Black Broad Branch Project is a local public history and advocacy project that is working to amplify the history of Black-owned land in the 19th and 20th centuries in Washington, DC.
Included are materials for 3rd, 6th, & 12th Grade Social Studies Curriculum: Reparations in DC and Beyond.
On May 5, 2021, Washington History magazine Editorial Board member Chris Myers Asch joined the authors of the forthcoming "Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, DC" Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green for a conversation about the Pointer family’s legacy. The authors were joined by James Fisher and Tanya Gaskins Hardy, who co-authored the forward for "Between Freedom and Equality."
From an enslaved African American purchasing his freedom to a 20th-century eminent domain land seizure, "Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, DC" is a dramatic story of freedom amid slavery and its aftermath. Authors Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green trace six generations in one Washington family, beginning with Capt. George Pointer, a Maryland man born enslaved in 1773 who purchased his freedom 20 years later while working for George Washington's Potomac Company. The land in Northwest DC where four generations of Pointer’s descendants later farmed was briefly engulfed by the Civil War and then seized by eminent domain for the expanding suburb of Chevy Chase, DC—specifically, to build Lafayette Elementary School for white children. Today efforts are underway in Chevy Chase to reckon with this history and further awareness of the legacy of George Pointer and his descendants.
Torrey and Green’s thorough research and stirring narrative provide unique insight across two centuries of DC history.