Heartbeat of the Hood
You’ll hear the sound of the drums if you take a late Sunday afternoon stroll near Meridian Hill Park - known as Malcom X Park by local residents – in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. If you let curiosity be your guide, your ears will follow the sounds growing louder as you climb the formidable uphill staircase. Resist any temptation to turn back. If you start feeling winded, just slow down your pace or take a moment to catch your breath and watch some birds take flight. Whatever you do, keep on climbing! What you’ll find at the top will be worth it!
If you stand facing the statue of Joan of Arc riding into battle, to your left you’ll see anywhere from 25 to 75 drummers seated more or less in 2 long rows.[1] The vast majority of the drums, such as the djembe and bougarabou, originate from West Africa, with some Afro-Cuban derived instruments, such as the conga, bongo, and timbales interspersed throughout. Thrown into the mix are percussion instruments of all shapes and sizes, such as the cowbell, claves (wooden sticks), fish-shaped guiro, shekere (gourd rattle), egg shaker, and of course, the tambourine. To the right of the statue is a much smaller circle of players, consisting of maybe 6-8 congeros, some percussionists, and maybe even a vocalist or 2.
The large drum circle adheres primarily to West African rhythms and is louder and more frenetic than the small one, which delves into Afro-Cuban rhythmic territory and is softer, subtler, more syncopated. Think of the large drum circle as the main dance floor at a club, and the small drum circle as the lounge. Each has its own special energy and force that compels you to move your body, so that’s what you’ll see people do in a spectacular way! On any given Sunday, you might see dancers (some amateur and some obviously trained), jugglers, yogis, hula-hoopers, tight-rope walkers, and little kids writhing, jiggling, twirling, and shaking to the beat.
On the periphery, people are engaged in all kinds of activities that one might expect to encounter in an urban park landscape: picnicking, dog-walking, riding bikes and scooters and skateboards, and curling up in a hammock with a sweetheart or a good book. And with America being the entrepreneurial nation that it is, wherever people gather, DIY salespeople will eventually show up. On any given Sunday, you might find local artisans selling hand-crafted jewelry and paintings, old-timers selling bottled water and snacks, and hippie chicks selling cannabis-infused baked goods. The scent of burning sage fills the air. . .
So now that you’ve gotten a feel for the scene, what’s it all mean?
For some people with African heritage, the drum circle connects them to their cultural roots and invigorates them spiritually. For Lunhoco Lee, a D.C. resident originally from Angola said that for her, visiting the drum circle is “like going to church. It gives me the energy for the rest of the week."[2] For others, the drum circle provides a safe space for venting negative emotions and soaking up positive emotions. According to a June 2017 Facebook post by Rashid Ali, “I was there last Sunday. I walked in with a heavy heart, worries, sadness, hopelessness. I walked out light hearted, happy, joyful, inspired!”[3]
That’s not surprising once you know the history of the drum circle, which allegedly started as one man’s means of self-expression. After Black activist Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Baba Ngoma, the house drummer at the Howard Theatre,[4] started drumming alone in Meridian Hill park every Sunday. Before long, Mr. Ngoma was joined by other African-American men from the surrounding predominantly Black neighborhood who used drumming as a method of releasing pent-up stresses and frustrations. According to William Caudle, a D.C. native who has been drumming at the circle for more than 40 years: “It was good therapy for African Americans.”
