I was looking through some old email to “attempt” to clean up my mailbox and found an email from Ray Milefsky or “Ray of Sunshine” as I would think of him.
Ray Milefsky was a Shaw neighborhood fixture. He had bought his Shaw home in the 1980s (according to his obit), but I had the sense he’d been in Shaw for much longer. He’d freely share his opinion and knowledge on the Shaw listserv before Yahoo and more sensitive voices quieted him. He passed away in 2016 and Durham University in the UK has an award in his honor.
Enjoyed your peek at the RLA, a much failed organization, I agree.
Thought you might appreciate the following sign for the Federal
Government’s Model Cities Program for DC, which I think was tied up with RLA in a scheme to rebuild DC to look like East Berlin through
“slum removal” in the 1960s. The sign is in an alley between P and
Q, and 13th and 14th, NW of Logan Circle. Otherwise, I don’t know
anything more about the tie-in between RLA and Model Cities. Would appreciate anything you might glean in your research!
Model Cities was different from the Model Inner City Community
Organization headed by Walter Fauntroy, which attempted to thwart or at least redirect the mass redevelopment of the city, that, he correctly argued, would displace many poor people, especially Blacks from the city as happened in the Greater Southwest Redevelopment
Project.
Cheers,
Ray Milefsky
