I remember the distaste that I have for organized religion after seeing a thread here or two about religion, and remembered it started as a teen learning about the brutal racism of the Catholic Church and schools I was raised in.

I used to frequent Georgetown as a student at nearby GWU. I remember on Sundays seeing elderly African-Americans with young people helping them into cars after service and couldn't figure out what that was about in such a white area. I lived off of Dupont Circle and one of my best buddies used to get so angry whenever we passed by her former family home in the neighborhood and how they were forced out, at the horrible physical expense to one of her great-uncles, by government workers whose congresspeople didn't feel like commuting to D.C. from the surrounding areas any more. She said to me, "Why do think all the old black people are there on Sundays? They took away our homes but couldn't take away the church though they thought we'd stop attending."

It's a shame that the article didn't mention that Georgetown was once a thriving black community. I was surprised to find out in the link below that Adams Morgan, another area I loved with a great mix of people, also became gentrified back in the 1800s. But it must have had the influx of the heavy AA and Hispanic mix by the time I was there.

Historian C.R. Gibbs, co-author of Black Georgetown Remembered, says by the end of the 1940s, many African Americans had moved out of the neighborhood. He pulls out a copy of Senate committee report from 1944 and flips to the appropriate page, and reads:

“In Georgetown, only remnants of a long-established negro population now remain, because so much of their property has been purchased and improved for white occupancy.”

That long-established population dated back to the very beginnings of the town, in 1745. http://wamu.org/programs/metro_connection/14/09/26/why_did_african_americans_leave_georgetown

It's good to know though that the university is considering its "moral obligation to the descendants."