Meridian Hill Park became more than just a natural gathering place in the heart of the hood; it morphed into a geographic symbol of protest. In 1968, race riots erupted in DC in the wake of the MLK assassination that devastated the 14th St. Business District north and east of the park and the U Street Corridor south of the park.[5] As part of the effort to rebuild their shattered community and instill a sense of pride, local residents petitioned Congress to change the name of Meridian Hill Park to Malcolm X Park.[6] The Sunday drum circle persisted and took root, growing into a cherished tradition that supported the community and bound it together during unsettling times. The period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s were particularly bleak due to the rapid crack cocaine boom with its associated gang violence and soaring homicide rate, which earned D.C. the notorious title of the “murder capital.”[7]
At the same time, the city began to gentrify quietly, below most people’s radar. White guys started showing up at the drum circle. Kevin Lambert was one of the first to arrive in 1992 and he was not readily accepted. “There was a kerfuffle,” Lambert recalls, but Barnett Williams, one of the founding members of the circle, welcomed Lambert into the fold and the other players eventually deferred to Mr. Williams out of respect.[8]
From the late 1990s up to the present, the winds of gentrification have torn through D.C. at hurricane speeds, wreaking havoc on the African-American community that has always called it home but increasingly finds itself unable or barely able to afford to live there. By 2011, the town affectionately nicknamed “Chocolate City” after George Clinton’s 1975 funk classic had lost its Black majority.[9] Still, the drums keep on beating.
But the feeling’s not the same for some of the elders of the circle. For William Caudle, the influx of newcomers - many of whom are unconnected to African cultural traditions - don’t always understand the importance of technique or respect the seniority of expert players. Instead, they create a free-for-all tourist attraction, thereby diminishing the spiritual value of the experience.[10] Similarly, Obar Moyo, who’s been faithfully attending the drum circle for many years as if it were Sunday service, feels that some of the original spirit has been lost. "Brothers needed a way to heal. This influx of other people that think they can just jump in here and make this thing happen," Moyo said. "This thing has been going on for 400 years and you need to fit in. The circle belongs to the Africans and the Native Americans."[11]
You can easily empathize with the elders. Too much hoopla has the tendency to erode authentic expression, both spiritually and culturally. A carnival atmosphere certainly has the potential to transform what was once sacred ritual into performance art. The elders’ genuine grievance notwithstanding, there’s another way to view the situation.
Change happens to all cultures just as it inevitably happens to individuals. The transformation precipitated by the presence of the newcomers - who also tend to be Gen-Xer’s and Millenials - is not insidious; on the contrary, it’s light-hearted and playful. And improvisational performance art, while it may appear silly or even ridiculous to people accustomed to more conventional forms of expression, is not automatically a secular act devoid of all spiritual significance. If you believe in the existence of the soul, any individual act of self-expression can be viewed as a form of spiritual practice, and when performed on a consistent basis in a communal setting, a beneficial new ritual may emerge.[12] After all, if it were not for one man’s individual act of self-expression, the drum circle in Malcolm X park would not be here today more than 50 years later.
Despite the intellectual appeal of this theory, it does not address the emotional pangs of loss that the elder members of the drum circle are experiencing. Not only do they feel that their neighborhoods are being taken away from them by the ravages of gentrification, but they are witnessing what seems to be the erosion of the distinctly African-American cultural and spiritual tradition in Malcolm X Park that they helped to create and maintain. There’s a palpable element of tragedy in that.
But that’s not the whole story. The Asians, Caucasians, and Hispanics who reside in the neighborhoods surrounding the park pay taxes and support local schools, businesses, religious institutions, and community organizations, thereby giving them the right to hang out in the park on Sunday afternoons too. Instead of setting up a Kabuki theater or a carousel or another loud diversion that would compete with the drummers and ultimately drive them away, they appreciated the drum circle for what it is – the heartbeat of the neighborhood. And they embraced it as a way to get to know their new neighbors, and in so doing, many of them learned about the central place Malcom X Park had in the Civil Rights movement, leading to a deeper understanding of African American history and culture, which is still undertaught in our schools.[13] And by welcoming the newcomers into the drum circle, many of the African American members began to see them as human beings seeking to add value to the community instead of invading locusts trying to detract from it. In this way, the drum circle helps to break down barriers of race, class, religion, sexual orientation, and political division, and has a profoundly unifying effect, which is a desperately needed counterpoint to the shenanigans on Capitol Hill, which have a polarizing effect.
