View. Johnson Hill, Green
Valley, and Hall's Hill are the African American nicknames for those
neighborhoods. And, to this day, there are reunions for all the areas. So, even
the kids and people who grew up here and are friends of my cousins, when you
say Johnson Hill reunion, everybody comes back.
There's three or four predominantly
African American churches in the community that have been here a long time.
Macedonia Baptist Church in Nauck, Mount Zion... Oddly, my mom and my dad never
went to the same church. My mom and I went to Mount Olive and my sister and my
father are members of Mount Zion, and my cousins went to Macedonia. We were all in close proximity, and the
churches communicated and shared in services, so everybody knew everybody like
a family. You had playmates, you had role models, right in the community. My
fourth grade teacher lived nearby, in Penrose. I was her baby sitter. My
principal in elementary school was Irma Blackwell, and she and my mom were in
Jack and Jill, too, which was considered the premiere middle class
African-American social organization. Mr. Betty and Thomas Bellamy, who was my
PE teacher also belonged to the organizations and our everything, so that's
kind of how everybody stayed in touch.
We attended the same schools because
we lived all in the same neighborhood. I was part of school system integration.
My mom was a school nurse aid at Thomas Jefferson Intermediate school, so
everybody knew my mom.
I went to high school at Yorktown, so
I know Hall's Hill, too. I started at Drew Elementary, then went to Jamestown. Next I was bused to Williamsburg, and then
Yorktown. I went to Virginia Tech for my undergraduate degree, American University
for my masters, and George Washington University for my doctorate in Information
Management.
When I was a kid, I felt I could go
anywhere in the community, including outside of this neighborhood. I was very
comfortable with it. It even got broader when I went to Yorktown and Jamestown,
because my classmates were not from my community. Some of my friends would be
daughters of congressmen, and one of my best friend’s father was a pilot for
Eastern Airlines. We would do overnight sleepovers, and to this day, we still
get together on our birthdays.
My mom sent me to private school
initially, My Savior Lutheran, near the Pike. She really wanted to make sure I
got a great start. Then I went to Drew Model School. My class was so advanced
that our first grade teacher petitioned to keep the whole class because we were
all reading on a fourth grade level in first grade.
I never felt limited, until high
school, when some problems occurred. When I got ready to go to college at
Virginia Tech, my counselor wouldn't sign my papers for me to go. So my mom
took off from work, and she told him that he was confused in his role. His role
was to sign the papers, and was not to choose where I went to school. He
thought that I would never graduate from Virginia Tech, so he wouldn't sign my
papers. Since that time, I've actually gone back to Virginia Tech. I'm on the
Provost Committee, and I taught Computer Science there during my doctoral dissertation
stage.
A similar situation happened to my
sister. They wanted to put her in a special class, and my mom told the school
officials, "No, she's quiet. There's nothing wrong with her. She's staying
in regular classes. She's not special ed." My sister now has her Masters
in Business Administration and she's retired from being chief of HR.
I didn't experience negative prejudiced
attitudes a lot, but growing up, periodically I did, I remember we went on
vacation to Disneyland, and we stopped at a gas station, and my dad came back
out saying, "we can't go here."
This is the premise behind the Green Book. That was in the 1960s, but I
would say I generally did not experience these attitudes on a day-to-day basis.
My parents always told us "You can be whatever you want to be." So, I
never felt limited. They were achievement-oriented people. They both worked two
jobs. My mom had a cosmetology license, and my dad was a janitor in the schools
for the County in the evenings, plus he worked for Department of Transportation
as a special driver and courier during the day. Their only goal, which we knew,
was that we go to college. And, when we got there, we would not have to work,
we were to focus on just our studies.
That was common in the circle I grew
up in. My cousins, all of them had scholarships, were on the honor roll. I
don't think I ever felt like I could not do achieve my dreams.
I was in with the Alpha Kappa Alpha
sorority before I went to school, so I won my scholarship from them, but I knew
more members of Delta Sigma Theta, like Miss Ola Willoughby and Alice Fleet.
They are naming a new school in Arlington after Ms. Fleet. I knew her from my
dad's church. One of my friends, Eric Green, who taught music in the school
system, now lives in Mrs. Fleet's house because things just evolved, you just
kind of stay in the community, if you can. It was not an accident that I came
to be in this house. I knew I always wanted to come back.
My parents were very engaged in PTA.
