Much of the boom has bypassed African-Americans, edging some out of old neighbourhoods, while others remain stuck in impoverished communities plagued by violence, bleak housing and beleaguered schools. Recently, a black cashier at a trendy market on 14th Street remarked to a black customer marvelling at the well-heeled clientele: “I grew up here. It’s not my city anymore.”

The remnants of darker times

In 1910, a judge in the District of Columbia ruled that a 7-year-old mixed-race child named Isabel I Wall was “Negro,” and therefore barred from attending a white school in the segregated city. Isabel looked white, according to news accounts of the time, and her mother was white. But her grandfather, OSB Wall, had been a freed slave, a noted abolitionist and a pioneering black officer inthe Union army.

He was Washington’s first black justice of the peace, appointed in 1869 by President Ulysses S Grant. He was an official with the Freedmen’s Bureau – the agency set up to help freed slaves – and a member of the District of Columbia’s legislature, according to historian Daniel J Sharfstein. A lawyer and a champion of Washington’s black community, he became a member of the city’s black elite.

But 19 years after he died in 1891, amid mounting racial oppression, his son, Stephen – Isabel’s father – began what Sharfstein called his “escape from blackness”. Stephen Wall built a house in the white enclave of Brookland and enrolled his daughter in the local white school. “My child is as white as any,” he said. But after the