Wealth & Money Quote by James Green Somerville

There is a polite kind of power in the way Somerville frames Washington: not as the marble-and-memoirs capital of agencies and ambition, but as an "international city" validated by a local congregation. He’s quietly relocating authority from government to community, from policy to pews. The sentence reads like an inventory, but it’s really an argument: the city’s global stature is most truthfully measured in who gathers together when nobody is being polled or processed.

The list structure matters. "Rich and poor, black and white" lands with the cadence of civic catechism, a deliberately plain pairing that invokes America’s oldest fault lines without dramatizing them. That understatement is the subtext: difference exists, inequality exists, but the speaker is insisting on a shared social fact that can’t be reduced to demographics. The congregation becomes a microcosm, a lived rebuttal to the idea that Washington is only elite, only partisan, only transactional.

Contextually, this kind of line often surfaces in religious or civic storytelling about the capital, especially when trying to soften Washington’s reputation as a company town for power. It also reflects a certain Washington optimism: diversity as proximity, pluralism as proof. The unspoken tension is whether being in the same room is the same as being equal within it. Somerville doesn’t resolve that; he performs a hopeful snapshot instead, using inclusive language as both welcome sign and moral claim.