03 May 2009
Self-Contained
(Formal Entrance to Buckingham today)
“Your only passport to this community of mansionette homes is your desire to live fully, completely and happily.”
- Sign on the wall of the Buckingham Rental Office, July, 1966
It is a rainy Sunday, and visions of thundering horses on green grass and on a muddy track flickered through my dreams. I am a little groggy on the way to The Virginia Room at the Arlington Central Library to get material to solve a mystery.
There are a lot of loose ends, trying to get to the mystery of how the Nazis made the pool go away.
Not mine, thank God. Big Pink has its own, of course, and it will be opening in three short weeks. The pool is part of the vision builder Frances Freed had for a “park-like campus with all the amenities” for her first high-rise apartment complex on in the Buckingham complex.
Big Pink was constructed in 1964, The Chatham was one of the first "international style" residential buildings in Arlington. Commissioned by Frances Freed, widow of Allie S. Freed, creator of the Buckingham neighborhoods, the building represented the ultimate in luxury apartments in the early 1960s.
Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-3 OK) was a resident of Big Pink right up to his retirement in 1973.
There are a variety of nuanced details in what is left of the Buckingham complex. Frances Freed even made an earlier try for something different than the colonial-style brick two-story blocks. It is a three-story building in the moderne style that was thrown up in the second cycle of building in 1938- but it was judged incompatible with the neighborhood then.
I am pouring over old photos and clippings, trying to develop the mystery of the disappearance of the Buckingham Swim Club, which used to sit on the property where the Mercedes Dealership rests now at the beginning of North Quincy at Glebe now.
There is something funny about the disappearance; I think it is part of some dirty laundry that ought to be out in the open, and not buried in some obscure County Zoning Committee records.
Buckingham was at its zenith when the High Court made its ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The last of the garden apartments in Buckingham One were complete. It was clear that the line between compliance and massive resistance were drawn starkly here.
The Old Dominion decided on Massive Resistance to integration. Fairfax County Opened Luther Jackson High School as an African-American only facility in that same year.
In Arlington, things slowly began to move the other way. The NAACP filed suite to integrate the Virginia schools, and as the state began to institute the resistance strategy, Arlington’s League of Women Voters and others began to press for integration.
On February 2, 1959, four black students were admitted to the previously all-white Stratford Junior High School (the building now houses the Hoffman-Boston Woodlawn Alternative Program at 4100 Vacation Lane).
“Massive Resistance” collapsed in 1959 after the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that public education took precedence over segregation policy. Patrick Henry, elementary and Washington-Lee high school enrolled African-American students that fall. Even so, it would be more than ten years before all Arlington schools were integrated, and the acceptance of integration was by no means universal.
Particularly in housing. Buckingham had been intended to be a self-contained entity; only ancient Glebe road cut right through the neighborhood. It was no joke that Frances Freed was the Queen of Buckingham. George Mason ended at the back of the neighborhood, first at Henderson Road, than at Park Dr.
If you look at the platt books in The Virginia Room, you can see it develop over the years. I looked at 1935, and 1952 and 1965 to get snapshots in time of how it happened.
The entryways to the Buckingham development were at the current George Mason (the two curious little duplexes that flank the entrance across from Arlington Hall Station remain, though unmarked as to what they were) and there was a big white elevated sign in the parking lot of the Drug Fair store at Pershing and Glebe (the first in the chain).
That is kitty corner from where a group called the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs (ACCESS) decided to make Buckingham's segregated leasing policy a matter of public protest, and decided on a sit-in campaign.
On July 10th, 1966, ten people were arrested after a five hour protest across from the Buckingham offices at 313 N Glebe road. Frances had a grand office on the second floor, where the immigration lawyer is now.
Ten ACCESS members sat in the rental office, including Christine Rose, Bill Hobbs, Roy Mauer, Jan Gelderman, Sharlene Kranz, Mari Haupt, Alice Ritter, Norm Simms, Joan Cooper and Franklin Johnson.
Seven white, three African American. They were all idealists in their twenties, with the exception of Alice, who was a veteran of the struggle and was 42.
The sit-ins were ignored by the Buckingham staff, although Assistant General Manager G.E. Murch informed them they were on private property and interfering with the operations of the Buckingham Apartments.
The cops arrived, and the circus began. Arlington Police LT F.C. Keyes gave them a choice about leaving or getting arrested, and the protestors remained mute. They were arrested and transported in two vans to the County slammer where they each were held under $500 bonds.
The crowd outside the offices had been as large as two hundred people, half of them in a picket line outside and the other half down by the florist at the access road to the parking lot off Pershing.
The protestors carried hand-written signs; one of them read “Mrs. Freed, you are blessed with the power to do good- let fair housing come to Buckingham!”
The Grand Dame of Buckingham had no comment for the reporters. One of her leasing officers told the crowd that “We don’t give a damn, We’re leaving,” as he locked the place up at 5:10 pm.
Mickey,the dimunitive Freed chauffeur, roared away with Frances in the back seat of the big black car, headed back to the refuge of the Shoreham Hotel in the District where she lived.
The protesters were in this for the long haul, and the crisis at the intersection of Pershing and Glebe went on all summer.
It drew some interesting counter-protestors, too, since massive resistance had not been abandoned by everyone. See, the Nazis and the Klan were in Arlington, too, and they wanted to be heard.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com