Housing in D.C for African Americans
Slavery was first abolished in D.C, where as the rest of the slaves were not emancipated for months later. Not only is this a very interesting idea in itself, but also what it led to. Because slaves were free here first, it became a congregating place for African Americans throughout the country, and added to the black population of D.C. After the massive flux of population, D.C. began segregating itself, and even today we can see that African Americans are largely restricted in where they can live. If it is either by how expensive housing is, or just by the information they receive, housing is largely restricted to the lower income housing in East side of D.C, away from all the monuments and affluent parts like the Northwest region. To start my research I would first begin looking into the population increases after slaves were first freed, and then see if there were any particular laws or ordinances created to restrict where African Americans can live. Also, I would want to look at maps at how housing has developed.
Murder Capitol
For many years Washington D.C was the murder capitol of America. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, the crack epidemic hurt the nation’s capital and hit it hard. Just like many other cities with high African American populations and a low level of income, it plagued the city. Due to the amount of drugs and cash floating around, it became an open invite for gangs to begin to establish themselves as a corner stone of the social like and street life of those with lower incomes. Due to this, D.C underwent gentrification to remove the bad parts and replace them with more affluent areas. While it helped the city over all and led to the first population increase in decades, it didn’t solve the problem of those who had the problem. It really just pushed them aside. I first used wiki to get a bit of back story, and then I would begin looking into specifically the rates of murder and also how is has decreased since the 90’s.
Riots
Riots have formed a central identity of the African American community of D.C. Started after the death of Martin Luther King Jr, they voiced their dissent with how the district was being run and how they had no voice. The riots highlighted a long seeded problem building up, not just a single instance. Due to the riots many of the white and more wealthy people living in the district to leave and started a downward spiral of the district. not only were there riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, but also in the early 90’s after the story of Rodney King made national headlines. It once again became the launching point for a bigger problem and not just one as simply as Rodney King being beat. I would start by looking at the problems leading up to and the 60’s riot and also the 90’s riots and begin mapping out a series of escalating and deescalating tension in the district with it coming to a head in each of the riots. 
I ended up not using any of the sites from today’s lesson because I couldn’t find anything relevant to my topic. I did find that social radar was incredibly useful as it was able to show the change in white and black population over time in DC. My paper and blog are about how the 1968 riots caused a lot of white residents to flee the district. Now that the district is undergoing gentrification the white population has risen over time. I would have also liked to show the dramatic change in income, but I wasn’t able to put that on there because it wouldn’t accept the data set.
