This discussion is held in support of the Charnice Milton Community Bookstore, a nonprofit initiative led by We Act Radio to bring a bookstore to Anacostia. 20% of P&P’s proceeds (excluding Book Fair sales) on Saturday, September 30, will be donated to this project.
Associate professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University, Hyra has spent the last six years studying the Shaw/U Street neighborhood, where he lives. As he did for Bronzeville and Harlem in his first book, The New Urban Renewal, Hyra gives a vibrant ethnography of a changing urban community. Once a center for D.C.’s African American elite, Shaw fell into decline in the late 1960s. Recent years have seen its fortunes improve, but gentrification has meant not just safer and cleaner streets, but the alienation of longtime residents. Calling these new urban districts “cappuccino cities,” both for their demographics and their higher cost of living, Hyra weighs their pros and cons and shows that the causes of gentrification, like its effects, are more complicated than most people assume.
Hyra will be in conversation with Kymone Freeman, an activist and co-owner of Anacostia-based We Act Radio AM.
