It is a Saturday evening on 9th Street NW, and the door of Dukem swings open with a wave of berbere and frankincense. A woman in a white netela carries a covered jebena past the window of Habesha Market. Three young men in soccer jerseys argue in Amharic on the corner of 9th and T. From the late 1990s onward, if you turned south off U Street into this half-block of brick rowhouses, you were, for two short blocks, in Addis Ababa.
By the count of the people who built it, this is the largest Ethiopian community in the United States.
Little Ethiopia, The Place
Little Ethiopia sits inside the Shaw neighborhood of northwest Washington, on a portion of 9th Street NW between U and T Streets, three blocks east of the 14th Street corridor and a block south of Howard University. The U Street Metro station on the Yellow and Green lines drops you within a few hundred feet of the strip. The buildings are nineteenth-century brick rowhouses, ground-floor storefronts under upper-floor apartments, the kind of small-scale commercial fabric that survived the postwar urban renewal that flattened so much of black Washington.
The DC Council formally designated the corridor “Little Ethiopia” by ceremonial resolution in December 2020, fifteen years after the restaurateurs first asked. The boundary they fought for is small. The community it represents stretches across the whole metro.
How Washington DC Became Ethiopian
Before the Ethiopians
Shaw was, for most of the twentieth century, the heart of Black Washington. Duke Ellington grew up here. The Howard Theatre opened on T Street in 1910, the Lincoln Theatre on U Street in 1921, and the corridor became known as Black Broadway, a parallel center of African American business, music, and intellectual life anchored by Howard University. By the early 1920s U Street was one of the largest established Black neighborhoods in any American city.
Then came April 4, 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. brought four days of rioting to Washington, and the worst of it concentrated at the intersection of 14th and U. The fires damaged 1,199 buildings and gutted commercial blocks across Shaw. Insurance pulled out. Middle-class residents left for the suburbs. The neighborhood entered a long generation of disinvestment, boarded storefronts, and open-air drug markets that lasted into the 1990s.
This is the Shaw that the first Ethiopians inherited. Cheap rents, empty buildings, a transit line about to open, and a Black neighborhood that had not yet been gentrified out of existence.
The Ethiopians Arrive
The trigger was a coup in Addis Ababa, not a pull from Washington. On September 12, 1974, a committee of low-ranking army officers known as the Derg overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. Mengistu Haile Mariam emerged from the committee as a Stalinist strongman and, in 1977, declared the Qey Shibir, the Red Terror. Over the next two years tens of thousands of Ethiopia’s best-educated young people were executed, tortured, or driven into exile. Some estimates put the death toll above 100,000.
Those who got out scattered first to Sudan, Kenya, and Italy. The 1980 Refugee Act opened a legal channel into the United States, and Washington, the seat of Ethiopian diplomatic exile and home to the only Ethiopian embassy in North America, was a natural anchor. The first wave settled in Adams Morgan, the multi-ethnic neighborhood north of Dupont Circle where rents were still low and the 18th Street commercial strip was already lined with cabbies, Salvadoran pupuserias, and African groceries.
The defining restaurant of that period was Meskerem, which opened at 2434 18th Street NW in 1985. Its co-owner Mohaba Mohammed had immigrated in 1980 and driven a cab before opening the dining room. By the late 1980s Adams Morgan was the unofficial Little Ethiopia, the place a newcomer from Addis would be told to get off the bus.
Little Ethiopia at Its Peak
The shift south to Shaw began around 1995. Adams Morgan rents were rising. Shaw’s storefronts were still cheap and the U Street Metro had opened in 1991, finally reconnecting the corridor to the rest of the city. A grocer named Tefera Zewdie opened a small carry-out and Ethiopian CD shop called Dukem on U Street in 1997. Within a few years he had a full sit-down restaurant at 1114 U Street NW serving doro wat on bone-china platters of injera.
Others followed quickly. By the early 2000s the Yelp map showed a tight cluster: Etete at 1942 9th Street NW, opened in 2004 by the brothers Yared and Henock Tesfaye and named for their mother’s nickname. Queen Makeda lounge a few doors up at 1917. Habesha Market and Carry-Out at 1919 9th. Chercher at 1334 9th. Within a few short years no fewer than ten Ethiopian restaurants were operating in the immediate vicinity of 9th and U.
