Lillian Cooper Wiggins died October 26 at age 92. She was my friend and the inspiration for much of the work that I have done since 2011 when I began writing about gentrification and racism in Decatur, Ga. I’m a historian and I first met Lillian in the pages of a history book of sorts, Dream City, the landmark 1994 work by Washington, D.C., journalists Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood. It’s a deep dive into the politics and culture of late-twentieth-century Washington wrapped around the story of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry.

Dream City is required reading for anyone working and living in Washington. I first picked it up in 2007 while working as a consultant to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). I had been hired to do documentary research and dozens of oral history interviews to support author Tony Proscio in writing his book documenting the history of the DC LISC office.

Jaffe and Sherwood introduced readers in Washington and beyond to Lillian’s best known contribution to Washington history. In the 1970s, she began writing about what has become widely known as “The Plan.” Jaffe later wrote, “We can thank Lillian Wiggins for first articulating this particular conspiracy theory [as a] columnist for the Washington Afro-American.” Jaffe got some things wrong in that 2010 Washington Examiner article, but the gist of his observation is correct: Lillian did expose many generations of journalists, historians, and sociologists to “The Plan.”

In a nutshell, The Plan is a narrative (sometimes called a conspiracy theory, sometimes called a contemporary or urban legend) that says a cabal of white power brokers is conspiring behind the scenes to displace Washington Blacks from political and economic power and ultimately the city itself.

About five years after I first read Dream City, I was living and working in Decatur where longtime Black residents were sharing intimate accounts of life in a city dominated by deeply embedded structural racism. Like Washington at the turn of the twenty-first century, Decatur was hemorrhaging Black residents and gentrification was a leading factor. A theme began emerging among the folks telling me their life stories in kitchens, living rooms, and churches across the city: there was a plan by whites to drive the Black folks out and turn the city white.

The Plan narrative, it turns out, is alive and well in Decatur.

In 2014, we moved back to the Washington area from Georgia and I began doing comparative research on an inner-ring suburb with a history similar to Decatur. In 2015, I tried to learn more about The Plan and its history in Washington. I went looking for the woman most frequently associated with the story, Lillian Wiggins, and I found some recently published newspaper articles where she was quoted. A few property records and telephone directory searches led me to cold call Lillian one day in July 2015. We spoke and she invited me to come over to her home in Southeast Washington.

Lillian and I spoke for a few hours in the first interview I did with her July 26, 2015. We discussed her journey to Washington from Cincinnati by way of upstate New York and Atlantic City. She told me about her personal plan to make a stable life in Washington. Lillian detailed her professional and personal accomplishments, working her way up from restaurant hat check girl and Navy Department file clerk to Washington Afro American newspaper columnist and D.C. government official. And, she gave me a post-graduate seminar on The Plan and why she wrote about it.

That first interview was the start of a friendship that included sharing holiday dinners and personal milestones. My wife and I felt like we had become part of Lillian’s family. We loved and respected Lillian and we were honored to be invited into her life.

Lillian’s pathbreaking writing on The Plan wasn’t the only professional inspiration that I got from her. In that first interview in 2015, she told me about how important Washington’s Black numbers bankers (backers) were:

And at that particular time, it was number backers filled. You know, it was little small things of whiskey and of course everybody – we didn’t have drugs at that time. It was numbers, the most popular. Actually, when I started working with the paper what I found  out, that the upstanding citizens insofar as whites were concerned in the District of Columbia were the number backers because it was the number backer kids that were able to go to college. They went to the fine schools and they had the Jack and Jill and they had the Tots and Teens that their kids could go to on weekends. 

Following that interview, I began incorporating questions about numbers gambling into my work. The results were breathtaking. I was able to discuss the significance of numbers gambling in Montgomery County, Maryland’s historically Black communities in my work on the White’s Tabernacle cemetery in Bethesda and the Talbot Avenue Bridge in Lyttonsville.

After moving to Pittsburgh, where I had lived in the 1990s, I revisited some of the Steel City’s history, especially books and articles about the Hill District. In September 2019, I read University of Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck’s book on the history Black sports, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh. Ruck’s research included interviewing many Black and Jewish racketeers whose gambling networks helped to capitalize early Black sports teams like the Negro Leagues’ Pittsburgh Crawfords. One line in Ruck’s book sent me down a research rabbit hole that really began at Lillian’s kitchen table in the basement of her Washington home.

Our move to Pittsburgh ended my regular visits with Lillian. The pandemic hitting nine months later only made things worse. We did get to visit with Lillian in 2021 on her 91st birthday and that was the last time my wife and I saw her. I hope to repay my many debts to Lillian by continuing to write about The Plan and the social history of numbers gambling. Rest in Power, Lillian. What emerged from “The Desk of Lil” has changed history and lives, including mine.

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