A Community That Built Itself
Stand at the corner of 9th and U Streets NW in Washington, D.C. on any given evening and let your senses lead you. The low thump of Ethiopian music drifts from a restaurant door. The air carries the warm, earthy scent of berbere spice and freshly roasted coffee beans. Through a window, you see people eating injera with their hands — laughing, talking loudly, completely at home. A sign above the door reads “Dukem.” Next door is a salon. Next to that, a market stocked with injera, teff flour, and Amharic newspapers.
This is Little Ethiopia — Washington D.C.’s most resilient, most fascinating, and least told immigrant success story. A community that arrived with almost nothing, settled in neighborhoods that others had abandoned, rebuilt those streets block by block, and then, when the city grew fashionable around them and the rents followed, picked up and did it all over again somewhere else.
This is the story of how they did it — and why it matters to every person in the African Diaspora.
Why They Came: Fleeing War, Chasing a Future
Ethiopia’s story in Washington, D.C. does not begin with restaurants or street signs or community festivals. It begins with flight. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ethiopia was convulsed by political turmoil — a military dictatorship overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie, plunging the country into decades of conflict. A devastating famine struck between 1983 and 1985. War with Eritrea continued. For hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians, leaving was not a choice made in comfort. It was survival.
Washington, D.C. became one of the primary landing points for this wave of refugees and asylum seekers, and for a practical set of reasons: the presence of African embassies, international organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, and the historic draw of Howard University, which had long attracted African students and scholars. Between 1983 and 2004 alone, more than 12,000 sub-Saharan African refugees were resettled in the D.C. metro area — with Ethiopians making up the largest share.
They arrived in a city that was still carrying the wounds of its own upheaval. The 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had torn through neighborhoods like Shaw, Columbia Heights, and the U Street corridor, leaving burnt-out buildings, shuttered businesses, and a generation of economic decay. The city’s Black neighborhoods were struggling. And into that landscape stepped a wave of newcomers determined to build something.
Adams Morgan: Where It All Began
The first chapter of Little Ethiopia was not written in Shaw. It was written on 18th Street in Adams Morgan.
In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Ethiopian immigrants began clustering in Adams Morgan — at that time an economically mixed, culturally diverse neighborhood that offered affordable storefronts and a tolerance for newcomers. In 1978, a restaurant called Mamma Desta opened its doors, becoming the very first Ethiopian restaurant to introduce Washingtonians to injera, doro wat, and the communal tradition of eating together from a shared plate. It would not be the last.
Restaurant after restaurant followed. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, 18th Street in Adams Morgan had become a genuine Ethiopian commercial hub — restaurants, beauty salons, specialty grocery stores, and informal gathering spaces where the community could speak Amharic, hear familiar music, and simply exhale from the pressures of building a new life in a foreign country. The Ethiopian community had not just survived in Adams Morgan. It had revitalized it.
But Washington was changing. Adams Morgan was becoming fashionable. Rents climbed. What had been affordable storefronts were now premium addresses. And so, in a pattern that would repeat itself more than once, the Ethiopian community did what communities with deep roots and flexible feet do — they moved.
Shaw and the U Street Corridor: Rebuilding on Broken Ground
In the mid-1990s, Ethiopian entrepreneurs began migrating to a stretch of 9th Street NW in the Shaw neighborhood — a corridor that still bore the scars of the 1968 riots. Buildings sat abandoned. Storefronts were boarded up. The street had the quiet, hollow feel of a neighborhood that had been left behind.
The Ethiopians saw something different. They saw possibility. They bought those abandoned buildings. They rebuilt them with their own labor, their own money, and the financial muscle of an extraordinary community institution called the ekub.
The ekub is a traditional Ethiopian rotating savings group — a form of community banking where members pool money together and take turns receiving the full sum. For immigrant entrepreneurs with no established U.S. credit history, no wealthy relatives, and no access to the kinds of capital that mainstream banks were willing to lend, the ekub was a lifeline. It spread wealth across the community, allowed risk-takers to take risks, and bound people together through mutual financial trust. It was, in many ways, the engine behind Little Ethiopia’s rise.
Restaurant after restaurant appeared near the intersection of 9th and U Streets. U-Turn, Queen Makeda, Dukem, and others opened within a short walk of each other. Salons, markets, and nightspots followed. Within a few years, the block had been transformed from a post-riot ghost corridor into one of the most vibrant commercial strips in Northwest Washington.
Belay Sahlemariam, co-owner of the popular U-Turn restaurant, later described what the community had accomplished with characteristic directness: “We bought abandoned buildings, rebuilt them and cleaned this area up to make it what it is.”
The Washington Post noted in 2011 that Ethiopians had become “so successful in redeveloping retail strips that urban histories see their arrival in a neighborhood as a first sign of gentrification — way before the better known waves of hipsters and gay urban pioneers.” That observation carries a complicated truth: the very communities that were being displaced by gentrification elsewhere were themselves the original revitalizers of the neighborhoods that would later gentrify around them.
