Existing comment:
Midcity at the Crossroads
Shaw Heritage Trail #8
Reading and Riting and Rithmetic
Seventh and R Streets, NW
Wrapping the corner of Seventh and Rhode Island is Asbury Dwellings for senior citizens. In 1901 the building opened as the city's white-only McKinley Technical School, memorializing slain President William McKinley (1843-1901). In 1928 the "colored" school system took over the building for a new Shaw Junior High, honoring Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw was the white commander of the Civil War Union Army's 54th Massachusetts regiment of black soldiers.
Shaw's acclaimed faculty included abstract artist Alma W. Thomas (1891-1978), who taught there from 1924 until 1960. Today her paintings hang in renowned art museums worldwide.
As time passed, the school became overcrowded and rundown, and parents protested for better accommodations. Finally in 1977 a new Shaw Junior High opened on Rhode Island Avenue. Asbury United Methodist Church opened the rehabilitated Asbury Dwellings for senior housing in 1982.
During the segregation era (1880-1954), the Shaw neighborhood was a center of black education.M Street High School, the nation's first high school (1870) for black students, operated nearby. Three important high schools succeeded M Street -- Cardozo (business), Dunbar (academic), and Armstrong (technical). Thousands of southern families migrated here specifically for the schools, where teachers with advanced degrees found work denied them by discriminatory colleges and universities.
The library building at Rhode Island Avenue and Seventh St. honors plumbing businessman Watha T. Daniel (1911-1973). Daniel was a leader of the Model Inner City Community Organization, an early 1960s coalition founded by Revs.Walter Fauntroy and Ernest Gibson to ensure that the poor would have a say in the urban renewal of Shaw. |