The Helios Biblios Hour : The Assassination of ???

Yolanda Ward existed, she was a housing activist, and she was killed in D.C. in 1980.Yolanda Ward, 22, a cochairwoman of the District's City Wide Housing Coalition, was shot and killed during a street robbery in far Southeast Washington early yesterday morning, D.C. police reported.. Moreover, the police have attempted to stop the independent investigation of her murder, even though "grapevine" inquiries report that she was murdered by "out of town" hired killers.Why be concerned with this one murder? Who was Yulanda Ward? She was a 22 year old black community activist involved with the Washington, D.C. Rape Crisis Center, the Black United Front and other community groups, most notably the Citywide Housing Coalition. It is this last activity that could have led to her death, for she was a key activist in uncovering a U.S. government plan labelled "spatial deconcentration. We clearly understood the process of gentrifica­tion (replacing poor inner city residents with middle and upper class "gentry"), and perceived the underlying economic basis on which the process rested with land speculators vigorously exploiting inner city neighborhoods. The displacement of Blacks and other minorities from the inner city was thought to be a product of the capitalist housing market, which provides housing only for those who can afford it. It was not until 1979 that we dis­covered and began to research a Federal gov­ernment program called "spatial deconcentra­tion", the hidden agenda behind the pheno­menon of displacement. We discovered that displacement had an economic base to be sure, but more importantly, it was a means of social control--a means to break up large concentra­tions of Blacks and other innercity minor­ities from their communities.