Lyon’s Legacy

Opinion

Lyon’s Legacy: Corrections

D. Taylor Reich
Arlington (Alexandria) County before the development of the 1920s and ‘30s. (via Library of Congress)

Lyon’s Legacy is a limited-run opinion column on the history of housing in Arlington. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

Lyon’s Legacy was a series that ran for the last four months on ARLnow, telling a story of the history of housing and racism in Arlington, and putting forward a suggestion for one way we could end the regime of economic exclusion that has dominated most of our county for the last century. As the series ran, some eagle-eyed readers kindly identified a few mistakes in the historical research.

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Opinion

Lyon’s Legacy: The Soul of Arlington

D. Taylor Reich
Household carbon emissions in the DC area in tonnes CO2-eq per year. Image by the CoolClimate Network at UC Berkeley, https://coolclimate.org/maps.

Lyon’s Legacy is a limited-run opinion column on the history of housing in Arlington. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

I grew up in Arlington because, in the 90s, it was a place where middle-class parents could afford to own a home and raise two children. I loved my childhood here. But because of Arlington’s economically-exclusive zoning laws and their contribution to rising housing prices, I don’t expect to be able to give my kids the same.

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Opinion

Lyon’s Legacy: What We Can Do Now

D. Taylor Reich
A six-unit apartment building in Oregon. Image by Sightline Institute.

Lyon’s Legacy is a limited-run opinion column on the history of housing in Arlington. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

“A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.” 

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Traffic

Lyon’s Legacy VI: Why Lyon Still Matters

D. Taylor Reich
Dion Diamond, Joan Trumpauer, and Ethelene Crockett face harassment at the Cherrydale Drug Fair during their sit-in on June 10, 1960 (photo via washington_area_spark/Flickr)

Lyon’s Legacy is a limited-run opinion column on the history of housing in Arlington. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

The H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program is housed today at 1601 Wilson Boulevard, a hundred-million-dollar building located not far from the place in Rosslyn where, a little over a century ago, a posse fired at a fleeing Black man because white landowners wanted to make the county more profitable for real-estate development.

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Opinion

Lyon’s Legacy V: Laws, Land, and White Hoods

D. Taylor Reich
Hooded Klansmen in Cherrydale in 1922. Image from the American Historical Photo Archive.

Lyon’s Legacy is a limited-run opinion column on the history of housing in Arlington. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

A century ago, white supremacy in Arlington was bigger than Frank Lyon. It reached up into the County Board, down into secret societies, and so deeply into our county’s life that its fingerprints are still found in our elections, our zoning laws, and traces hiding in our rafters and backyards.

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Opinion

Lyon’s Legacy IV: White Families’ Homes

D. Taylor Reich
Most developments in Arlington in the early 20th century included racially-restrictive covenants, like this one in Columbia Forest.

Lyon’s Legacy is a limited-run opinion column on the history of housing in Arlington. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

“IN THIS early-twentieth-century era, when African Americans in the South faced terror that maintained them in subjugation, when African Americans throughout the nation were being driven from small towns where they had previously enjoyed a measure of integration and safety, and when the federal government had abandoned its African American civil servants, we should not be surprised to learn that there was a new dedication on the part of public officials to ensure that white families’ homes would be removed from proximity to African Americans in large urban areas.”

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Opinion

Lyon’s Legacy III: The Constitution and the Raid

ARLnow.com
A later artist’s rendition of Crandal Mackey’s raid on Rosslyn. This painting hangs in the Virginia Room at Arlington Central Library. The depiction is hagiographic, cartoonish, and inaccurate, but indicates the significance of the event in Arlington’s history. Image used with permission of Arlington Public Library.

Lyon’s Legacy is a limited-run opinion column on the history of housing in Arlington. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

“Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose… That exactly is what this convention was elected for — to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitation of the federal Constitution, with the view to the elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of.”

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