This book traces the history of the U Street neighborhood in Washington, D.C., from its Civil War–era origins to its recent gentrification.
Home throughout the years to important scholars, entertainers, and political figures, as well as to historically prominent African American institutions, Washington’s U Street neighborhood is a critical zone of contact between black and white America. Howard University and the Howard Theater are both located there; Duke Ellington grew up in the neighborhood; and diplomat Ralph Bunche, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and medical researcher Charles Drew were all members of the community.
This robustly diverse neighborhood included residents of different races and economic classes when it arose during the Civil War. Jim Crow laws came to the District after the Compromise of 1877, and segregation followed in the mid-1880s. Over the next century, U Street emerged as an energetic center of African American life in Washington. The mid-twentieth-century rise of cultural and educational institutions brought with it the establishment of African American middle and elite classes, ironically fostering biases within the black community. Later, with residential desegregation, many of the elites moved on and U Street entered decades of decline, suffered rioting in 1968, but has seen an initially fitful resurgence that has recently taken hold.
Blair A. Ruble, a jazz aficionado, prominent urbanist, and longtime resident of Washington, D.C., is uniquely equipped to undertake the history of this culturally important area. His work is a rare instance of original research told in an engaging and compelling voice.
Blair A. Ruble is director of the Kennan Institute and co-chair of the Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author, most recently, of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka.
Table of Contents
List of Profiles x
List of Maps xi
List of Figures xii
Preface xv
Introduction: Washington's Contact Zone 1
1 Ambiguous Roots 19
2 A City "Like the South" 47
3 Confronting the Nation 95
4 "Black Broadway" 133
5 The Last Colony 173
6 Chocolate City 227
7 "The New You" 261
Notes 313
Acknowledgments 385
Index 387
What People are Saying About This
Jonathan Holloway
No one, to my knowledge, has assembled a narrative on black Washington that covered such an expanse. There have been a number of books that have looked at black Washington during a certain era, but they do not attempt the sort of panoptic approach that one finds in Washington's U Street.
— Jonathan Holloway, Yale University
Deb Morris
Ruble takes us back to the days before Jim Crow, when U street was a mixed community, then look at the post-Jim Crow era, when it was central to black cultural and social life, and moves on to today, and its spectacular revitalization.
From the Publisher
No one, to my knowledge, has assembled a narrative on black Washington that covered such an expanse. There have been a number of books that have looked at black Washington during a certain era, but they do not attempt the sort of panoptic approach that one finds in Washington's U Street.—Jonathan Holloway, Yale University
Ruble takes us back to the days before Jim Crow, when U street was a mixed community, then look at the post-Jim Crow era, when it was central to black cultural and social life, and moves on to today, and its spectacular revitalization.—Deb Morris
