“Then, on the overnight layover, I naturally went sightseeing in downtown Washington. I was astounded to find in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than any I’d ever seen in the poorest sections of Roxbury; in dirt-floor shacks along unspeakably filthy lanes with names like Pig Alley and Goat Alley. I had seen a lot, but never such a dense concentration of stumblebums, pushers, hookers, public crap shooters, even little kids running around at midnight begging for pennies, half naked and barefooted. Some of the railroad cooks and waiters had told me to be very careful, because muggings, knifings, and robberies went on every night among these Negroes….just a few blocks from the White House.
But I saw other Negroes better off; they lived in blocks of rundown red brick houses. The old “Colonial” railroaders had told me about Washington having a lot of “middle-class” Negroes with Howard University degrees, who were working as laborers, janitors, porters, guards, taxi-drivers, and the like. For the Negro in Washington, mail-carrying was a prestige job.”
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Chapter 5 - Harlemite, page 75.