SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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Washington, 1920
Washington, D.C., from its founding at the turn of the nineteenth century, has been about the pathologies of American race relations. Originally carved out of two plantation states — Maryland and Virginia — which together accounted for more than half the slave population of the United States at the time, slavery and the slave trade became a constant feature of local life from the very beginning. Given its location midway along the Atlantic coast, the city developed into a major depot and auction site for slave traders. Intense political disputes and social unrest eventually led to the outlawing of the slave trade within the Federal capital as part of the Compromise of 1850. Manumission was relatively easy within the District, with residence by free blacks thereafter being permitted. As a consequence, Washington was just one of three cities at the outbreak of the Civil War, together with St. Louis and Baltimore, in which a majority of the black population was not slave. Life for free blacks, however, was never easy. Law and custom confined employment for African Americans primarily to trade and services as the apprenticeships so necessary for entry into many sectors of the labor market remained tightly controlled to keep blacks out. An increasingly robust and autonomous African American community set down roots.
Following the Civil War, the neighborhood around the intersection of 7th and Florida became a hinge among different segments of one of the largest and most economically diverse urban African American neighborhoods. To the north stood the intellectual mecca of Howard University, with the professionals’ haven of LeDroit Park located almost directly to the east. To the south, 7th Street served as the focus for a vibrant African American working class community. U Street, African-American Washington’s burgeoning high street, extended to the west. Numerous major African American institutions in the city were within a mileor-two radius of this critical corner. The magnificent 1,500 seat Howard Theatre, which opened its doors in 1910, stood at the center of it all. Whites always were present, in part because many lived nearby, in part because they passed through while moving around town, in part because they attended Big League ballgames at Griffith Stadium, and in part because they were patrons of the area’s many music and dance clubs. Whites owned and ran businesses in the area. Lingering pockets of German and other immigrant social clubs, and a few residents, were left over from the era prior to the hardening of segregation. Greek immigrants opened shops in the area. Jewish merchants
