Duke Ellington's U Street: Black Broadway Before the Riots

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-nine, at a home on Ida Place, later renamed Ward Place, Northwest, two blocks from a neighborhood that was already becoming something remarkable. By the time he was a teenager, U Street had acquired a name: Black Broadway.

The geography of that name was simple and ugly. Downtown Washington was segregated. The Constitution Avenue theaters turned Black patrons away. The department stores on F Street would sell to them but not hire them. The finest restaurants in the capital did not serve them. So Black Washington built its own district, running from roughly Seventh Street to Fourteenth Street along U Street, and what it built was extraordinary.

The Howard Theatre opened in nineteen ten, one of the first major venues in the country to book Black performers for Black audiences. The Lincoln Theatre arrived in nineteen twenty-two. Duke Ellington himself played both. The clubs and ballrooms that lined the corridor hosted Pearl Bailey, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald, performers who could fill concert halls downtown but were not permitted to enter them as customers.

Ellington left Washington for New York in nineteen twenty-three and never really came back to live. But the neighborhood that formed him, the music culture of U Street, the Black middle-class DC that Howard University and the federal government had built, informed everything he wrote. The sophistication, the social complexity, the refusal to be only what the dominant culture permitted, it is in the music.

U Street survived Jim Crow. It did not survive April nineteen sixty-eight. Within four days of Martin Luther King Junior's assassination, about twelve hundred buildings across the city had burned or been damaged, many of them along the corridor. The Howard Theatre sat dark for years. Whole blocks stayed vacant through the nineteen seventies and into the eighties.

The Green Line Metro arrived in nineteen ninety-one. The neighborhood began to come back. Whether what came back was the same neighborhood is a harder question, one that the people who had stayed through the devastation and were now being displaced by rising rents would have answered without hesitation.