In the 1970s and ’80s, Adams Morgan was the closest thing in Washington to Barack Obama’s multicultural, international milieu.
While Barack Obama was a grade school globe-trotter, growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii, Adrian Fenty’s neighborhood was a microcosm of the world.
Ja Shia, 26, born and raised in Adams Morgan, remembers Fenty’s father, Phil, buying ice cream for the neighborhood kids.
There was a sense of belonging, he said, an “it-takes-a-village” atmosphere that inspired a connection among residents to a host of diverse groups.
The mayor’s parents, Phil and Jan, arrived from Buffalo, N.Y. He was a photographer and draftsman, she was a public school teacher, but the two opened Fleet Feet, a store for serious runners, in 1984. The family and the store are part of the community’s core.
The area was once a typical Washington district of the early 1960s, divided along black-white lines. But school desegregation, the blossoming of the era’s counterculture, and an influx of Hispanic immigrants made it the city’s most diverse area.
Adams Morgan residents still pride themselves on being part of an inclusive neighborhood where people of different races and ethnicities mingle freely.
It was a place where growing up with biracial parents, as Fenty did, was not an obstacle.
“It gives a bit of arrogance,” said Shia, who is also of mixed race. “You do think you can walk into any situation. It does help out in life and it also gets you into some trouble.”
While Fenty’s parents and their store have remained in Adams Morgan, the mayor and his wife, Michelle, a corporate lawyer born to Jamaican parents in London, live in the more staid, more affluent Hillcrest neighborhood on the other side of Piney Creek Park.