The Entrepreneur Spirit: One Business Becomes Ten
Part of what made the Ethiopian business community so powerful in D.C. was a deeply cultural approach to entrepreneurship — one rooted in collective success rather than individual competition.
Tsehaye Teferra, President of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, described the phenomenon to CNN: “You see within the Ethiopian community when you have someone start a business, that person becomes a role model for others. So you are absolutely sure that you get three, four businesses the next day in the same location.”
This clustering strategy was not accidental. It was deliberate and culturally intelligent. By concentrating businesses in one corridor, the community created a destination — a place where customers knew they could find Ethiopian food, products, services, and fellowship in a single walk. Each new business strengthened the ones around it. Each new customer drawn to one restaurant discovered three others next door.
One of the most beloved stories of this era is that of the Tesfaye family — brothers who built a successful parking management business across D.C., then decided to open Etete restaurant as a gift for their mother. “Her dream was always owning a restaurant,” said Yared Tesfaye. “She loves feeding people, she loves cooking.” The brothers went on to buy the building next door, where their sister opened a salon. One family. One block. Multiple businesses. That is the Little Ethiopia model in miniature.
There was also Tefera Zewdie, who credits himself as one of the first to plant a flag in Shaw when he opened a tiny grocery store in 1997 selling Ethiopian CDs, meat, and spices. It grew into a sandwich shop, then a small restaurant, then Dukem — a restaurant so popular that lines form out the door almost every night. Around 2000 or 2001, Zewdie recalled, it was remarkable when a single non-Ethiopian walked through the door. Today, roughly 95 percent of his customers are not Ethiopian.
The Battle for the Name: 15 Years to Be Recognized
By 2005, the Ethiopian community along 9th Street NW had built something real. No one who walked the block could deny it. And so, Ethiopian restaurateurs and community leaders launched a campaign to have the city officially rename a stretch of 9th Street “Little Ethiopia.”
As community leader Tamrat Medhin explained at the time: “We’d like to get recognition from the host country for our contributions. There are thousands of people serving in taxis, parking lots, hotels, and restaurants.” The Ethiopian American Constituency Foundation (EACF) organized the campaign, launched an online petition that gathered thousands of signatures, and secured the support of a D.C. Council member. The momentum looked real.
But the campaign ran into a wall of resistance from parts of the established African American community, for whom Shaw and the U Street corridor held profound historical meaning. For generations before the 1968 riots, U Street had been called “Black Broadway” — a cultural heartland of African American music, theater, commerce, and civic life. Jazz legends had performed there. Civil rights leaders had organized there. For some longtime residents, the idea of renaming any part of that legacy felt like a displacement on top of a displacement.
Retired postal worker Clyde Howard spoke for many when he told the Washington Post: “Where were they during the riots? They’re Johnny-come-lately. What gives them the right? Just because you opened a store?”
The Ethiopian business owners pushed back with equal conviction. Terfera Zewdie responded: “Show me where it says you need to be somewhere 12 years to have your own community. Things change. Washington, D.C. is so big. We didn’t ask for U Street. We said Ninth Street.”
The 2005 campaign failed. The D.C. Council did not move the initiative forward. No signs went up. But the community did not give up — it kept building, kept showing up, and kept making its case through the quiet, consistent language of commerce and culture.
Finally, in January 2021 — more than fifteen years after that first campaign — the D.C. Council passed a ceremonial resolution officially honoring the 9th and U Street corridor as “Little Ethiopia.” The resolution acknowledged the community’s role in revitalizing Shaw following the 1968 riots, celebrated Ethiopia’s status as a symbol of African independence and dignity, and recognized the Ethiopian community’s partnership with the African American community in the shared fight for civil rights. It had taken two decades. But the name was real at last.
Mama Tutu and the Yellow Pages: Building the Infrastructure of Community
No account of Little Ethiopia’s history would be complete without the story of Yeshimebeth Belay — known throughout the community simply as “Mama Tutu.”
A businesswoman and community anchor, Mama Tutu recognized early on that the Ethiopian community needed an infrastructure of its own — a way for members to find each other, to support each other’s businesses, and to be visible to the wider city. Starting around 1994, she began compiling lists of Ethiopian businesses, doctors, lawyers, and service providers in the Washington area, and soliciting advertisers to support the publication.
What started as a modest listing grew, year after year, into the Ethiopian Yellow Pages — a telephone directory published annually that eventually reached over 900 pages of content. It covered everything from Ethiopian-owned restaurants and salons to software companies, medical practices, and legal services. The directory became a community institution, a proof of scale, and a document of just how deeply the Ethiopian community had planted roots in the DMV.
Mama Tutu’s husband, Yehunie Belay, was a famous Ethiopian singer who performed regularly in the community. Together they owned a restaurant called Little Ethiopia, where Yehunie performed for the diaspora. Their story is a perfect encapsulation of what Little Ethiopia truly was — not just a commercial district, but a cultural home. A place where language, food, music, faith, and belonging all lived together on the same block.
