![]() ![]() “This is the best people-watching in the city,” says 29-year-old Megan Luczko as she sits in the grass on a blanket. “I feel the rhythms in my heart,” he writes in a notebook. It’s Kayembe’s first time in the drum circle. Several drummers help 24-year-old Mike Kayembe, who is deaf. On a nearby green space, people practice yoga and the Brazilian martial art capoeira. Joel Bergner, who has been coming three years, laughs at the noise complaints: “Why would you move somewhere that has this decades-old tradition and expect it to stop because of you?”Īs Elgizouli promised, by early evening hundreds of people surround the pulse of the drums. He says anyone who would like to participate should e-mail him at to get an application to register his or her drum. The drum circle used to be a small gathering of African-Americans, but so many new people have come to the event, Taft says, that crowd control and public safety are concerns. “There are homes on all sides and complaints on all sides.” “It can be loud,” says park-service spokesman Bill Line. “I just want people to respect the tradition,” Taft says, “and to seek to understand the history of the drum.”Īs the neighborhoods around the park have changed, the National Park Service has received complaints about the noise. ![]() In 1975, Powell founded the Malcolm X Drummers & Dancers, a performance group devoted to the cultural activities born during the park’s civil-rights heyday. In 1970, activist Stokely Carmichael unofficially renamed the park Malcolm X Park. “There would always be some kind of drumming,” he says. Drummer Doc Powell recalls marches and protests in Meridian Hill Park. After slaves were emancipated in DC in 1862, Taft says, they were given back their African clothing, religious artifacts, and drums and went to two of the higher places in the city-Meridian Hill and Fort Reno-and “drummed and danced to give thanks to God for answering their lifelong prayers to be free.” Today the gathering is a way to honor those ancestors.ĭuring the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, drums brought people together. In the antebellum South, masters banned slaves from banging drums out of a fear they would use the drums to communicate and flee to freedom. Taft has been part of the drum circle since 1972 and the event’s sponsor for 15 years. Taft says it exists to honor a storied history of drumming in the African-American community. Some worry that the gathering’s meaning is getting lost. DC resident Heran Sereke-Brhan, who has been coming here for six years, says the crowd has gotten younger and more diverse: “I don’t know why all these different people are drawn here, but the beauty is that they are.” ![]() ![]() Meridian Hill sits by three neighborhoods-U Street, Adams Morgan, and Columbia Heights-that have changed a lot, and the drum circle has changed, too. “There are not a lot of places in DC where you can do something like this,” Jimenez says, “especially without drinking or paying money.” Ileana Olmos and Katherine Jimenez, natives of Panama and Costa Rica, say the event reminds them of their home countries, where people often gather outdoors around music. ![]()
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