Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White is facing backlash from community leaders after he attended, and voiced support online for, protests against the developers of the MLK Gateway project—a major mixed-use development project in historic Anacostia—that saw some attendees harass Latino construction workers. 

The protests, which began last Thursday, were led by CARE DC, a group in Ward 8 advised by White’s close associate and Peaceaholics co-founder Jauhar Abraham, who has a complicated history. While the group’s stated aim was to protest against the alleged lack of D.C. residents hired to work in construction jobs on the project, viral videos of last week’s protest, which White attended and posted about on his lively Instagram page, show that it quickly turned ugly.

One video of Thursday’s demonstration, posted by an entertainment blog, shows a group of protestors disrupting the work site and shouting “you don’t live in Ward 8” at workers as they leave the site. One man sings on a megaphone, “and don’t you come back no more.” The video’s caption read: “Protesters tell Mexican workers to stop stealing their jobs.” 

Another video of the protest shows Abraham calling out the lack of employment opportunities for Ward 8 residents while describing the site’s construction workers as people “who don’t speak English,” “don’t have green cards” and “shouldn’t be here working.”

White—who is currently running for reelection—encouraged residents to attend the protest in a since-deleted flyer posted to his Instagram account, before videos of the demonstrations became public.

A number of Latino advocacy groups, including the DC Latino Caucus and DC Hispanic Contractors Association, swiftly condemned White’s involvement. “Why did you allow humiliation of Latino workers at this rally you promoted?” the DC Latino Caucus wrote in a Twitter post on Saturday. “We can fight for equity and hold developers accountable without dividing Black and Brown residents. We look forward to your apology.” 

Reached by phone on Monday, White told DCist that he didn’t organize the protest but was there to support the group’s mission of holding developers accountable to complying with D.C.’s local hiring mandate. 

“I do want to say that if anybody was offended about the comments made about the Hispanic community, I apologize on behalf of that, because it’s not our intentions,” White told DCist. “We just want to make sure that if [developers invest in] in Ward 8, that businesses grow and people in the community benefit from it.” MLK Gateway has received more than $8 million in D.C. government funding.

D.C. Department of Employment Services’ “First Source” law requires that 51% of skilled workers hired on local development projects receiving more than $5 million in public funds are D.C. residents. MLK Gateway’s developers, including tech firm Enlightened Inc., also committed to 83% of their new hires being from the District for the first phase of construction, including 67% from Wards 7 and 8, per the project’s website. (In 2018, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 8A, which represents Anacostia, negotiated a separate community benefits agreement with the developer that requires Menkiti to work to reduce displacement of residents and provide an IT training program for Ward 7 and 8 residents, among other benefits.) 

White added that he’s been communicating with the lead developer, the Menkiti Group, for more than three years about the specifications of the project, which would bring office space and nearly 15,000 square feet of retail to the intersection of Good Hope Road SE and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE. One of White’s longtime concerns, he says, is that the majority of the project’s contractors don’t actually live in Ward 8, which local hiring laws require for projects like these. After not getting the level of specificity he requested from Menkiti about employment information, White says he went to the site himself and was disappointed in the number of workers from D.C. he found. 

Bo Menkiti, CEO of the Menkiti group, first publicly commented on the protest in a Facebook video on Saturday that listed the job opportunities for Ward 8 residents created by the project. In an emailed statement to DCist on Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for the Menkiti Group denied the allegation that the company has not met First Source hiring requirements.

“Over 80% of all new hires to date on the first phase of the project are DC residents, of which the overwhelming majority reside in Ward 8. We also have two Ward 8 sub-contractors currently employed on construction of Phase I,” the spokesperson said. “We are dedicated to supporting the community and providing local jobs, so much so that we are exceeding all hiring requirements including new hires in the local area.”

Even after First Source was significantly reformed in 2011 to encourage better compliance, DOES has faced criticism for its failure to hold developers accountable to meeting this requirement

While White apologized on radio station WPGC Monday morning for the tenor of the protests, he initially doubled down on his decision to attend. Shortly after criticism began to erupt on Friday, White posted an image on Instagram that seemed to imply Latinos weren’t the only workers harassed off of the site on Friday. 

“There were Hispanics, blacks, and whites on that site that went home,” White wrote, before adding, “I do not encourage any racist behavior. In fact, the members of the Hispanic community should be joining us ensuring everyone is receiving equitable wages. This is not about race but equity.”

After videos of the protests began to surface, commenters said the demonstrators’ chants were offensive to the Latino community and drew unnecessary divisions between D.C.’s Black and Brown residents. On Friday, the DC Hispanic Contractors Association voiced its frustration in a letter to White, asking him to “bring folks together.”

“In times such as these, with the divisive rhetoric on a national level, it’s saddening to find threats and insults directed at Latinos, many of whom live in the District as well,” the letter reads. “Pitting Black and Brown communities against each other is not what our great District of Columbia is about.”

White addressed those concerns in a call with WPGC Radio’s Joe Clair Morning Show on Monday. “I want to start by apologizing to the Hispanic community,” he said, adding that the protest got a bit “out of hand.” He also spoke about the protest in a Facebook Live video on Monday. Addressing a small crowd, he said, “We will not sit on the sidelines any longer and allow developers to get rich while the poor get poorer.”

White has a history of raising concerns about developers not hiring the required number of D.C. residents to work on construction sites. He staged a protest in spring of 2018 at the Maple View Flats construction site at 2300 MLK Jr. Avenue SE, where he said developers Bozzuto and Chapman mishandled their contract by failing to hire the required number of D.C. residents.

White said that he had a meeting scheduled with Menkiti on Monday to discuss the contract details and figure out a plan to hire more workers from D.C. 

This story has been updated to include a statement from the Menkiti group and to clarify the language used to describe Jauhar Abraham.

Aja Beckham contributed reporting.