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Introduction to the "Out of Kenilworth" oral history collection |
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An Introduction to the “Out of Kenilworth” Oral History Project
by Joseph Lapp, project director
The “Out of Kenilworth” oral history project centers around the history of the Fellowship Haven (FH) Church and the lives of the church’s first missionaries and long-time pastor couple, Elmer and Fannie Lapp and their family. It branches out from this theme to include history of the larger Kenilworth area, a small community in the corner of NE DC that lies east of the Anacostia River, including stories of the Kenilworth Courts, Douglas Street, and Eastland Gardens neighborhoods, the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens and Kenilworth Dump/Park, and the original white suburb of Kenilworth.
The name “Out of Kenilworth” is an echo of Isak Dinesen’s collection of stories named Out of Africa. When I first read this book I was fascinated by her stories of African life and her cross-cultural presence there. Later I began to realize the way in which colonial and even racist attitudes inevitably influenced both her outlook and the content and form of her stories. I found parallels between her story and the story of the Lapp family as white folks coming into, in this case, an African American neighborhood in Washington, DC and making a life there, parallels between both the quaint stories of cross-racial and cross-cultural interaction that she tells and that came from the FH church’s experience in Kenilworth, and also parallels in my own questioning of her colonial motives paired with a beginning understanding of some of the underlying pseudo-colonial or prejudice-driven forces at work in the missionary enterprise as it was understood and implemented by the Amish-Mennonite mission boards and the church workers they sent to Kenilworth.
I have chosen the name, “Out of Kenilworth,” then, to intentionally reference the colonial/racial fragilities of the FH church’s outreach to the Kenilworth neighborhood while also seeking to triumph over them. Unlike Dinesen, I, the narrator-like interviewer and compiler behind the scenes of each story, was actually born into the neighborhood and cross-cultural situation that I survey, and so have a claim to belong there. And unlike Dinesen’s one-sided stories, this is an oral history project, and as such each participant – black or white, from Kenilworth or from an Amish-Mennonite rural enclave – gets to tell their own story in their own words and with their own thoughts and assumptions displayed. Thus, no single narrator exists to load their own racial/cultural view willy-nilly onto each and every story.
When Elmer and Fannie Lapp did indeed move “out of Kenilworth” and retire back to their home area in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 2001, it was the end of an era both for the FH Church and for the Kenilworth neighborhood. It is my hope that this oral history project will function not only as an ode to the lives of my parents and the church’s work in Kenilworth, but more importantly as a multi-voiced record of the differing viewpoints, thoughts, and feelings of a generation of conservative Mennonite whites and urban blacks who came together for a time at a small church on Douglas Street in Kenilworth, DC.
To understand this project one should first know that I, Joseph Lapp, completed this project solely of my own motivation, with my own funds, and on my own time, and that Elmer and Fannie Lapp are my parents. After completing a B.A. in English at Calvin College in Michigan, I wanted to find a story that I could attempt to shape into a first book. Growing up hearing repeated stories of the heyday of the FH church and youth group in the seventies and early eighties, I realized that the interaction of white, rural Amish Mennonites with black, urban, public-housing-complex dwellers could make for a rich trove of stories highlighting themes important to me, themes like cross-racial and cross-cultural interaction, African American and Amish-Mennonite spirituality and life, black history, and the triumphs and perils of the Christian missionary enterprise. Accordingly, in February of 2003 I moved back into Kenilworth, renting a room in the basement of a house on Douglas Street still owned by the FH Church. For better or for worse, my idea of interviewing a few people and working their stories into the larger creative nonfiction manuscript I planned to author soon turned into a full-fledged oral history project.
My parents, Elmer and Fannie Lapp, moved from rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania into the Kenilworth neighborhood in 1965 along with three small children. Sent in cooperation by two conservative Mennonite mission boards representing a growing Pennsylvania and Midwest Amish-Mennonite constituency called the “Beachy” church, the Lapps sent their children to the local public elementary school and began to get to know their neighbors. They soon began holding children’s activities, and so many children from the surrounding area came that more workers were needed.
