William Vollin remembers the games he played as a boy. “Hide and go seek and marbles and ball games and that kind of thing,” he says in a video call. “I never thought I was poor personally because I had a grandmother who worked 30 years or so as a maid and always kept food on the table. We adjusted to the environment.”
Now 92, Vollin is one of the last remaining former residents of Queen City, a historically Black neighbourhood in Arlington, Virginia, erased to make way for the rushed construction of the Pentagon during the second world war. He spent a lifetime mourning its passing. But now he is delighted by a public artwork that honours its memory.
Queen City by artist Nekisha Durrett is a 35-ft tall, well-like brick tower in Metropolitan Park, Arlington, that peers over trees and architecture to mark the site of what existed before. Durrett commissioned 17 Black ceramists to make 903 ceramic teardrop vessels that signify the 903 individuals of Queen City displaced after losing their homes with almost no notice.
Queen City had thrived for 40 years before the wrecking balls came. Vollin, whose father worked in a brickyard, recalls that while it lacked electricity or running water, the sense of community was irreplaceable.
“Even though it was a poor area, we were like family,” he says. “Sometimes when you’re so poor, you have friends and you have neighbours who look out for you. You’d go into a house and there was food. It was just a close knit community that was devastated.”
He was around 10 years old when, in 1941, he learned his home would be taken away. “We didn’t have much time to think about it. I think they made a decision in February that we had to get out in March. We did not own our home and so we were homeless. We were left devastated, had no place to go.
“My grandfather was once a slave and this seemed like it was almost a new form of slavery that would once again make us homeless. They put us in a trailer camp and I guess we stayed in there for two or three years. I went from one trailer camp to another trailer camp in filthy conditions.
“I used to bring water into the trailer to keep clean. Still I don’t remember ever missing a day of school because I was just determined. What I viewed as my stumbling blocks I used as stepping stones all through my life and consequently I have gone on to be successful as an educator.”
With war raging in Europe, Franklin Roosevelt, then president, had approved the use of “eminent domain” – the right of a government to expropriate private property for public use – to seize 411 acres of land near Washington. Eighty decades later, Vollin remains sharply critical of the decision.
“Eminent domain is supposed to be used to build bridges and roads and things to enhance a community. I maintain that in this case it was used to destroy a community. Eminent domain has been used all over this country in low-income, Black and other areas to destroy communities and take property.
“What they did was extremely illegal. Any time you destroy the hopes, dreams and aspirations of people, it is an atrocity. There were churches that were destroyed, there was a fire department that was destroyed, there were businesses that were destroyed. I brand this as an atrocity, what they did to us.”
Construction of the Pentagon began on 11 September 1941 (the site was bordered by five roads so the developers opted for a five-sided building) and was officially completed just 16 months later, thanks to 1,000 architects and 14,000 tradesmen working around the clock.
The Pentagon is the world’s biggest low-rise office building with 6.5m sq ft of office space and 7,754 windows. It was meant to be turned into a hospital, office or warehouse after the war but instead became a permanent symbol of American military might.
Vollin, a civil rights activist and former school principal, reflects: “That was quite a contrast in tearing down a community to build a war department. I’ve never been in the Pentagon; I have no desire to go into the Pentagon at all. There was property everywhere else. They could have gone to Maryland or DC to build the Pentagon so I have no real regard for that area.”
The jarring story of a Black neighbourhood being displaced by the military industrial complex resonated with Durrett, 47, a multimedia artist whose goal is to unearth lesser known Black histories.
In a joint video call with Vollin from his home in Washington, she says: “This 411-acre footprint of the US government stomped out this community.
“In their haste and their willful ignorance, when they were looking for land to build the Pentagon, they looked across the river in 1941 and pointed to Queen City and said, look there, there’s nothing there, let’s build there. In fact there was a boy there who would grow into a man who was a teacher, a principal, a counsellor, a father, a husband. There were 903 people like William.”
Durrett believes a grave injustice was done in the name of eminent domain. “I don’t think there was a need to wipe out a community and especially wipe out a community without just compensation, which is also embedded in eminent domain and often not adhered to. There is never just compensation in these instances. Most of the people in Queen City were Black people in America in the 1940s and could not own their property, so they received nothing.”
Durrett’s monumental sculpture, Queen City, is intended to honour those people who had little material wealth but were rich in other ways. “This piece is calling out the divestment in the community – not having water, not having sewage, not having paved roads and electricity while the rest of Arlington was developed – but also saying, look at the beauty that was in this place in spite of all of that.
“Look at what a community who has very little in the way of material wealth can produce. Knowing that history was what led me to wanting to build something using the very thing that was destroyed in Queen City, which was community.”
Durrett worked with a community of her own: consultants and engineers in the Washington area helped produce the piece. Her collaboration with 17 Black ceramists across the country served as a reminder that, while there is only one Pentagon, there are numerous African American communities that have been destroyed.
She recalls: “One of the prompts that I had for them was to describe a ‘Queen City’ in their community and nearly every one of them was able to bring forward an example of a community similar to Queen City where eminent domain wiped them out.
“There is an example of Queen City in every state in this country. When you begin to scratch its surface, it’s not hard to arrive at the conclusion that this entire country is built on the dispossession of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Black people and the exploitation of immigrants.”
The finished artwork exudes power and permanence like one of nearby Washington’s many memorials. The Washington Post described it as “a reservoir for public memory, a symbol of a near-forgotten past”. No one can accuse Durrett of failing to think big.
She explains: “That’s how scale functions for me in my work. It’s a way to make something that is invisible difficult to ignore. This sculpture is almost mundane in this presentation. It was made using very humble material:, brick and concrete. It looks like something from a bygone era, outdated infrastructure, like a well or a smokestack or something emerging from the ground.”
The use of 5,000-odd reclaimed bricks is also a nod to the area’s former brickyards where many Black people found work. “A very clay rich soil that made it right for brick production. I was thinking, what would a person from Queen City, who maybe worked in these brickyards, build for themselves using these materials?”
Durrett hopes the work will encourage people to realise that history, including Black history, is everywhere around them and to act upon it. “This piece has a potential to inspire people once they are implicated in this history. How are they going to share the story? How are they going to energise people to change policy? Art has the potential to inspire change. An artwork itself can’t do that but people in community and in concerted effort can bring about significant change.”
And how did Vollin, who intends to seek an acknowledgement from the Pentagon over what happened, feel when he first saw the artwork? The grandfather admits: “I’m pretty tough but I was quite tearful when I last saw it. It symbolised that my grandma and those folks that ran Queen City will be remembered. Now she can look down and smile.
“It’s almost like a dream coming true. This has bothered me for so many years. Every time I pass by the Pentagon I remember my friends. I never saw many of them again: we were just scattered all over the place. I was very emotional when I first saw it.”
As Vollin speaks, that emotion is reflected in Durrett’s eyes beside him. He goes on: “I intend to go there many times and take friends over there to see this amazing structure. Even at my age, it’s reinvigorated me. I’m uplifted to see what this young lady has done. It’s been a sort of vindication, seeing this structure, that we’ll not be forgotten.”