DC Heritage Trails: Worthy Ambition: Ledroit Park / Bloomingtom Heritage Trail:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Spiders: The system has identified your IP as being a spider. I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, a number of options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm excited for your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1] TRLED_190920_01.JPG
|
[2]
 TRLED_190920_07.JPG
|
[3] TRLED_190920_10.JPG
|
[4]
TRLED_190920_12.JPG
|
[5]
TRLED_190920_17.JPG
|
[6]
TRLED_190920_19.JPG
|
[7]
TRLED_190920_22.JPG
|
[8]
TRLED_190920_24.JPG
|
[9]
TRLED_190920_27.JPG
|
[10]
TRLED_190920_29.JPG
|
[11]
TRLED_190920_32.JPG
|
[12] TRLED_190920_35.JPG
|
[13] TRLED_190920_41.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- TRLED_190920_07.JPG: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., leads the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Some of the signs were assembled at Mount Bethel Baptist Church. Front row from left to right: John Lewis, Matthew Ahmann, Floyd McKissick, Dr. King, Cleveland Robinson, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Joseph Rah, Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins.
- TRLED_190920_12.JPG: Worthy Ambition
LeDroit Park/Bloomingdale Heritage Trail
11 Dividing Line
This busy stretch of Rhode Island Avenue was a racial dividing line even as DC became majority African American in 1957. "African Americans were not welcome on [the north] side of the street," commented Reverend Bobby Livingston years later, "unless you had a mop and a bucket in your hands." In 1958 Mount Bethel Baptist Church, a 1,500-member black congregation, purchased its church from a white Methodist congregation. Reverend Leamon White oversaw Mount Bethel's move from Second and V Streets. The civil rights activist had worked for desegregation in the early 1950s and in 1963 helped plan the March on Washington. Signs for the march were assembled in Mount Bethel Church.
Memories of discrimination during the 1940s and '50s remain for many neighbors. Across First Street, Rhode Island Pharmacy operated a whites-only soda fountain. Discrimination meant, however, that black-owned businesses thrived, including Johnson's pharmacy and Harrison's Café on Florida Avenue. Some white businesses welcomed all to sit and eat, including B. Ambrogi's at Third and Rhode Island, later B & J's Barbecue.
Like many DC neighborhoods, Bloomingdale experienced the civil disturbances following the 1968 assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Safeway near this corner was looted. In addition, "Rioters ... destroyed the inside of" Reservoir Market, recalled Barry Cohen of his family's store just north at First and U Streets. "It was like a bomb had gone off." The building survived only because the upstairs tenant held her baby as she yelled out the window, "Please don't burn us out! I have nowhere to go!"
- TRLED_190920_17.JPG: Rev. Leamon White (second from left) protested the segregation of DC's restaurants alongside Mary Church Terrell (center) in the 1950s.
- TRLED_190920_19.JPG: Rhode Island Avenue Methodist Church, photographed in 1910, was succeeded by Mount Bethel Baptist Church in 1958.
- TRLED_190920_22.JPG: Young Edward Taylor poses outside High's at 84 T St., around 1950.
- TRLED_190920_24.JPG: Bethel Baptist Church, a white congregation, occupied 215 Rhode Island Ave., until 1952, when Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church bought the building.
- TRLED_190920_27.JPG: Mt. Pleasant celebrates Rev. Robert Anderson.
- TRLED_190920_29.JPG: A lively evening at Harrison's Cafe at 455 Florida Ave., which served families and clubs. It also offered an after-hours club upstairs.
- TRLED_190920_32.JPG: During the segregation era (1880-1954), newspapers freely advertised on a racial basis. This ad from 1927 steered black buyers to houses south of Rhode Island Ave.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