Gentrification Strikes Again — and the Community Moves On
History, as it turned out, had a sense of irony. Just as the Ethiopian community had been pushed out of Adams Morgan by rising rents in the 1990s, the same forces began pressing on Shaw in the 2000s and 2010s. The neighborhood the Ethiopian entrepreneurs had revitalized was now desirable real estate. Luxury condos replaced vacant lots. Coffee shops opened next to injera restaurants. Property taxes soared.
Restaurateur Zenebech Dessu, who had established her beloved Zenebech Restaurant in Shaw in 1998, finally sold the business in 2016 after her property taxes “increased tenfold.” “I’m not happy,” she said as she prepared to leave, “but I decided I had to make the move.” Her departure was emblematic of a larger exodus — not a retreat, but a migration. The community was not disbanding. It was expanding outward, as it always had.
Today the Ethiopian community in the DMV has two thriving “Little Ethiopias” outside the District itself. One stretches through Silver Spring and Takoma Park in Montgomery County, Maryland — where Ethiopians make up 29 percent of the population in one Census tract near downtown Silver Spring. The other runs through Alexandria, Virginia, where the Southern Towers apartment complex is home to a community so dense it is 40 percent Ethiopian.
Montgomery County, recognizing what this community had built within its borders, became the first jurisdiction in the United States to officially declare September as African Heritage Month. The county hosts an annual Ethiopian Festival in Silver Spring that draws thousands from across the region. Montgomery County’s pattern of formal recognition is a model for what official acknowledgment of the African Diaspora’s contributions can look like — and the Ethiopian community earned it.
What Little Ethiopia Means for the Broader African Diaspora
The story of Little Ethiopia is not only an Ethiopian story. It is a story about what the African Diaspora is capable of when it is left space to breathe, to organize, and to build.
It is a story about ekub — about the wisdom of pooling resources within a community rather than waiting for institutions that were never designed to serve you. It is a story about clustering — about understanding that strength comes from proximity, and that a block of ten businesses is more powerful than ten businesses scattered across a city. It is a story about resilience — about being pushed out of one neighborhood and rebuilding in another, not once but twice, without losing momentum or community identity.
It is also a story about the complexity of building something new in a place with its own history. The tension between the Ethiopian community and the African American community over the naming of Little Ethiopia was real, and it was painful. It reflected deeper questions about belonging, about who gets to claim a place, and about how communities with different histories and different arrivals navigate shared space. Those questions have not been fully resolved — but the 2021 resolution, which framed the recognition in terms of partnership and shared struggle rather than competition, pointed toward a more honest and constructive path.
Dereje Desta, publisher of Zethiopia, a monthly newspaper for the Washington Ethiopian community, once put it plainly: “While taxi drivers and parking-lot attendants are more visible, a lot of Ethiopians are professionals. Go into the Patent Office and hospitals and you’ll hear Amharic spoken. Ethiopians are everywhere.” That quiet, pervasive presence — professional, entrepreneurial, cultural, civic — is the fuller picture of what Little Ethiopia built in the DMV.
Visit Little Ethiopia — What to Eat, See, and Experience
If you have never experienced Washington’s Ethiopian culture firsthand, here is where to start:
- Dukem on U Street NW — one of the original Shaw Ethiopian restaurants, always busy, always authentic. The kitfo and doro wat are legendary
- Habesha Market on U Street — stock up on injera, spices, Ethiopian coffee beans, and specialty groceries
- Sidamo Coffee and Tea on H Street NE — fresh coffee from beans roasted daily, with traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony available on request
- Ethiopic on H Street NE — a more upscale experience, but no less authentic, with a menu that introduces the full range of Ethiopian cuisine
- Silver Spring’s Ethiopian corridor — for sheer variety and scale, nothing in D.C. proper matches what Montgomery County has built: dozens of restaurants, coffee shops, and markets within walking distance of each other
- The annual Ethiopian Festival in Silver Spring — held each September as part of African Heritage Month, a celebration of food, music, dance, and community that the whole DMV should experience at least once
A Community That Built Itself — and Keeps Building
The story of Little Ethiopia in Washington, D.C. is still being written. The original corridor at 9th and U Street still stands, now officially named, still home to restaurants and culture and community. Silver Spring and Alexandria have grown into vibrant Ethiopian hubs in their own right. A new generation of Ethiopian Americans — born in the DMV, educated in its schools, building careers and families here — is carrying the story forward into territory the first generation could not have imagined.
What they inherited was not just a neighborhood or a set of businesses. They inherited a way of building — through community, through mutual support, through the ekub spirit of shared investment in each other’s futures. They inherited the knowledge that you do not need to wait for the city to welcome you. You can revitalize the block yourself. And then, if the city prices you out, you can do it again somewhere else.
That is the untold history of Little Ethiopia. And honestly? It deserves to be told much more loudly than it has been.
