For decades, the park south of Tilden Street, bisected by Connecticut Avenue, was Melvin Hazen Park.
Then, in 2017, Neil Flanagan wrote for the Washington City Paper about Hazen’s long-ago efforts to wipe a Black neighborhood in Tenleytown off the map. DC Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Rock Creek Conservancy and ANC 3F started pushing the National Park Service to change the park’s name.
In February 2022, they got their wish. NPS erased the “Melvin Hazen” name and the designation “Reservation 630” has taken its place.
After the 2022 redistricting, the park is no longer within ANC 3F’s boundaries, but split between ANC 3C and the new ANC 3A. And those two advisory neighborhood commissions have taken up the effort to give Reservation 630 a new name: Georgia Ellard Park.
Ellard was the first Black person and woman to serve as the superintendent of Rock Creek Park. Fox 5 spoke to her and to an ANC 3A commissioner in June. (Ellard, now 93 years old, also took part in a 2021 panel on the women in Rock Creek Park leadership.)
ANC 3A passed a resolution on June 20th in support of the name change, and after their unanimous vote, the commissioners applauded Ms. Ellard, who was in attendance. ANC 3C passed a similar resolution on July 17th.
Their lobbying is unlikely to end there. In February 2022, when it announced the removal of Melvin Hazen’s name from the park, NPS also said that it did not have the authority to add a new name. That will take an act of Congress.
Honors for the “Grandfather of Black Basketball:” At a June 24th ceremony, UDC unveiled a statue of E.B. Henderson.
Today, UDC commemorated alumnus Dr. E.B. Henderson by unveiling the statue in his honor.
Click here to see more >> https://t.co/tKJp5GbbXr#UDCFirebirds #EBHenderson pic.twitter.com/SaYgTxVsdP
— University of the District of Columbia (UDC) (@udc_edu) June 24, 2023
Who was he? A leader in the Civil Rights Movement, and in the 1920s, the man credited with introducing the game of basketball to Black youth in DC. The statue depicts Henderson as a young man, because, sculptor Brian Hanlon said, “we need to remember where we came from.”
Brian Hanlon, founder of Hanlon Sculpture Studio, said he sculpted UDC alumnus Dr. E.B. Henderson as a young man “because we need to remember where we came from.” pic.twitter.com/9a5TDUiUeX
— University of the District of Columbia (UDC) (@udc_edu) June 24, 2023
Read reports about the statue’s unveiling from the Washington Informer, WTOP, and Ebony.
In other news: UDC and Howard University are jointly offering a free 15-week course on health data science (DCist). And two strangers provided a random act of kindness to eleven members of Forest Hills-based Northwest Neighbors Village (Popville).