I know that wasn't the majority of African American parents, but mine were and
those parents that were present, this I did it well. The wider community was a fostering
environment. Judge Newman lived one street over from here. He went to my dad's
church.
I am the Chairperson of the
Transportation Committee for the Arlington View Civic Association, a member of
the Arlington County Information Technology Advisory Commission, and my passion
is STEM and mentoring. I'm also a member of the Northern Virginia Chapter of Delta
Sigma Theta sorority.
For me, the first problem with
transportation in Arlington is following and living up to the legacy of Mr.
Eugene Hubbard, who used to be on this committee for the county. He was the deacon at my church. Like him, I feel
like I need to be socially engaged. One of the key premises of my sorority is public
service and social action. My pastor, Reverend James E. Victor, who came from
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King served, always has
pushed us to be socially involved. I feel that because I went to Virginia Tech,
where the percentage of minority students was so small, in order to make a
change, you always have to be a part of solution, not just sitting on the
sidelines complaining.
One particular local issue we face on
the transportation committee is that we cannot get South Quinn Street reopened.
They closed it. You can go out of the neighborhood, but you cannot ingress.
They blocked it. It's a VDOT (Virginia Department of Transportation) design
error, but it' is just a bad design. We never had a problem before. Now
everything is bottlenecked coming out of this neighborhood. You can try to come
out Rolfe Street, but it's difficult due to heavy traffic and you cannot safely
cross the street to Hoffman Boston School.
The sad part is the county does not desire to correct their error and
ignores the issue.
Now, why would you open it up on 12th
and S Rolfe instead of from our
neighborhood to Columbia Pike? These are the things that I feel like, "Is
this like a racial thing? Why would you do this to our community when we're
already having problems getting out of the community?" They've done the
numbers, they've counted the traffic. They know when school is in session,
that's how the buses used to get out. And, yet, they don't mind bottlenecking
the street with all this traffic. They won't fix it. They took our bus stop
away and cause is to walk miles, also. That was one of the main bus stops if
you ride the bus to church, and it's one of the busiest bus corners in this
area. I had my coworker give me a Google snapshot of Columbia Pike, and there
is a bus stop on every side but ours. All the way down the Pike. And they won't
return the bus stop. Then, they took the crosswalk away, so you can't safely
walk across the street to the bus stop on the other side, or come back to your
neighborhood unless you want to play dodge ball with your body. That's an
extremely busy section. So these are the things that I've been trying to
address. Metro won't return the stop. Just nothing.
While I was going back and forth,
communicating on the issues, next thing you know I get a Twitter update that they're
building a new bike route down Washington Boulevard, and "Oh, what great
transportation options!" But you didn't even consult us! And you dropped
them right at the same street that we're still having problems with, so now the
bikes can't even get across. So, it's kind of Arlington County fixes what they
want to fix and it's not to our advantage, maybe, because it's a predominantly
black neighborhood. They don't care that it's dangerous. We met with the
project manager and his assistant, she didn't even write up the report, I had
to protest, "Where is the report?" After you studied a neighborhood?
They don't care. It was all a front, just so they could say, "we walked
the issue with them."
I am the Chair of Transportation for
our Neighborhood Association. This issue is a major deal. The people who come
to my church now don't have a bus stop. Why do we have to walk all the way to
the Sheraton, or walk all the way to Saint John? Everybody else can just walk
out of their building and get on the bus. Some of our folks are elderly, and
they've got to come under that big bridge and try to cross with all that
traffic to get to church. Why should there be no bus stop here? Took the
benches away, took the trashcans away, it's just like they don't care. Every
morning when you try to catch the bus to Ballston, you've got to run at record
breaking speed to get to the other side of the road, and if you get off on the
other side, coming from the Pentagon, you have to walk all the way back down
and across heavy traffic. We asked for right turn on red on the one street they
left open leaving the neighborhood during non-traffic times. No. Then, they
come and put a sign "No right turn". After two years, they finally sent
somebody to our neighborhood association meeting. We asked him "do you
know what the issues are?" "No, I don't, they just told me to
come." I'm a very detail oriented
person, an IT professional. So, I go on the website for Columbia Pike, to view the
multimodal plan for the renovation of Columbia Pike, and see that our
neighborhood’s concerns are not even listed. And when we did the neighborhood
walkthrough with a County staffer, he said, "Maybe we could open up Quinn
Street, if we cut down the wall for this high rise house, there's some things
we could do as a part of the multimodal." I asked for him to be our PM
(project manager), and there went all the PMs. A County Board member, when we
first started the conversation, said, "Don't accept anything until you're
happy with it." Yet, because it became something that the transportation
folks didn't want to fix, to design the transportation the way we wanted it,
all of a sudden all of our requests had to be posted through an on-line service
app. Our transportation manager disappeared. It is a way to avoid the issue.
