Walter Washington

Walter Edward Washington was born on the fifteenth of April 1915 in Dawson, Georgia, a farming community of cotton and peanut fields in the southwestern part of the state. He was the son of William L. Washington, who labored in a ball-bearing factory and worked in hotels as a bellhop, valet, and cook, and Willie Mae Thornton Washington. When he was only two months old, his mother carried him north in the Great Migration to Jamestown, New York, where he would be raised. His mother died when he was six, and he came of age within the care of his father and an extended Black family network.

At Jamestown High School he ran track and managed the football team, one of only two Black students in a graduating class of some four hundred. He went on to Howard University in Washington, D.C., studying public administration and sociology, and later earned a law degree there. His long apprenticeship in public service began in housing: he supervised the District's Alley Dwelling Authority, led the National Capital Housing Authority, and briefly headed New York City's housing agency.

In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Mayor-Commissioner of the District of Columbia, making him the first African American to lead a major American city. In 1968, amid the grief and fire that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he refused an order to have looters shot, choosing restraint and the dignity of his people over force.

When home rule came, Washington was elected the District's first mayor in more than a century, serving from 1975 to 1979. He steadied a city finding its own voice and governance. He died on the twenty-seventh of October 2003, at the age of eighty-eight. May the steward who carried a capital toward self-rule be honored, and long remembered.