Evening star., 1959-12-27
THE SUNDAY STAR
By GEORGE BEVERIDGE
Star stan Writer

Star Stan Writer
Metropolitan Washington closes
the door this week on it's "Ex-
ploS:ve sos"
The SOS, more than anything
else, were a decade of explosive,
unprecedented change here
shifts which sharply altered living
habits as we'll as the physical
makeup of the area.
1t was, as we'll the Nation, the
era of hoola hoops, of rock n roll,
Of ducktail haircuts, and of little
cars.
1t was the age of the H-bomb,
the ICBM, the Sputnik. 1t was a
period of almost unbearable in
ternational tensions. of great labor
conflicts, and-locally as we'll as
nationally-the first major polit-
ical change in 20 years. Television
came of age; the rooftop antenna
became stock adjunct of resi-
Dental architecture-and all these
things left their impact.
Locally. however, there were two
more explosive changes having to
do with growth-one physical and
one social-each as powerful in
its own way as the other.
The first was the emergence Of
the metro area as an urban entity
tied together with area-wide
concerns and problems, and held
apart by a vacuum of effective
regional political machinery.
The second change was deseg-
regation.
Washington, during the sos,
became in many ways an inte-
grated community. The pace was
set by court fights in the Thomp-
son Restaurant case and, in June,
1858. the Supreme Court ruled
finally that District restaurants
must provide service to Negroes.
A year later, the high court
handed down its monumental de-
cision against segregation in the
schols, and public school integra-
ton began.
Within the District, racial bar
riers also broke down in housing,
recreation, theaterS and a myriad
Of other social activities. More
gradually, barriers began to fall
in employment and labor unions.
The most striking element of the
whole process in Washington was
It's smoothness. But desegregation
brought problems in the suburbs
and a number of other effects, the
end of which still are not in sight.
Integration, for example,
brought in one sense a new form
of segregation Many of Wash
ington's former all-white neigh
borhoods. racially mixed at first,
have become virtually all Negro.
So have some schools. The most
far-reaching effect was that ever
increasing numbers of low-income
Negroes concentrated in the CEN
trail city, surrounded by virtually
all-white, higher-income suburban
belts, to which thousands of
previous District residents had
fed.
Statistics in this realm can be
misleading. The ratio of Negroes
to the total metropolitan area
population, for example, has
varied only 2 per cent over the
last decade-from 234 per cent
of the total to 255 per cent.
In positive numbers, however,
Negroes in the District have in
creased from 284,3l3 in 1850 to
over $4,000 this year, according
to Washington Board of Trade
estimates. And the District popu-
lation has become more than half
Negro-with the non-white popu-
lation increasing from 35.4 per
cent in 1850 to over So per cent
today.
1t is little recognized fact that
the Washington areas total rate
Of growth actually was higher in
the 1940s than in the '5Os-in-
creasing from a 967,985 popula-
ton in 1910 to 1,46O 900 in
1850. But this influx resulted
mainly from World War II, and
the growing dominance of Wash
ington as a world capital. The
phenomenon which occurred in
the SOS was that a new type of
growth took over, arising from
natural economic and social
forces, and part of a national
concentration of Americans in
fast-growing metro urban regions.
The Washington area, between
1850 and 1860 grew from 1,463,0
people to an estimated 2,l34.OOO,
with most of the new settlement
in the suburbs. The District of
Columbia, almost overnight, it
seemed. no longer was self
sustained community. 1t became,
suddenly, no more than the center
OF vast urban region. And the
problems. in all parts of the area,
became immense.
Two of the greatest were traf-
flc congestion everywhere and-in
the center-growing slums and
blight which were sapping the
vitality of the Capital. BY the
. end of the decade, Washington
was moving ahead-if slowly-in
both fields. But more dramatic
than the actual progress was the.
fact that the area had begun to
mobilize regional machinery to
make co-ordinateG attacks on
problems like transportation.
sewage disposal, water supply and
transit regulation.
Through it all, Washington re-
tanned a vital. growing economy,
largely unresponsive to recessions
and setbackS which struck other
areas.