For better or for worse, the drum circle in Malcolm X Park has evolved into a place of refuge where everyone can go to try and heal whatever is broken inside them. Is it an accident that the lifeblood of this sanctuary is the rhythmic pulse of African drums? Not when you consider 2 generally accepted, interconnected scientific theories. The first theory is that DNA strands extracted from racially distinct individuals are virtually indistinguishable from one another, making racial differences a man-made construct, not a genetic reality. The explanation for our genetic similarity pertains to the second theory that humanity descended from a common African female ancestor.[14] So, unless your reliance on faith requires you to reject science, the only logical conclusion you can come to is that we’re all part of one big family and Africa is our ancestral home. Even if we’re thousands of years removed and so culturally divergent that we’ve become strangers to one another, the sound of the drums will bring us back together every time, if only for a few hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the park.
[1] This is just a rough estimate. Participation depends on the weather and what else is going on in the world. “Hundreds” of drummers have been rumored to show up, but this is unsubstantiated.
[2] For more about Lunhoco Lee and other D.C. residents’ feelings about the Malcolm X Park drum circle, see http://www.dbknews.com/2017/06/15/african-drum-circle-washington-dc-columbia-heights/
[3] Although drum circles are based on deeply rooted traditions, participants use modern technology to communicate. The Malcom X park drum circle has its own Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sunday-Drum-Circle-at-Malcolm-X-Park/404173559607946
Drum circles can be found in many cities across the U.S. Go to http://drumcircles.net/circlelist.html to find a drum circle near you!
[4]About a mile away from the park, The Howard Theater is a legendary performance space that hosted major African-American artists as well as a theater company affiliated with Howard University, where professors and students have been studying African history and culture since the emergence of Pan-Africanism after World War I. According to Blair Ruble, historian and author of Washington’s U Street: A Biography, these fields of study were ignored by White-dominated universities at that time, which put Howard University at the vanguard of growing African cultural movements in the U.S. For more or the origin of the Malcolm X Park drum circle, see https://wamu.org/story/15/11/06/why_some_meridian_hill_park_drummers_say_the_beat_isnt_what_it_used_to_be/ For more on the Howard Theater, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Theatre
[5] The superb journalistic standards of the Washington Post are evident in this brilliant, interactive photo-essay called 1968 Riots: 4 days that Reshaped D.C. at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/dc-riots 1968/?utm_term=.5efe8bf0ea79
[6] Although the petition failed because Federal regulations prohibit the park to be re-named after another person when a memorial to President James Buchanan exists within the confines of the park, its unofficial title became Malcolm X park. That’s what everyone in the neighborhood calls it. It’s even listed on street signs as Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park. For local viewpoints on the Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park naming controversy, see http://dcentric.wamu.org/2012/05/malcolm-x-or-meridian-hill-park-on-symbolism-and-accuracy/index.html and https://dclifemagazine.com/reviews/heres-meridian-hill-park-renamed
[7] For more on the socio-economical effect of the crack epidemic on D.C., see https://wamu.org/story/14/01/27/crack_1/
[8] For more about the cultural evolution of the Malcolm X Park drum circle, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-rhythm-of-the-city-the-meridian-hill-park-drum-circle-evolves/2014/08/27/ed2de94c-1e73-11e4-ab7b-696c295ddfd1_story.html?utm_term=.9547a1359e77
[9] From the New York Times article Farewell to Chocolate City at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/farewell-to-chocolate-city.html
[10] For more viewpoints on how changing D.C. demographics have impacted the Malcolm X Park drum circle, see https://wamu.org/story/15/11/06/why_some_meridian_hill_park_drummers_say_the_beat_isnt_what_it_used_to_be/
[11] University of Maryland students interviewed Mr. Moyo for this article in their school paper, the Diamondback, at http://www.dbknews.com/2017/06/15/african-drum-circle-washington-dc-columbia-heights/
[12] Check out this fascinating article on the relevance of ritual in our increasingly secularized society. https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/life/culture/article/2016/06/27/why-rituals-are-still-relevant
[13] For more about the Ticona family’s involvement in the Malcolm X Park drum circle, see https://wamu.org/story/15/11/06/why_some_meridian_hill_park_drummers_say_the_beat_isnt_what_it_used_to_be/
[14] If you can’t get enough of science, see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/ and https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429904-500-found-closest-link-to-eve-our-universal-ancestor/
