June 8, 1966: Beltway March to Protest Segregated Housing

To prepare for reading A Raisin in the Sun, I asked my students to investigate the history of their neighborhoods. I presented teams of students with a range of artifacts — newspaper headlines, photos, advertisements — that documented life over the past century in Silver Spring, Wheaton, and Glenmont. Students perused the artifacts and noticed familiar places in the neighborhood and also identified changes over time.

For example, 25 years ago there was a grocery store in what is now a Staples, and I asked students about the impact that may have had on their neighborhood. One of the artifacts was a photo of the Beltway March, an action organized by ACCESS (the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs) in 1966 in which participants walked around the Capital Beltway for four days to protest housing segregation.

In another artifact, we saw how developers sought to attract white D.C. residents to move to the suburbs, and we noticed how the developers sought to prevent Black people from moving into particular neighborhoods. We looked at photographs of Lyttonsville, a neighborhood in Silver Spring developed by Black people, and now with the ACCESS march, we saw people pushing back against segregation all around the D.C. suburbs. We watched a video to learn more about the march and paid attention to words like “systematically” and “campaign” to see how institutions work together to enable racism, and on the other side, how people come together to take action in an organized way through campaigns and movements.