Thanks; I actually got to see the later part of the story when I was in college. I was working as a janitor, and we had many unionized steam pressers that were Southern blacks. They were great workers, mostly in their fifties (this was in the late 1980s), but they would describe problems with their children that were just terrible; the same type of stable jobs weren’t available to that next generation, and it really impacted them - the people I worked with had come up from the Deep South in the 1960s when good jobs were plentiful (we were right outside of Newark), and were the last generation to have those opportunities.
Just a shame; today you see much of the same dilemna (and reaction) from a wider pool of Americans facing the same dim employment opportunities...
What you describe mioors what happened in a lot of industrial cities, DC included.
I was very curious after see a local short about a long-time photographer (African-American) from Silver Spring/Bethesda where they profiled a lot of his work in his community. There were many, many pictures of affluent looking African-Americans from the turn-of-the-19th century.
It begs the question, “what the heck happened?” Why the “New Deal,” public housing (government sponsored ghettos)and welfare, of course — lots of social engineering.
I saw a lot of this first hand as a very young boy in Marin City, California in the early 1950s. (You should google “Marin City”)