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Screening: Barry Farm: Community, Land and Justice

Join us for a documentary screening to mark the final week of the exhibit 'Barry Farm: Uplifting a Living History, Ensuring a Just Future.'

As part of the closing activities for the exhibit Barry Farm: Uplifting a Living History, Ensuring a Just Future, join us for a 50-minute documentary screening as part of a day of celebration at the MLK Library.

About the exhibit:

Since September, this traveling exhibit has visited three libraries: Anacostia Neighborhood Library, Bellevue Neighborhood Library, and the MLK Library.The installation at the MLK Library features an expanded section featuring historical photographs of Barry Farm and excerpts from the Life in the Barry Farm Community Oral History Project. The exhibit is on view at the MLK Library, Floor 1, East, through June 28. Learn more about the exhibit here.

About the film:

The empty fields of Barry Farm hold powerful memories of enslaved people to one of D.C.’s first thriving Black communities, until 2018, when the final community members were removed to make way for redevelopment. Told by the generations of residents, as well as D.C.’s leading historians, artists, musicians and analysts, this film tells of a community that risks being erased from the map.

Take a left off of the Anacostia Freeway on to Firth Sterling Ave – 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 Band honed its chops on homemade instruments before putting a turbocharge 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 Foundation and the DC Legacy Project, and directed by Sabiyha Prince and Samuel George, 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, D.C. And, in the cycles of place and displacement, it is a story of the United States of America.

This screening is being held in conjunction with and the Library's 90's Block Party in celebrtion of Black Music Month and Father's Day.

Come sing, dance and celebrate Black music, D.C. culture and community all afternoon long.

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