Washington's U Street

A must-read for anyone interested in the tremendously rich history of the U Street neighborhood.

U Street gives readers many human-interest stories, delivered with a light touch.

Too often, historians forget that Washington, DC, is a city with a history and not just an extension of national politics. Ruble gives readers a history of U Street with a story of a neighborhood that began as a free black community.

Groundbreaking... Ruble carefully constructs a biographical history of U Street in northwest Washington that highlights the accomplishments of everyday people in the neighborhood, while simultaneously giving life to the area’s buildings, streets, and educational and cultural institutions, particularly those of the African American community.

An informative, readable, and well-documented work that seeks to recover the history of the nation's capital from the vantage of its African American residents and one of their most enduring communities.

Ruble offers more than a mere chronology of the U Street neighborhood. Washington's U Street: A Biography gives readers a glimpse into the lives of the people—rich and poor, black and white, law-abiding and not—who elevated U Street into the iconic place it is today for Washingtonians, especially African Americans.

A welcome gift for anyone interested in Washington or ubran issues in general.

This book is loaded with terrific photos and fascinating sidebars about some of the more interesting people who lived, played, and worked on U Street.

A fine work that sheds light on race relations on U Street and throughout the District.

Erudite and refreshing... meticulously recreates the fractious, racial atmosphere around which seminal African American luminaries, working-class blacks, and white residents feuded with one another over—and gave shape to—the interminable, public and private venues that composed U Street throughout the last two centuries of its history.

No one, to my knowledge, has assembled a narrative on black Washington that covered such an expanse. There have been a number of books that have looked at black Washington during a certain era, but they do not attempt the sort of panoptic approach that one finds in Washington's U Street.

Ruble takes us back to the days before Jim Crow, when U street was a mixed community, then look at the post-Jim Crow era, when it was central to black cultural and social life, and moves on to today, and its spectacular revitalization.