DC Heritage Trails: Lift Every Voice: Georgia Ave./Pleasant Plains Heritage Trail:
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- TRGAPP_120930_01.JPG: Lift Every Voice
Georgia Ave./Pleasant Plains Heritage Trail
7 Ed Murphy Way
Back In The '60s, everyone came to Murph's.
Ed Murphy's Supper Club, that is, located across Georgia Avenue from 1963 to 1975. In the beginning suits and ties were mandatory for the club's highpowered male patrons. But as the Black Power movement grew, the dress code relaxed to include dashikis or turtlenecks for the civil rights and DC statehood activists who gathered there.
In 1978 Murphy built the ambitious Harambee House Hotel, and reopened the supper club on its second floor. "Harambee House came into my father's spirit during the height of the 1968 riots," recalled Murphy's son Keith. "We had to do a nationwide search for upper-level [hotel] managers because there were so few black people in the business." When it opened, Harambee House was one of the first-class hotels built, owned, and operated by an African American in U.S. history. With African decor and high-end amenities, the hotel attracted guests such as Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. Stevie Wonder, Nancy Wilson, and other top entertainers performed in the supper club. The downstairs Kilimanjaro Room hosted press conferences by Muhammad Ali, Coretta Scott King, Carl Stokes, and John Conyers. After two years of punishing debts, however, Murphy sold the hotel to Howard University.
Beginning in the early 1900s, the blocks on this side of Georgia Avenue were filled with industrial activities: junk yards, plumbing shops, and bakeries. During the streetcar-era (1862-1962), youngsters entertained themselves watching "the pit," the point in the route where southbound streetcars switched from overhead electric wires to an underground power source (and vice versa for northbound trains). Congress had banned the use of overhead wires south of Florida Avenue.
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Georgia Ave./Pleasant Plains Heritage Trail
6 Medical Care for All
During the Civil War (1861-1865), thousands of formerly enslaved people came to Washington in search of new lives. They needed work, education, shelter – and health care. In 1862 the U.S. government responded with Freedmen's Hospital, located at 12th and R Streets, NW.
Less than a decade later, Freedmen's moved near Fifth and W Streets and became Howard University's teaching hospital. At a time of strict segregation, Freedmen's, like the university itself, was open to all, offering high-level care and education.
Freedmen's focused on training physicians, but also became a top research institution. Pediatrician Roland Scott pioneered studies on sickle cell anemia, the genetic blood disorder that primarily affects African Americans. Washingtonian Charles R. Drew, who developed life-saving methods for mass blood banking during World War II, headed Freedmen's Surgery Department from 1941 until his death in 1950. From 1908 until 1975, Freedmen's operated in the building across the lawn from this sign, closing when Howard University Hospital opened on Georgia Avenue.
Among the Howard-associated physicians who cared for their community was Ionia Whipper, a graduate who sheltered unwed mothers in her home/clinic nearby at 511 Florida Avenue during the 1940s. Former faculty member Simeon Carson opened a private hospital at 1822 Fourth Street. During Civil Rights demonstrations Freedmen's treated participants free of charge.
Just east of here is the edge of what oldtimers called Howardtown, an area of wood-frame houses that grew from a settlement of formerly enslaved people during and after the Civil War. The Kelly Miller Dwellings replaced much of Howardtown in the early 1940s.
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