Over the next decade, my research on suburban gentrification and erasure exposed me to more stories about the Black women who cleaned homes and who helped to raise generations of middle- and upper-class white children. She also recalled the tense last meeting her family had with Walker in a Washington hotel shortly after the Scandiffios had moved to Florida. Now 78, Scandiffio recalled Walker’s trips with the family to a vacation home and a few details about Walker’s personal life. The new information wasn’t much, but it was enough to tease additional details from Ann Scandiffio. Undated color slide taken by Pauline Scandiffio, courtesy of Ann Scandiffio. With the new census information, I learned her last name and a few more biographical details-that she was 40 years old in 1940 and a divorced Tennessee native. Until 2022, when the National Archives and Records Administration released the 1950 census, Lucille Walker’s story was a dead end. When I interviewed Ann Scandiffio in 2009, she recalled very little about Walker: her first name, the name that she and her brother called Walker (“Sha”), and some of the things that Walker did for her. Their first child, Frank, was born in 1943, and Ann was born in 1944. Mario Scandiffio was a pediatrician and Pauline Scandiffio had been a nightclub singer and federal employee. Laid out three years earlier, Northwood Park’s 198 original homesites had racially restrictive deed covenants. In 1939 Scandiffio’s parents bought a home in the Northwood Park subdivision. Lucille Walker’s story as a Black domestic worker survives in bits and pieces in the memory of the physician’s daughter, Ann Scandiffio. She worked for a white physician’s family. In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb.
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