I’ve pulled two Washington Post articles from the pile.
The first is from May 10, 1955 “5000 Homes To Be Razed In RLA Plan” by Robert C. Albrook. The RLA is the Redevelopment Land Agency, a government agency that dealt with blight. And the blight in this case were some 5000 houses in the general Shaw area. I say general because the agency was working on the 2nd Precinct (think 14th St NW to Union Station, Florida to Mass Ave) and hadn’t paired it down to the Shaw School borders. They were considering what needed repair and what needed to be bulldozed. The neighborhood had yet to organize against those plans and the impact of the SW Urban Renewal hadn’t really sunk in yet.
Fast forward a couple of decades to “RLA Sets Razing in Riot Areas” February 20, 1971 by William L. Claiborne. 1971, a little more than 2 years after the 1968 riots that ruined many parts of Shaw. Instead of several thousand structures to be razed, the effort was to tear down several hundred damaged properties. Fun quote from this article is:
Marion Barry, executive-director of Pride, Inc., who also attended the session, said, “You never get anything done unless the citizens go out and raise hell…. This (demolition schedule) came because of our protest.”