Exhibit Q: PG County’s contribution to Black intellectualism surpasses…

Some years ago while staying at a boutique hotel in the Bahamas, I found myself sitting with a couple from England and a slight blonde from the Midwest—who, upon learning that I was from the DMV, recalled a time when she got lost while traveling to Washington, DC. She found herself straying, inadvertently into Prince George’s County. People had warned her that she should avoid the county as it was dangerous. She thought that I would understand her trepidation, asking, “Where are you from?”

Prince George’s County. I had been invited to do a talk on home in African American literature at the College of the Bahamas. I am an academic. In fact, many of the most significant African American thinkers and writers have been shaped by the rich culture of Prince George’s County, Maryland. In fact, I would argue that PG, as the county is colloquially called by locals, has had a more enduring impact on and made more sustained contributions to Black letters than Harlem. Just look at some of the folks who have lived here:

• Ntozake Shange, daughter of the Black Arts Movement at the vanguard of womanist literature;
• Marita Golden, the founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation;
• Aalyah Bilal, whose debut short story collection was a National Book Award Finalist;
• Zane, who broke open Black erotica and for a time reigned as one of the most powerful women in the book industry;
• Connie Briscoe, best-selling author;
• Jason Reynolds, best-selling author;
• Omar Tyree, best-selling author;
• Thomas Sayers Ellis, the founder of the Dark Room Collective;
• Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet, MacArthur Fellow, and CEO of Freedom Reads; and
• Hoke S. Glover III (Bro Yao) poet who founded, owned, and operated Karibu Books which spawned Mahogany Books.

Of course, these writers are in community with others from the broader metropolitan region, such as:

• Kwame Alexander, Emmy award winning and best-selling author;
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, among the most influential Black writers of our time; and
• Rion Amilcar Scott, Pen/Hemingway recipient creates a fictional Cross River, based upon his experiences growing up in neighboring Montgomery County.

So why aren’t people talking about a PG Renaissance? For one thing, Prince George’s is not noted for dramatic patterns of migration. Unlike New York, Maryland is south of the Mason Dixon Line. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, in order to escape slavery, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and others had to leave Maryland. At least, until the Civil War ended in 1865.

Nevertheless, during the twentieth century, people migrated to DC for many of the same reasons that people moved to Harlem. Especially after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of “Separate but Equal,” the Federal Government was compelled to open its offices to African Americans to work behind a desk. This allowed Black migrants to obtain good government jobs, earning benefits, salaries, and pensions. As a result, according to Andrew Van Dam of the Washington Post, PG is surpassed by only Charles County as home to the most affluent African American population in the country.

My parents were new, first-time homeowners when they brought me, their third born child, home to Kentland. That house accommodated us comfortably while we were young. When I was seven, we moved to a larger home in a new development on the southern edge of Bowie where I would grow up with my brothers. My parents rose early to take Route 50 into Washington, DC to work. PG cannot be disconnected from DC.

Prince George’s County leans toward the District of Columbia and not just as a site of employment. Take, for instance, the way Prince Georgians tell folks who ask when traveling that they are from DC, because if they say, “Maryland,” people who are not from this area usually ask, “Baltimore?” Baltimore’s gritty blue-collar culture is notably different from the white-collar bureaucracy that helped turn the nation’s capital into Chocolate City. Not to mention the fact that Baltimore has distinctly different franchises in the Ravens and the Orioles than DC’s Commanders and Nationals.

Following the financial crisis of 2008, gentrification ate the Chocolate City—renovating row homes, building luxury condos—and expectorated many of the city’s poorer, more melanated residents. A number of the Black people who used to live in the District relocated to PG. Half a century prior, the county transitioned from rural to suburban with the passing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 as African American families like mine fled the inner-city turmoil and in search of larger houses with nice yards. More recently, many of the County’s wealthier residents migrated to Charles County looking for the same things. IRS records show that fifty-six percent of Charles County’s most affluent Black residents relocated from PG.

Renaissance literally means re-birth. In fact, PG has not experienced a re-birth so much as it serves as a steady pump at the core of an incubator for today’s most prominent poets and writers. Joy Alfred, Brian Gilmore, Sufiya Abdul Rahman, Khadijah Ali-Coleman, Monifa Love, and Randall Horton are just a few. Moreover, the DMV has deep, if not storied, ties to African American letters. Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Anna Julia Cooper, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, and Toni Morrison, have all had meaningful connections to this region. In addition to the likes of celebrated entertainers like Dave Chappell, Taraji P. Henson, Chadwick Boseman, Felicia Rashad, and Martin Lawrence, who spent some or all of their formative years in the DMV, writers like Ibram X. Kendi, Tony Medina, Fred Joyner, Shakeema Smalls, Toni Asantelightfoot, Sami Miranda, Joel Dias Porter, Kenny Carroll, Derrick Weston Brown and Reuban Jackson continue to feed this vibrant culture. Yet, this reality fails to draw attention of historians and scholars.

And the state does not even seem aware of this distinction. The information about Prince George’s County on the Maryland state website is literally four sentences long. The site gives neighboring Montgomery County more than four times that many, which suggests something of the status assigned to the two counties in the region. PG ranks a close second to Montgomery County, with just over 955,000 residents. Surely the State might find something to note in such a well-populated county.

A hundred years ago, Harlem was in vogue. The Great Migration was in motion and Black people were leaving the country in droves, heading to the city. Among them came artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. Alain Locke, who also has ties to the DMV, famously named himself midwife to this New Negro born of an era which has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Despite the fact that the period of increased productivity only lasted just over a decade, it’s legacy has been heralded for nearly a hundred years.

It is time that PG County take its place as a locale of note within a metropolitan region responsible for so much literary production. Emmy Award Winning and bestselling authors, National Book Award finalist, Pen/Hemingway recipient, MacArthur Fellow, and Black owned bookstores. I remember, near the end of his life after evacuating New Orleans following hurricane Katrina, MacArthur Fellow and artist John T. Scott telling me that culture is not like rain; it bubbles up from the ground like a spring. It’s no wonder, then, that Prince George’s County, in particular, and the DMV more broadly—home to a diverse community of Black people—gives rise to a class of writers who generate an ongoing stream of noteworthy literature.