The new folks that are moving into
the neighborhood are getting involved, because the one that got killed in
traffic was a military guy. It just so happens the night that I had that
meeting and the County came, the head of their George Washington Carver Union,
Rafael, came, and he's military, so he's been supporting the family, and now we
have a widow with three kids, all because of the same problem we were fighting
over! Fix the road!
People talk about this in the
neighborhood. It’s a common discussion, they're aware. It's a continued
resentment within the community. I pound on the door still because we have a
good civic association president, and she seems to be trying to get all of Columbia
Pike involved, who have some similar issues.
I also serve on the Arlington County IT
Commission, which works with the county’s CIO (chief information officer) to set
preferences and road maps and new ideas and direction for the county from the
information technology side. Hopefully, as we move forward, we'll start to come
up with a way to invite the Amazons and other companies that are moving into
Arlington to help out, to be more forward thinking in the digital arena that Arlington
is moving into, to help us craft policies, and to integrate the messaging of
information technology into our community and beyond.
Because I am on the Virginia Tech
Provost Committee I had an idea in talking with our CIO to involve the college so
that more minority students would get to Virginia Tech. He immediately
connected me with the head of curriculum for Arlington schools, and she and the
provosts of Virginia Tech had a conference call, so I feel like I can make a
change.
It needs to work from the inside out.
It is the same with the transportation issue. Sadly, I feel some things are still
racially motivated in Arlington. The change here to the road, closing off our
streets, without taking into account that this was a predominantly African
American community, seemed to me that they just didn't care that they closed
off three roads and left only one open, No notice to our concerns was made
until someone got killed in the community in an accident. He was crossing the
street, and a car ran over him. When the road was redesigned, they made it more
dangerous. For over two years, I had been meeting with the County and they kind
of ignored it as not really an issue. We had just set up the first face-to-face
meeting, asking to please take it seriously, and one person from our community said,
"I would hate to have this meeting after somebody dies." And then two
days later, a man got hit. Killed.
So, because of those behaviors I kind
of see some negative things about Arlington. I still see the racial divide. I
still see North Arlington has maybe more of a priority. One time, my house was
broken into. To this day, I've never met the policeman who investigated my
case. I called. I asked to meet them. They were like, "No." So, I ask,
if that were in North Arlington, would it have been handled the same way?
Some other things are still bad. A
little boy in the neighborhood up here started walking around with me. I could
tell he was really really smart, because I'd take him to church and other people
saw it, too But there were some issues at home, because he was sent out and being
raised by his great grandmother. One day
he shared that he was being abused by his grandmother. Well, I reported it to
the school. By law, they have to do something if they are made aware of abuse.
I had been speaking to the school social worker about the boy previously,
because he always used follow me home, which I thought indicated a problem, and
I didn't want anybody to think "I'm trying to take this kid" The
social worker said "Yeah, he can
come down there, they’ll help him with his math, etc." Eventually they
removed him from the home. Well, when they did, and after I talked to the
principal, I learned it was the second time that it had been reported. They
knew there was a problem and did not give it proper attention until they were
pushed. So the boy then went into foster care and just had more rigor to him
going to bed and studying. As a result, he got Student of the Month and became
a straight A student. To make a long story short, he ended up, through
Arlington County, being put back with the aunt. I'm still following his
situation a little. At this point all I can do is pray he's good. I didn't hear
from him for a while after the aunt took over. But two weeks ago, he wrote me. He's
in a cadet program now. He thanked me, because for five years now he's been an
honor roll student. But the County didn't see it. I saw it, and I wasn't even
there every day. They just took him maybe as another black male kid with some
issues in the family home, and not about what he could excel to be, to see his
potential.
Now the good part about Arlington is
they actually remodeled this house for my 101-year-old aunt who lived here.
Came in and helped her as a low-income resident, and totally remodeled this
house for her to live in so she could stay in Arlington. The County put in a
security system, redid her kitchen, made it appropriate for elderly. That came
through County funding and the AHC, Arlington Housing Corporation, which is
private. Her taxes were waived in Arlington, also.
