Jennifer Gelencia Muhammad has offered food, clothes, and other resources to people outside of the city’s largest shelter every Saturday for the last five years. On July 21, she offered a parade.
Muhammad is the founder of The New Royal Family of Advocates for Planetary Change, a nonprofit organization that conducts outreach and advocacy work for people experiencing homelessness. After years of offering material support, she recognized the people she serves are also looking for a sense of dignity. In the face of a D.C. government that opts to clear encampments and cut funding for homelessness prevention, she held the first annual Crown the Homeless parade outside of the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) shelter to honor people experiencing homelessness in the community and urge their Northwest D.C. neighbors to participate in the organization’s outreach efforts.
“No matter what your station in life, your race, your nationality, I just see royalty,” Muhammad said in an interview before the parade. “If we’re all in that mindset, I think we’ll be able to eradicate homelessness because we won’t have our fellow kings and queens sleeping in these conditions, we’ll put them in palaces.”
About 100 people marched the parade route, which started at CCNV on Second Street and turned left to go four blocks down Indiana Avenue and D Street, then right to go down 6th Street, and finally down E Street to complete the loop. Participants held neon green signs with messages like “Show the homeless some love,” “Little things matter,” “D.C. let’s take care of our own,” and “Homeless not helpless.”
The parade was led by a group of nine dancers and drummers as well as four women — including Muhammad — who wore pageant dresses and held a banner that read “New Royal Family of Advocacy for Planetary Change.” A man holding a megaphone led the group with a “Homeless lives matter” chant while Metropolitan Police Department cars and officers on bikes prevented vehicles from disrupting the parade.
“Let the people know, let the men and women of God know, let the government know that homeless lives matter,” the man with the megaphone chanted as the group turned down E Street.
One of the women wearing a pageant dress was Elvera Patrick, the parade director and a Pure International Pageants queen. She thought one of the best ways to lift up people experiencing homelessness is to remind them they are royalty.
“I will be honored with crowning the homeless kings and queens,” Patrick said. She helped assemble and distribute gold paper crowns to participants both before and after they marched.
Muhammad began planning the event with other members of The New Royal Family about eight months ago. She said advocates, volunteers, and supporters wanted to do more to promote the mental well-being of the people they serve and encourage residents in the area to participate in their outreach efforts every Saturday.
“We need all members of the community to help us get our kings and queens off of the street so that they can live humanely,” Muhammad said.
Muhammad, also a pageant queen who has worked in education and mental health and is passionate about protecting women and children from abusive household situations, said she wanted the people she serves to feel as empowered as she does when she puts on a crown. She chose to make the celebration a parade in the hopes people would see them passing by and either join in, recognize the dignity of the people experiencing homelessness, or google the organization. She established the organization in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to provide community support to people experiencing homelessness by distributing tents, toiletries, feminine hygiene products, medical supplies, food, and water in addition to offering other advocacy and outreach efforts.
“We’re doing a parade to raise awareness, to continue to put the plague of the suffering of the people back in the society’s face in a larger way,” Muhammad said.
Crystal Hughes, a local resident, said she attended the parade to help alert other community members of the support The New Family can provide them when they don’t receive assistance from the government. She said Muhammad reached out to her when she was struggling to afford care for her young daughter and helped connect her with foundations and support her mental well-being.
“I was thinking about leaving the whole DMV altogether until she stopped me and said we want to support you, we want to support your child,” Hughes said.
Frederick Ware-Newsome, whom Muhammad described as her mentor, said the parade helped show young people in the community how celebrating themselves and others can empower them to overcome adversity. He said he was excited when Muhammad came to him with the idea because when people see a parade they are inclined to look into the organization running the event and consider how they can support their local community.
“It’s a privilege and honor to see people rise, rise, rise,” WareNewsome said in an interview after the parade. “Sometimes it only takes one and if that one takes a hold it turns into everyone gravitating towards that one.”
Ware-Newsome is confident the parade will continue and garner more participants each year because everyone who attended brought a lot of energy and many documented the event on social media.
“It’s history in the making, getting all of these people together and peacefully,” Ware-Newsome said.
