History & Legacy
Barry Farm is one of Washington, DC’s oldest Black communities, built after the Civil War as land for newly freed Black families. Over time it became a place where people bought homes, raised their kids, organized for better schools and housing, and created a strong Black culture in Southeast. Even as highways, policing, and redevelopment have tried to break the neighborhood apart, Barry Farm residents have continued to fight for their homes, their stories, and their right to return. This site honors that history and the legacy of the people who built Barry Farm and still carry it with them today.
Key Parts of Barry Farm’s History
Post-Civil War Beginnings
After the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau sold small lots in Barry Farm to formerly enslaved Black families. Owning land gave them a chance to build stability, community, and independence in DC.
Community, culture, and Organizing
Barry Farm became known for its tight-knit families, churches, youth programs, and organizing around housing and education. The neighborhood helped shape Black culture in Southeast, including music, sports, and everyday community care.
Displacement and the Fight to Return
Demolition and redevelopment have pushed many longtime residents out of Barry Farm. Even so, people continue to organize, tell their stories, and demand real affordable housing and a guaranteed right to come back home.
Barry Farm was created right after the Civil War when the Freedmen’s Bureau began selling land to formerly enslaved Black families. For $125–$300, families purchased small lots and built their own homes. This made Barry Farm one of the first Black landowning communities in Washington, DC.
Owning land meant independence: the security to raise families, pass down property, and build generational strength during a time when Black people were fighting for basic rights.
Why It Mattered
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Black families gained freedom on their own terms
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The community built schools, churches, and mutual aid networks
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It showed that formerly enslaved people could create thriving neighborhoods when given resources
Barry Farm began as one of the most powerful experiments in Black freedom after the Civil War. In 1867, the Freedmen’s Bureau purchased 375 acres of land in Anacostia so formerly enslaved African Americans could buy land, build homes, and start new lives rooted in ownership and independence. Families purchased one-acre lots, constructed their houses by hand (even after long workdays) and established churches and schools that became the backbone of the community (D.C. Policy Center, The History and Evolution of Anacostia’s Barry Farm)
From the beginning, this neighborhood was more than a place to live. It became a center of political leadership and Black self-determination. Early residents, including the sons of Frederick Douglass, helped pass early civil rights laws in D.C. and worked to end racial discrimination in public spaces. Through the late 1800s and early 1900s, Barry Farm–Hillsdale residents demanded basic infrastructure, clean water, electricity, paved streets, that the city denied them because of race and class bias (Anacostia Community Museum, Community Activism—Barry Farm–Hillsdale)
By the 1940s and 1950s, Barry Farm had become a major site of Black activism. When the federal government seized part of the land to build the Barry Farm Dwellings (a segregated public housing project), residents organized to protect their homes and community. Youth and parents played key roles in Bolling v. Sharpe, one of the school desegregation cases that joined Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Families also integrated the Anacostia Pool after years of exclusion, showing how everyday resistance shaped the neighborhood’s identity (Anacostia Community Museum)
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, local residents built powerful organizing networks. Women led the Band of Angels, fighting for better housing and healthcare, while the National Welfare Rights Organization connected Barry Farm’s demands to national civil rights struggles. Young people formed “Rebels with a Cause,” advocating for safer streets, fair treatment by police, and youth empowerment (D.C. Policy Center; Anacostia Community Museum)
In the 1980s, Barry Farm gained national recognition again as the birthplace of the Junkyard Band and a major force in Go-Go music, the heartbeat of D.C.’s Black culture. Even through poverty, underinvestment, and systemic neglect, Barry Farms remained a community defined by strength, creativity, leadership, and unity.
By the 1990s and 2000s, residents continued fighting environmental injustice, including pollution from the nearby Navy Yard. And by 2019, as redevelopment plans threatened to erase major parts of the neighborhood, residents mobilized once again, but this time to preserve sections of Barry Farms as an official historic landmark, protecting the legacy of Black homeownership and activism that had shaped the community for over 150 years (Anacostia Community Museum; D.C. Policy Center)
Barry Farm is not simply a place on the map. It is a living story of Black land ownership, resistance, community pride, cultural expression, and multigenerational strength. Its history shows why the stakes of redevelopment are so high: this is a community built from resilience and self-determination, and its preservation matters not just to Southeast D.C., but to the story of Black America as a whole.