DCentric

Good morning, DCentric readers! Here’s what we’re reading, right now:

Life Is (Relatively) Sweet In Washington, DC For Members Of All Racial And Ethnic Groups “I think that much as claims about the economic vibrancy of the DC area are rightly tempered by the observations that conditions are much worse for the city’s working class residents than for affluent professionals, claims about the city being “a city divided” need to be tempered by the reality that these divisions exist all over the place.” (Think Progress)

Saul Solorzano touched thousands of lives in D.C.’s Central American community “Among the struggling immigrants who benefited from Carecen’s help over the years, the tearful testimonies at several crowded memorial services last month and the painstakingly penned messages in a condolence book at the Carecen office spoke eloquently of his impact. ‘You will live in the heart of every immigrant,’ one woman wrote in broken Spanish.” (The Washington Post)

Obama: ‘Obviously’ black Americans have ‘suffered more’ “And what I think about every single day is how we can make sure more folks are going to work. And obviously the African-American community has suffered even more. There’s that old saying when American gets a cold, African-Americans get pneumonia. And the jobless rate across the board, and particularly in communities like inner-city Chicago, this has been a devastating blow.” (thegrio.com)

Reinventing the Southwest Waterfront “It may not look it, but Southwest is one of DC’s oldest neighborhoods. Plantation homes once lined the banks of the Potomac…Local historian Paul Williams says Southwest was a working-class community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘It was densely populated, thriving, and predominantly African-American,’ Williams says.” (Washingtonian.com)

Comemmorating the Fifty-Year Anniversary of the NFL’s Last All-White Team “The mainstream media didn’t cover the racially charged protests against the Washington Redskins in 1961, sparked a half-century ago by outrage over owner George Preston Marshall’s refusal to integrate his all-white team. The black press, however, was all over the story, particularly the Afro-American Newspapers, whose legendary sportswriter Sam Lacy wrote countless columns on Marshall’s racist ways.” (Washington City Paper)

New Columbia Heights: ‘Greening Initiative’ abandoned houses coming along nicely “You may have seen signs on abandoned houses around the neighborhood for the Greening Initiative: it’s a program run by the DC Housing Authority to fix up DCHA-owned abandoned houses and rent them out as scattered-site public housing, with some being sold at market rate to fund the rest…A number of those houses are in our neighborhood, and now, a few months in, there’s some progress.” (New Columbia Heights)