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

businesses and non-profit community groups offered commercial and civic services unavailable from the larger white city, published magazines, produced plays, opened restaurants, designed theaters, built hotels and apartment buildings, sold automobiles, created YMCAs and other institutions to offer community services. The imposition of Jim Crow segregation in the city beginning in the late 1870s prompted fragmentation along the twin pressure points of class and race both within the national African American community, and within Washington, D.C. African American elites sought to distinguish themselves from poorer rural migrants. Skin color, personal and family histories, education, and wealth became markers separating the “talented tenth” from the rest of the African American community. Simultaneously, as they were increasingly spurned by whites of similar socio-economic and educational accomplishment, African American elites gained a consciousness of themselves as black. On the surface, everyone appeared to live their lives within their own group as much as possible. The music and literature emerging from the neighborhood suggests that a far more complex chemical reaction was taking place out of sight. Herein lies Washington’s important contribution to American culture: the supercharging of “high” bourgeois values with the vibrant “low” working class culture of the streets. created a particularly vibrant commercial district as one moved south towards the busy Northern Market that stood at 7th and O Streets. By the 1930s, a small Chinatown developed around 7th and H Streets as Chinese homes and businesses were destroyed to make way for the Federal Triangle government office complex following World War I. White businesses served a large African American clientele in a complex relationship that ranged from close friendship to tense hostility. Many of the businesses destroyed during civil unrest following the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were white owned, often by Jewish proprietors. Jewish and African American 7th Street co-existed prior to the civil unrest of 1968 much as black and white Washingtonians lived segregated lives that rarely touch one another throughout the first half of the 20th century. Beyond immigrant merchants and their families, white visitors to 7th Street near Florida Avenue remained, for the most part, just that: largely outsiders who came to watch a baseball or football game, to listen to music, to be otherwise entertained, or to make a profit. This crossroads brought together distinct worlds of an African American working class that made 7th Street their home, and a U Street which became the domain of an African American middle class. Jim Crow segregation increasingly meant that Washington’s African Americans had to fend for themselves. African American

Whites rarely went to see a movie at the big cinemas along U Street; they didn’t have to do so as they had larger, more luxurious movie houses of their own downtown. Similarly whites didn’t venture into African American neighborhoods for meals. Whites sought out music in African American clubs because they offered a sound that did not exist in white Washington. For many, the crossroads of 7th and Florida offered music that was different, better and unavailable closer to home.

The complexity of the communities and people colliding around the corner of 7th Street and Florida Avenue inspired some of the most profound and enduring voices of early 20th century America. The neighborhood’s deep contradictions created a tense conflict among norms and attitudes that melded into an explosive creative mix of class and background.

Three local cultural figures — the poet Langston Hughes, the novelist Jean Toomer, and the composer Duke Ellington — capture the area’s invention. Hughes, Toomer and Ellington were more or less contemporary products of the nation’s nascent African American middle class, with personal stories tied by family to the neighborhood as well as to its churches, schools and community life. Hughes’s 1927 poem “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” Toomer’s novel Cane, and Ellington’s

Washington’s Howard Theater, 2015. Photo: Blair A. Ruble. 2015.

homage in his memoirs to Holliday’s pool hall depict the rough-and-tumble life of 7th Street with its rich and juicy language and musical tradition, bringing poor black outsiders into “mainstream” American literature and music for all time. Washington generally, and the junction of 7th and U Streets NW in particular, provided the space — both physical and metaphysical — in which it all happened.