Movie Screening of Barry Farm: Community, Land & Justice in Washington, DC and a Follow up panel discussion

The documentary film will be followed by a panel featuring co-directors Sabiyha Prince, Sam George, and Michael Fisher, Jr., who is finishing a book on the development of Barry Farm. The panel will be moderated by Derek Hyra. Please see a description of the film below;

Take a left off of the Anacostia Freeway on to Firth Sterling Ave in Southwest DC–what do you see? You see empty fields. You see shiny new buildings just breaking ground. Construction equipment. Sweeping views of the capital. As one community member states in this film, if you are a developer, you see a gold mine. But these empty fields hold powerful memories. Enslaved people once worked this land. Later, during Reconstruction, formerly enslaved individuals purchased it, and built one of DC’s first thriving Black communities. Here, the city constructed a sprawling public housing complex in the 1940s, beloved by insiders, if notorious to outsiders. Here, the movement for Welfare Rights took shape. Here, the Junkyard Bandhoned its chops on homemade instruments before putting a turbo charge into the city’s Go-Go music. Here, residents lived in the Barry Farms Dwellings up until 2019, when the final community members were removed for the redevelopment.

This documentary film, a collaboration between the Bertelsmann Foundationand the DC Legacy Project, tells a story of a journey for community, land, and for justice. It is a story of Barry Farm, but it is also a story of Washington, DC. And, in the cycles of place and displacement, it is a story of the United States of America.