The Capital of Duke

WASHINGTON —  There were flowers.

Each of us plucked a carnation, red and white and spicy, from Judith Bauer’s outstretched hands and quietly placed it beneath the large portrait painted on the side of a building that faces the U Street/Cardozo Metro stop.

City traffic seemed to stop swirling for a moment, and Saturday became less urgent as we paused to honor Edward Kennedy Ellington--”Duke” Ellington--whose sad-eyed portrait stared down at us.

Ellington, the extraordinary jazz composer, pianist and bandleader, was born and grew to manhood here, but this was a city where the white majority paid little heed to him while he lived. When a walking tour called “Duke Ellington’s D.C.: A Tour of the Historic Shaw Neighborhood” began recently, 14 of us took the opportunity to learn more about the man who brought us “Satin Doll,” “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” among hundreds of compositions. As a nearly lifelong resident of the Washington area, I joined the 4 1/2-hour tour to learn more about my hometown and its history.

The Shaw district, a few square blocks of old homes and churches, small businesses, theaters and restaurants, begins about a mile north and east of the White House. It’s a mixed neighborhood of fine 19th century row houses being gentrified and of deteriorating buildings that have their own story to tell.

Most of the Shaw neighborhood where Ellington grew up was woods and fields until the Civil War, when three military camps were set up in the area. One of them, Camp Barker at 13th and R streets--near one of Duke’s boyhood homes--was a resettlement area for slaves fleeing the South, a tent city that grew into prosperity after the war.

By the 1880s Shaw was thriving, with new homes, businesses and the fast-growing Howard University a few blocks away lending stability to a black community whose members were determined to build their own lives in America.

“We’re going to enter a 1923 snapshot of Washington’s black world,” said Bauer, who leads tours for the D.C. Heritage Tourism Coalition, a nonprofit organization of community groups and businesses. In March it began offering walking and bus tours to historic neighborhoods and places far from the tourist crush on the National Mall.

Bauer had us clattering over the streets and sidewalks of Shaw, named for Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the white commanding officer of the black Massachusetts 54th Regiment that fought in the Civil War (and whose story was told in the 1990 movie “Glory,” starring Denzel Washington).

From about 1900 to 1950, this was the heart of black Washington’s professional, educational and cultural world. U Street was Washington’s black Broadway, where all the great black entertainers played, a place so grand it was said you needed a tie just to walk down it.

Duke was born here on April 29, 1899. As a young man, his father, James Edward, fled the poverty of North Carolina to come to Washington, where he worked in a variety of jobs for a wealthy white physician. In those jobs the elder Ellington picked up social skills and graces. He eventually opened his own catering business, working events at the White House and other homes in Washington. “He spent and lived like a man who had money, and he raised his family as though he were a millionaire,” Duke Ellington wrote in his autobiography, “Music Is My Mistress.”

As a boy, the younger Ellington learned to affect the same overwrought language that his father used. It was a curious blend of Southern black eloquence coupled with an odd formality, thought to be the source of Ellington’s signature “love you madly” closing at the end of his shows.

Although Duke showed no early aptitude for music--he told an interviewer late in life that if he’d had his way, he would have become an architect--his mother, Daisy Kennedy Ellington, enrolled him in piano lessons with a Mrs. Clinkscales. But he was so crazy about baseball that he quit after a few months and didn’t touch music until his teen years, Bauer said, “when he discovered that girls were attracted to boys who could play the piano.”

Our tour passed by the first office of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in True Reformers Hall at 12th and U streets. The four-story Italianate building, designed by black architect John Lankford, was the architectural showpiece for African Americans in the capital and a center for community activity for decades. Ellington played one of his first paid performances with his own band there in 1918.

It’s also where Marshall, who graduated first in his class at Howard University Law School, began his law career as legal director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People from 1940-1961. In this building--and at the New York NAACP offices--Marshall plotted some of the strategy for arguing Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., before the Supreme Court in 1954, which led to the desegregation of America’s public schools. In 1967 Marshall became the first African American to be appointed to the Supreme Court, serving until 1991.

We passed the U Street site of the now-vanished home of poet and writer Jean Toomer. Toomer is regarded as the literary father of the Harlem Renaissance, the explosion of artistic creativity in New York’s black neighborhood early in the 20th century. While living in Shaw in 1923, he wrote much of “Cane,” a collection of prose, poetry and narrative essays. The book has a well-known scene from the Lincoln Theater, a 1,500-seat movie house for blacks built in 1922 and just across the street from the Ellington portrait. With an infusion of $10 million, the Lincoln was brought back to life a few years ago as a shimmering perfection of gilt and brass, plush seating and thick carpeting. It now functions as a community and experimental theater, hosting occasional headline acts.

