If you were a D.C. cop hunting drug dealers a decade ago, Trinidad was a target rich environment. Rayful Edmond III, our one and only crack king, called it home.
The neighborhood on the city’s east side is sandwiched between Florida Avenue and H Street, which burned in the 1968 riots. Trinidad suffered. Rayful Edmond was the local hero in the 1980s. He was the law, the employer, the judge and the jury. On Thanksgiving he delivered free turkeys from his Porsche.
For kicks on Wednesday, I drove the two narrow, one-way streets of Orleans and Morton Place, where Rayful’s employees sold crack. A few of the tiny row houses were fixed up. “For Sale” signs stood in some yards. Gentrification had come to this ‘hood. But I had to brush by a knot of young men, blocking the street and waiting for me to roll down my window and ask for a bag. Edmond is in the slammer for life, but his trade lives.
What brought me to Trinidad that sunny autumn morning was not to check out the crack scene, but to follow Adrian Fenty as he toured J.O. Wilson Elementary School up the street. Tommy Wells, most likely to be elected to City Council next week, invited the man most likely to be mayor to tour a few Capital Hill schools.
Most of the reporters and TV cameras had split by the time we hit the rougher side of Capital Hill. They missed the school that might have changed Rayful Edmond’s life.
Question: Which elementary school in the Washington region consistently takes top prizes in the annual National French Contest? Lafayette in Chevy Chase? Rosemary Hill in Silver Spring? McKinley in Arlington?
None of the above.
Answer: J.O. Wilson. The school’s prowess, going back a decade, is due in large part to longtime French teacher Florentino Martinez. But the success at this majority African-American school comes by way of a collaboration between the school, the community, the churches — and mentoring from Georgetown volunteers.
The lesson for Adrian Fenty, as he hurtles toward taking over the schools, is: It takes the village to make its village school work. But the mayor can help.
“We can’t help what’s happening outside,” principal Cheryl Warley told Fenty. “But we can make it right inside. The first thing we demand isrespect.”
And that every student wear a uniform.
“You have to change the culture, first,” she said. And keep the halls spotless and the classrooms orderly and the parents involved.
Reverend Louis B. Jones, pastor of nearby Pilgrim Baptist Church, came here 16 years ago into Rayful’s world of drugs and abandoned cars and truancy. “You name it,” he told me.
Pilgrim Baptist adopted J.O. Wilson. Jones sent his parishioners to read to students, donated money to fix the library, paid for vans and special events.
Says Reverend Jones: “It can be done.”
If it had been done for Rayful Edmond, perhaps he would have been an entrepreneur in a different line of work.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
