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Worthy Ambition
LeDroit Park/Bloomingdale Heritage Trail
6 Best in the Country
Poet May Miller once remarked that unlike New York's Harlem, LeDroit Park "didn't have to have a renaissance." In fact, before they joined the cultural movement of the 1920s and '30s, most Harlem Renaissance intellectuals spent time at Howard University and in LeDroit Park.
Miller and her father, Howard University dean and Sociologist Kelly Miller, hosted poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1897 when Dunbar first moved here from Dayton, Ohio. Soon after he moved to 1934 Fourth Street, at this corner. "The best Negroes in the country find their way to the capital," Dunbar wrote, "and I have a very congenial and delightful circle of friends." Among them were Robert and Mary Church Terrell, who purchased number 1936 Fourth Street in 1893 through a "straw," a white person acting on their behalf.
Poet Langston Hughes lived with cousins nearby at 2213 Fourth Street in 1924. Unlike Dunbar, Hughes found Washington's black society "as unbearable and snobbish a group of people as I have ever come in contact with." In fact his high-class cousins looked down on the series of menial jobs Hughes was forced to take. Fortunately he was able to enjoy evenings at Seventh Street's nightclubs, where he found inspiration for his innovative jazz poetry.
The rowhouses and apartments just north of here along V and W Streets were constructed as public housing in the 1930s and early '40s. They replaced the dilapidated structures of Howardtown, which developed during the Civil War (1861-1865) when refugees from slavery came to Washington's Union Army encampments for shelter, work, and protection. |