Because my dad had Alzheimer's I know
that the services provided through Arlington County were amazing. As he
progressed through the various stages of Alzheimer's from the three dollar ride
from Star Cab with a sensitivity driver to a center in Falls Church, to when we
could no longer attend the center, they sent an aide to the house. That part of
Arlington County services I know. I know that part of Arlington to be a good
thing, including how they properly fiscally manage their resources for the
community.
There is more to what the community
offers here. When I was sixteen, I went to the Unemployment Office, trying to
get a job. They helped me find a situation, and I worked at the Pentagon from age
sixteen to twenty-three. Other resources that I got exposed to in my community
were being a member of 4H, joining Brownies, going to the pool at the Y and learning
to swim. All of that I love about Arlington.
There was that exposure to all the
different sides of Arlington in the community growing up. Now I feel even
there's more opportunity. I've done my Zumba classes and swim classes at the
pools. I feel comfortable doing that. I see the resources that Arlington has,
so that part I think is good. I see how they teamed with Macedonia Church and
built affordable apartments, where they had the land, and Arlington had the
resources to build, and then in a number of years, Macedonia will own the
apartments, outright. This really helped most of their low income folks to stay
in the neighborhood, and raise their families. My sorority and different people
from the church, are now trying to do more mentoring programs in the schools, too,
many different things to help out.
Now, like I said, some things are
good, right? The services part is really good.
In the community here, people are concerned
about the changes in the population. Because of the gentrification it's hard,
due to the prices, for African Americans to live in Arlington now. Other people
leave because they want bigger homes, and they think the taxes are too high,
but I know Arlington has the lowest tax rates in the whole DMV. So this
neighborhood has become very diverse. But, that diversity is a mixture. It is a
lot of people in a small space.
A number of expensive new townhouses have
gone in the other end of the neighborhood. The folks are from elsewhere. The
older residents sell out to them. Even the George Carver Apartments are gone
now. That was sad, because that was a co-op, and predominantly African American.
The church wanted to help them, and they formed a non-profit to help them
remodel and stay. And they said, "No." And then, the builder came in,
and they were sold.
I've experienced everything here. I
had to rescue a kid in the street; he was being cared for by some women along
with like ten other kids in the evening, while the other people were cleaning
homes. It's a lot of career-oriented younger people and older people, too, but
some of it is really strange! Why would the one year old be walking in the
middle of the street, and no one noticed that they were gone? That's too many
kids in the house. I see some of the group homes, too, of two and three
families, all moving in this area.
I remember when this neighborhood was
very family oriented. I think more of the folks my age, they moved out thinking
maybe they didn't want to pay for the older homes that their parents lived in,
instead of thinking, "I can remodel this, I already own it, it's
cheaper." They move away and buy something else.
I've been hurt for the last two weeks
because my neighbor over here was foreclosed on his home. African American guy.
Why didn't he say something? I have people who would have done anything to keep
him in his home, even as a renter, even if he didn't own it, to find some way
to solve the problem.
There is still a lot of warmth in the
neighborhood. My neighbors are very friendly. We don't speak everyday, but you
can see good things like, when it's snowing. I don't mind shoveling my snow,
but I remember coming back one day and my neighbor had finished my sidewalk for
me. And, my neighbors across the street, the couple, when that little boy was
having issues, I knew they were foster parents of the year, so I went and I
told them about the situation, and they were giving me all the numbers to call
and how we could support the child, to try to come up with some helpful
solution. And then, one time my mom was sick, I was worried, "I need to
walk the dog, but I need to get to the hospital", and my neighbor came
over and walked the dog for me. He doesn't even do pets, but it's that kind of just
stretching past their comfort level to help each other. When I worked out of the
country for a couple of months, people would call my mom and tell her "your
daughter’s got a package on the step. I know she's not here. I'll get it.” I
didn't have to feel like someone's going to break in the house. People are
watching out for each other, definitely. My mom got sick a few weeks ago, and
we ended up at the hospital. And, at the hospital was my cousin's mother, and
everybody was exchanging numbers like, "Why don't I have your number to
call you about your mother?" That kind of camaraderie and just passionate
care for each other. And, literally, when I got there, one of the deacons from
my church, who's mother lives around the corner, he was there, helping another
gentleman from the church with his medicine. By the time I walked in, his
mother called, and she said, "My son called and said your mom just came into
the hospital.” It's that kind of connected environment of people. People are watching
out for each other and caring - they do. That's what makes a community.
