Digging deeper into the fabric of the community surrounding 7th and Florida Avenues, NW, the situation becomes much sadder. There’s a ten block radius near this Metro PCS store that historically claims a legacy that includes Duke Ellington’s childhood home, Marvin Gaye’s high school, a home Gil-Scott Heron once resided, and a historically Black college, Howard University, where Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Diddy, most of Bad Boy’s superstar producers, and a seemingly limitless more, learned how to create musical magic. Plus, now-shuttered venues like Bohemian Caverns were where African-American artists for three generations, from Cab Calloway to The Last Poets, created the archetypal modes of Black American cultural expression.

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By the 2020 US Census, it’s highly likely that for the first time in six decades, Black people will not be in the majority of D.C.’s population. Thus, it is easy to argue that one store playing one style of music is the final vestige of the Nation’s Capital’s modern heartbeat. The second you pull the plug on Metro PCS, you’re also, in a sense, disconnecting the city’s Black heritage from its life support.

Affluent white millennials moving to D.C. in droves has raised the racial economic inequality in the city to a level where six-figure white median household incomes are three times greater than that of Black families in the city. Such a radical shift alters the fabric, and in many ways, violates the cultural construction of the city. Therefore, someone who is likely not from D.C. called another person likely not from D.C. in regards to what, to them, is a noise violation. There’s a lack of empathy in the face of zoning regulations and concerned citizen appeasement in regards to the cultural curation aspect of the issue that is damning. The obliviousness that likely most Shaw residents have to D.C.’s organic sound is a worse slight.