When the planned city of Greenbelt began accepting residents in 1937, competition was fierce, with more than 5,700 families applying for the 885 homes available.

But not everyone was welcome.

Although the city was built on former tobacco fields farmed by several Black families and Black construction workers had helped build it, African-Americans were not allowed to apply to move in.

The city’s population, as historian Cathy Knepper wrote, could be summarized as “a community of white, Protestant, low-level government employees.”

“But of course, there was not one black family: Integrated meant something different in those days,” said Daniel Ray Young, who wrote a play about the city, told The Washington Post in 1997.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The original plans for Greenbelt included a separate area called the Rossville Rural Development that would be used by Black farmers, but those were dropped amid opposition from white neighbors and lawmakers.

Still, the town was fairly open. When a handful of residents complained at a town meeting in 1939 that African-American customers were being served at the town’s drug store, the editor of the Greenbelt paper noted that the complainers “were literally shouted down.”

By 1967, the city council was telling owners of apartment buildings in town to voluntarily adopt non-segregation policies, and Black families began moving into the area. The following year, the Fair Housing Act barred discrimination in rentals and home sales at the national level.

The city has long grappled with this history, from changing the way the city council is elected in 2009 to address criticism that it underrepresented Black voters to adding a special archive to the city’s museum devoted to the African-American experience in Greenbelt.

In 2013, the city, which is now 47 percent African-American, elected its first Black mayor, Emmett Jordan, and in 2019, its second, Colin Byrd.

In November, Greenbelt residents went a step further, voting by a margin of 1,522 to 910 to form a commission to study whether Black and Native American residents should receive reparations for past wrongs.

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