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22 the grandson of Frederick Douglass and a geology teacher at M Street High School, lived in the 1700 block of 15th Street; the rowhouse is still standing today between two vacant lots. During the years after World War II, Shaw became a deteriorating central city neighborhood. As black professionals moved north in the city, the rowhouses and Victorian mansions of an earlier era became boarding houses and apartments with many of the problems of absentee landlords.6 Prior to its designation as a major urban renewal area in 1968, Shaw, with a resident population over 40,000, had high unemployment and welfare assistance figures--30 percent of the households were listed with incomes of less than $3,000.7 Yet throughout all of the changes in her neighborhood, Alma Thomas never left 15th Street. "Many of my people moved out to the suburbs...I prepared myself to live in the slums.8 Her constancy was testimony to the importance of Shaw in her early life and to the resoluteness of character she eventually developed. As well, her commitment to the house of her youth and early career demonstrated the importance of an ongoing artistic tradition in her own life. When friends would chide her for remaining in the Shaw ghetto, she said "This house has an art tradition, and I do not plan to leave it."9 In her later years, as interviewers and reporters trooped to her home after she had gained renown, many took note of the cluttered, but cultural, atmosphere of the house: