Duke Ellington’s Washington

The companion website of the one-hour PBS documentary, Duke Ellington’s Washington, about the African-American community in Washington D.C. during the early 20th century which nurtured the emergence of a surprising array of talented African-American lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and cultural figures, epitomized by Duke Ellington. The program is a dynamic blend of the music and pictures that illuminate both young Ellington and the hometown that nurtured him, and the intimate oral histories of people who knew Duke as a boy and the community that was home to so many talented African Americans. The program takes an unconventional approach by combining the celebrated past of Washington’s black community with its modern revival of that heritage along with another of Ellington’s legacies, the Ellington School for the Arts which is producing a new stream of talented DC musicians, actors, dancers, and artists of all kinds.

In the era before the Harlem Renaissance, the Washington black community was the center of black culture in America — a jazz mecca for such greats as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Pearl Bailey, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. In that era, Washington’s black community was the largest in America. Unlike Harlem, which was largely white-owned, U Street — dubbed “the black Broadway” by Washingtonian Pearl Bailey — was black-owned, black-run and black-built. After the devastation of the 1968 riots, the old U Street sank into urban ruin. But the area is reviving, its comeback signaled by the restoration of historic buildings, rehabilitated rowhouses and new jazz clubs.