The financial scaffolding that made it possible was an old one. Ethiopian communities pool capital through a rotating savings club called an iqub, in which members each contribute a fixed amount per month and take turns receiving the lump sum. An iqub of ten people meeting monthly could float a restaurant down payment. The community had no access to conventional small-business lending. It had iqub, and it had cousins.
In 2005 the restaurateurs petitioned the DC Council to formally name the strip Little Ethiopia. Belay Sahlemariam, co-owner of the U-Turn restaurant, framed the case plainly: they had bought abandoned buildings, rebuilt them, and cleaned the area. Councilmember Jim Graham backed the resolution. It stalled. Other Shaw residents argued the area should be remembered as Black Broadway, not renamed for a new arrival. The Little Ethiopia signs never went up.
The Change
The signs did not go up, but the rents did. The same Metro line and restaurant cluster the Ethiopians had built attracted developers. By 2010 the U Street corridor was the city’s fastest-gentrifying neighborhood. By 2018, when Etete closed, its co-owner reopened the space as a cocktail bar with hookah and DJs.
The community did not disappear. It moved. Montgomery County, Maryland, particularly Silver Spring and Takoma Park, became the largest Ethiopian-American cluster in the metro by population. Alexandria, Arlington, and Falls Church in Virginia received the second wave. The Ethiopian Community Center on N Capitol Street remained, but most of its members now drove in from the suburbs.
In December 2020, the DC Council finally passed the ceremonial resolution naming 9th and U Streets NW as Little Ethiopia. The vote came fifteen years after the original petition, and arrived as a memorial as much as a recognition. The Embassy of Ethiopia celebrated it. So did Dukem, still open at 1114 U.
The Landmarks of Ethiopian Washington
Dukem (1114 U Street NW, opened 1997). The anchor of the corridor and arguably the single most important Ethiopian business in the eastern United States. Tefera Zewdie and Hiwot Gebru opened it as a carry-out and CD shop and grew it into a full restaurant that won Washington City Paper’s best Ethiopian restaurant award five years running from 2008 to 2012. Still operating. Saturday nights still feel like the wedding of a cousin you do not quite know.
Etete (1942 9th Street NW, 2004 to 2018). Named for the Tesfaye brothers’ mother, whose nickname meant mama in Amharic. The kitchen was hers. For fourteen years Etete drew lines down 9th Street on Friday nights. It closed in 2018 and reopened as a cocktail lounge called 1942 DC. The injera is gone. The address is the same.
Habesha Market and Carry-Out (1919 9th Street NW). The neighborhood grocery, fast-casual counter, and unofficial messageboard. A pager-and-counter operation where the staff will guide a non-Ethiopian customer through the difference between kitfo and gored gored. The shelves carry teff flour, frankincense, and Ethiopian satellite phone cards. Still open.
Chercher (1334 9th Street NW). The Shaw flagship of a small local group that now also operates in Columbia Heights and Bethesda. Known for tibs, the cubed meat dish that arrives on a sizzling clay platter, and for a Sunday-afternoon coffee ceremony in the back room. Still open.
Debre Selam Kidist Mariam Cathedral (1350 Buchanan Street NW). The largest Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo parish in the Washington area, founded in 1987 and moved to its present Buchanan Street home in 1997. More than 1,500 registered families. Services in Ge’ez and Amharic. On Timkat in January and Meskel in September, a procession of white-robed parishioners stretches around the block.
Ethiopian Community Center (1409 N Capitol Street NE). The civic anchor. Resource center, social services hub, after-school programs, and the place where new arrivals are pointed when they get off a plane at Dulles with a Diversity Visa and a cousin’s phone number.
Ethiopian Community Development Council (Arlington, Virginia, founded 1983). Tsehaye Teferra started the ECDC in a one-room office to help Derg-era refugees navigate American paperwork. The organization is now one of nine federal contractors for refugee resettlement and has helped settle more than 60,000 refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere into the United States since 1991.
Where the DC Ethiopians Came From
The first refugee wave in the late 1970s and 1980s was disproportionately urban and educated, the young professionals and students who had been targets of the Red Terror. Most came from Addis Ababa, the political and intellectual center of the country.
The second wave, arriving from the 1990s through today, has been broader. Amhara region, the historic highland heartland whose language Amharic still functions as the lingua franca of the diaspora. Oromia, the largest region by population, whose Oromo-speaking community in DC has grown sharply in the last twenty years. Tigray, the northern highland province whose Tigrinya speakers maintain their own churches. Smaller communities trace back to Gurage, the Southern Nations, and Harar.
