One of my favorite National Archives resources for Shaw historical information was RG 328, Records of the National Capital Planning Commission. I found photos, maps, and loads of information about the transformation of the neighborhood, before and after the 68 riots, in this record group. But in looking back at some of my old posts, I’d discover that a former NCPC executive director, Reginald W. Griffith, had written about Shaw as an urban renewal area.
Back when Griffith was a student at M.I.T. he wrote for his 1969 Masters thesis, “The influence of meaningful citizen participation on the urban renewal process and the renewal of the inner-city’s black community: a case study – Washington, D.C.’s Shaw School urban renewal area – MICCO, a unique experiment“. I wrote about it in my post, Slummy history.
There was an oral history of Black alumni of M.I.T. and Griffith described how he came to DC. He was working for the Boston Redevelopment when the opportunity to work with MICCO—the Model Inner City Community Organization in Washington, DC came up. He moved his family from Boston to DC to be a community activist. From his point of view he was pro urban renewal, an hoped to renew Shaw. In his thesis, he acknowledged the community’s outlook that ‘urban renewal is negro removal’.
He thought the Shaw neighborhood was the hardest hit by the 1968 civil disturbance/ riot. But there was a lot of opportunity afterwards. “The local planning agencies basically abdicated their functions. They didn’t know what to do. So we at MICCO, who were initially finding out from the community what they wanted and finding out what the planning agencies were doing and telling the planning agencies what the community would like, found ourselves in a unique position. The local planning agencies basically backed off, threw up their hands, and said, “What do we do?” The community was saying, “We’ve got to do something.” MICCO filled the vacuum.
As a result, we accomplished a lot. We were able to get black architects their first new schools, but it wasn’t easy. In fact, the politics of the situation was such that when we were about to do that, these same architects were offered bigger school additions as a diversionary ploy, because the rules of the game were that if you were doing one school, you couldn’t do another. MICCO knew there would be a new Shaw Junior High School, we knew there would be a new Dunbar High School. These were multi-million dollar jobs that were in the heart of the black community and could be given to qualified black architects, and there were lots of qualified black architectural and engineering firms around. ”
According to the National Capital Planning Commission’s May 4, 2017 meeting transcript, Griffith served as NCPC’s Executive Director from 1979 to 1999. The mentioned him because he had died. I can’t seem to find an obit, so I will go with what the NCPC said.