A Fitting Tribute
—Logan Circle Heritage Trail —
Front:
Across the street is St. Luke's Episcopal Church, completed in 1880 by DC's first black Episcopalian congregation. Founding pastor Alexander Crummell was a prominent African American intellectual. After 20 years as a missionary in Liberia, Crummell was appointed in 1873 to head St. Mary's a small mission church in Foggy Bottom. In 1875 his growing congregation purchased this site to construct St. Luke's and commissioned Calvin T.S. Brent to design it. Brent was the city's first African American professional architect.
Crummell's belief that progress for African Americans required intellectual leadership heavily influenced the early thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1897 Crummell co-founded the American Negro Academy to advance black unity and achievement and develop intellectual arguments against racism. Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and Howard University mathematician/sociologist Kelly Miller also helped found the ANA. Du Bois succeeded Crummell as president upon Crummell's death in 1898.
The ANA organized nearby at John Wesley Cromwell's 1439 Swann Street home. Cromwell was a lawyer and newspaper publisher whose
The People's Advocate promoted racial uplift and the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. Cromwell clerked at the Treasury Department, then went on to serve as a teacher and
principal in DC's Colored Schools, writing and lecturing on black history. Cromwell's daughter, educator Otelia Cromwell, was the first known African American to graduate from Smith College. As an adult she lived nearby on 13th Street.
The internationally acclaimed artist Alma Thomas, known for her abstract oil paintings, lived just north of here at 1530 15th Street. Thomas was the first graduate of Howard University's Art Department (1924) and earned a M.A. from Columbia University. She taught art at Shaw Junior High School for 35 years.
Back:
The Logan Circle Neighborhood began with city boosters' dreams of greatness. The troops, cattle pens, and hubbub of the Civil War (1861-1865) had nearly ruined Washington, and when the fighting ended, Congress threatened to move the nation's capital elsewhere. So city leaders raced to repair and modernize the city. As paved streets, waster and gas lines, street lights, and sewers reached undeveloped areas, wealthy whites followed. Mansions soon sprang up around an elegant park where Vermont and Rhode Island Avenues met. The circle was named Iowa Circle, thanks to Iowa Senator William Boyd Allison. In 1901 a statue of Civil War General (and later Senator) John A. Logan, a founder of Memorial Day, replaced the park's central fountain. The circle took his name in 1930. The title of this Heritage Trail
comes from General Logan's argument that Memorial Day would serve as "a fitting tribute to the memory of [the nation's] slain defenders."
As the city grew beyond Logan Circle, affluent African Americans gradually replaced whites here. Most of them moved on during World War II, and their mansions were divided into rooming houses to meet a wartime housing shortage. By the 1960s, with suburban Maryland and Virginia drawing investment, much of the neighborhood had decayed. When civil disturbances erupted after the 1968 assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it hit bottom. Ten years later, however, long-time residents, newcomers, and new city programs spurred revival.
A Fitting Tribute: Logan Circle Heritage Trail takes you through the neighborhood's lofty and low times to introduce the array of individuals who shaped its modern vitality.
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