Much of the post-1995 arrival came through the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery, the 1990 program that issues 50,000 green cards a year to natives of underrepresented countries. Ethiopia has been one of the top sending countries for the lottery’s entire history. Between 1995 and 2017, Ethiopians won 67,832 diversity visas, more than any other African nation. A large share landed in Washington because they already had family there.
That is how chain migration works. The first cousin sponsors the second. The second hosts the third on a couch in Silver Spring. Five years later the husband’s brother wins the lottery and the cycle repeats.
Little Ethiopia Today
The 9th Street commercial heart is thinner than it was. Etete is a cocktail bar. U-Turn is gone. The block still has Dukem, Habesha, Chercher, and a few smaller operators, but the daily foot traffic is mostly people on dates from the rebuilt condo buildings two blocks west.
The community itself is bigger than ever. Most counts put the DC metro Ethiopian population somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000, depending on how the second generation is counted, which makes it by some distance the largest concentration of Ethiopians outside Ethiopia. Montgomery County has the largest cluster. Fairfax County and Alexandria have the next two. Falls Church has Meaza Restaurant on Columbia Pike, a 5,700-square-foot dining room that many DC food writers consider the best Ethiopian kitchen in the metro.
What endures in Shaw is the cultural and religious infrastructure. The Orthodox churches anchor the calendar. The Ethiopian New Year, Enkutatash, falls in mid-September and brings parishioners in white netela back to the neighborhood in numbers nothing else can match. Timkat in January and Meskel in late September draw similar crowds. The Embassy on International Drive still functions as the diplomatic home address. The Diversity Visa lottery still arrives every year, and a new cousin still gets the call.
Little Ethiopia, the name, is a memorial to a strip of buildings. Ethiopian Washington, the place, is just getting started.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Ethiopians settle in Washington DC?
Ethiopians came to Washington DC in large numbers beginning in the late 1970s, fleeing the Derg military regime and the Red Terror that followed the 1974 overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. Washington was a natural anchor because it was the seat of Ethiopian diplomatic exile, home to the only Ethiopian embassy in North America, and offered cheap rent in Adams Morgan and later Shaw. Once the first generation arrived, chain migration through family sponsorship and the Diversity Visa lottery made DC the largest Ethiopian-American community in the United States.
Is Little Ethiopia still Ethiopian today?
The 9th Street NW corridor that the DC Council formally designated Little Ethiopia in 2020 is thinner than it was at its 2005 peak. Several anchor restaurants have closed and gentrification has pushed many businesses to Silver Spring, Alexandria, and Falls Church. The neighborhood still has Dukem, Habesha Market, Chercher, and an active Orthodox Tewahedo church life, but the bulk of the metro’s Ethiopian population now lives in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
What are the most famous Ethiopian landmarks in DC?
The signature landmarks include Dukem at 1114 U Street NW, the corridor’s anchor restaurant since 1997, and the former Etete at 1942 9th Street NW, which defined the 9th Street strip from 2004 until 2018. Debre Selam Kidist Mariam Cathedral on Buchanan Street NW is the largest Ethiopian Orthodox parish in the metro. Habesha Market at 1919 9th Street NW, Chercher at 1334 9th Street NW, and the Ethiopian Community Center on N Capitol Street are the other key anchors.
Where in Ethiopia did the Washington Ethiopians come from?
The first refugee wave in the late 1970s and 1980s came largely from Addis Ababa and the surrounding urban Amhara region, since the Red Terror disproportionately targeted educated young people in the capital. Later arrivals through the Diversity Visa lottery and family sponsorship have come from across the country: the Amhara highlands, Oromia, Tigray, Gurage, and Harar. Amharic remains the dominant language of the DC diaspora, with significant Tigrinya and Oromo-speaking communities.
When did Ethiopians first arrive in Washington DC?
A small Ethiopian student and diplomatic community existed in Washington before 1974, but the major migration began with refugees fleeing the Derg military regime after the 1974 revolution and especially the 1977 to 1978 Red Terror. The 1980 Refugee Act opened a legal channel. The first commercial cluster formed on 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan in the 1980s, anchored by Meskerem in 1985, and shifted to Shaw and U Street in the mid-1990s.
If your family’s story passed through Little Ethiopia, or through Addis Ababa, Asmara, the Amhara highlands, or any of the places the Ethiopian diaspora made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the first refugee year of 1974 to the rowhouses of 9th Street NW, to wherever you are now.