Capitalizing on the popularity of volunteer service terms for Beachy young folk, a trend started by the need for non-resistant young men to do alternative service during the Vietnam draft, the mission boards recruited and sent a series of young Amish-Mennonites to help with the mission effort in Kenilworth. The mission soon began holding church services in a basement of one of the four houses that were eventually bought on Douglas Street, and a church building was built in 1975. The church took firm root in the community, continuing to attract a large number of neighborhood children for programs like summer Bible school and two weeks of summer camp and forming a small but vital youth network out of teenage converts from the surrounding area.
The church and voluntary service unit thrived into the mid-1980’s, when changes in the larger neighborhood and a split with the Beachy mission boards began to create decline in both numbers and unity within the church. Founded as a dynamic new work and flourishing as such, the FH missionary enterprise was unable to create the critical mass of neighborhood church-goers necessary for the church to grow as a self-supporting body with local leadership. By the time of this oral history project, FH church attendance was down to a dozen or so people on a Sunday morning, with a small group of loyal members still dedicating themselves to two full weeks of summer camp for community children but offering little else in the way of community outreach.
While this collection revolves around the story of the FH Church as outlined above, other area stories found their way into the narrative, especially as I became increasingly interested in the broad history of the Kenilworth area. The history of the Kenilworth Courts public housing complex is prominently featured as a vital African-American, low-income community in the capital of the United States, a place representing a broad network of black family life yet often separated from the power structures that operate just across the Anacostia River in downtown DC. Stories from such “project” communities are often left out of the historical record, which tends to be dominated by the cares and triumphs of the dominant ethnicities and upper classes. Thus I took great pleasure in chronicling a bit of the creation and decline of the Kenilworth Courts neighborhood, along with a community renaissance led by the dynamic Kimi Gray, a welfare mother who got the ear of the Reagan-era Republicans and turned her neighborhood around.
Also finding their way into the mix are stories of the Douglas Street and Eastland Gardens neighborhoods, communities formed in the early 1900’s by middle-income African Americans seeking a place to own a home, have a garden, and rear their families in peace; stories of the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens National Park, a water gardens started as a commercial operation in the late 1800’s by a Civil War veteran; stories of the Kenilworth Dump which once burned all the city’s trash and is now a park; stories of changing transportation infrastructure and it’s effect on the area, most notably the place of Kenilworth Avenue in the community’s history; and a few stories of the original white suburb of Kenilworth founded in the late 1800’s and surviving into the early 1950’s.
Having grown up between Kenilworth, DC and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, all the time integrally involved with the life of the FH church and, obviously, with the life of my family, I am necessarily an interviewer with a position that is perhaps, for some, way too close to my subject for anything like historical detachment and accuracy. Yet I hope that users of this collection will be able to sort through and adapt to the particular nature of my relationship to my subject and my interviewees, and for every moment where the assumed knowledge that passes unspoken between myself and interviewee leaves the researcher confused I hope there will be two or three places where my unique relationship with the informants yields information much richer than any outside observer could have elicited.
Finally, a few notes for some of this collection’s peculiarities:
-1W or 1-W service is the governmental designation for alternative service for pacifists during the Vietnam draft.
-Interviews often use FH as shorthand for Fellowship Haven, which represents both a mission entity and a formal church body and building.
-VS stands for voluntary service, a larger Mennonite tradition of young people volunteering a year or more with a Christian service organization, and one that in the Beachy Amish-Mennonite community was specifically motivated by the Vietnam draft.
-The use of “Pennsylvania” or “Lancaster” in the context of the Lapp family and FH workers usually refers to the Beachy community found in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the originating place for the Lapp family. Lancaster is both a town and a county, with the area Beachy communities referenced in this project mostly located in the county east of the town of Lancaster itself. Similarly, the use of “DC” or “Kenilworth” is often used generically to signify the specific location of the Lapp family and other FH church workers in the mission effort centered on Douglas Street in the Kenilworth area in NE Washington, DC.
-“Lily ponds” is the local name for the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, such as, “We used to ice skate at the lily ponds.”
-See the supporting documents for a record of the Lapp family’s birth order and a chronology of their physical moves.
-“The Lapps” is a term often used by Kenilworth community members to denote anyone associated with the FH Church.
-See supporting documentation for an article outlining the history of the Beachy Amish-Mennonite churches.
-The collection includes a full life history of both Elmer and Fannie Lapp, my parents.
I hope that you, the researcher, will find this collection both enjoyable and informative. I would love to hear from you, via my contact information held by the archivist, as you use this collection for research. Happy reading (and listening)! Peace, Joe Lapp
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