The old YMCA being restored a few blocks away at 1816 12th St. is another historic black-designed building, this one by W. Sidney Pittman. This is where James Langston Hughes rented a room as he worked on “A Negro Speaks,” his first published poem. While visiting his mother in Washington another time, he began at the Y a series of poems called “The Weary Blues.” The jazz he heard in Washington’s clubs, played by the musicians of Ellington’s era, inspired him, he said. “I tried to write poems like they sound on 7th Street,” he later wrote.

Down the street we visited the still-unfinished African American Civil War memorial, the only national monument to black Civil War soldiers. While workmen rip out and refit upper stories of the former eight-story Masonic building, the ground floor hosts a collection of Civil War photos and uniforms. African Americans from all over the country drop by to look for family connections in the computerized database of 209,000 black soldiers who served in the Union Army.

Across the museum plaza--with its stirring bronze celebrating the contributions of black Civil War soldiers--stands the small, private Black Fashion Museum. It holds Mary Todd Lincoln’s second inaugural dress, made by a black clothier in Washington named Mary Keckich. Keckich’s son was killed while serving in the Union Army, and after President Lincoln was assassinated, she befriended Mary Todd Lincoln, even lending financial support.

In a side room as quiet as a chapel, a glass case holds the gold and blue dress that seamstress Rosa Parks was working on that day in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man.

The finale of our tour was a brown-bag lunch at the Whitelaw Hotel. Once the only first-class hotel for blacks in segregated Washington, today it is an elegantly restored residence for the well-to-do. Ellington stayed there during his many visits and prolonged stays in Washington so he could be close to his parents and friends.

In the cavernous ballroom, we sat under the quiet elegance of the Tiffany-style ceiling, enjoying homemade sandwiches, sugar cookies and apples from Ben’s Chili Bowl, now a restaurant but once a silent movie theater built for black audiences in 1910. As we ate and mused on the day’s journey, a woman’s voice echoed from the lobby as she sang, “Who Could Ask for Anything More?”

Trim and neat in a purple suit, she was a perfectly veiled and gloved proper “Negro lady” from Ellington’s era. She was really actress Amityah Elayne Hyman from Emerald City Productions, a local theatrical company. She sang “Can’t Take That Away From Me,” “I’ve Got Rhythm” and “No One to Talk With All by Myself,” then slipped away as quietly as she had come, a ghostly reminder of what Langston Hughes said of his own time and the age of Ellington in Washington: “We build our temples for tomorrow.”

GUIDEBOOK

Walking Duke’s D.C.

Getting there: From Los Angeles, direct service (one stop) is offered on US Airways to downtown Washington National. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $696.

Taking the tour: The Ellington tour is by appointment, telephone (202) 232-2915. For other D.C. Heritage tours, call (202) 828-9255 or check https://www.dcchamber.org

Where to stay: Three nearby historic hotels of interest:

The Henley Park, 926 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., tel. (202) 638-5200, fax (202) 638-6740, Internet https://www.henleypark.com. Doubles begin at $175; weekend special, $99.

The Morrison-Clark, Massachusetts Avenue and 11th Street N.W., tel. (202) 898-1200, fax (202) 289-8576, Internet https://www.morrisonclark.com. Doubles begin at $165; $89 weekend special.

The Hay-Adams, 1 Lafayette Square, tel. (202) 638-6600, fax (202) 638-3803, Internet https://www.hayadams.com. Doubles begin at $325; until Sept. 3, $199.

Where to eat: Ben’s Chili Bowl, 1213 U St. N.W., local tel. 667-0909, offers simple, hearty fare.

Florida Avenue Grill, 1100 Florida Ave. N.W., tel. 265-1586, features Southern cuisine.

The Islander Caribbean Restaurant, 1201 U St. N.W., tel. 234-4955, offers the foods of Trinidad and Tobago.

Republic Gardens, 1355 U St. N.W., tel. 232-2710, offers ordinary fare, but its nightclub captures some of the feel of Ellington’s era.

For more information: The Washington, D.C., Convention and Visitors Assn., 1212 New York Ave. N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005-3992; tel. (202) 789-7000, fax (202) 789-7037, Internet https://www.washington.org.