On a winter morning on Bonifant Street, the smell of roasting coffee carries past the boarded promise of a metro construction site and out onto Georgia Avenue. It comes from Kefa Cafe, a tiny room two Ethiopian sisters opened in 1996, and it is as good a place as any to begin understanding the Ethiopians in Silver Spring, Maryland, a community that has quietly made this Washington suburb the centre of one of the largest Ethiopian populations in the United States.
The Place
Silver Spring is an unincorporated community in Montgomery County, Maryland, pressed up against the District of Columbia line just inside the Capital Beltway. It took its name from a spring whose bed sparkled with flakes of mica, and it grew through the 1920s into one of the region’s first suburban downtowns, home to an early strip mall built in 1938 and a Hecht’s department store that opened in 1947.
For decades after the Wheaton Mall opened three miles north in 1960, downtown Silver Spring declined into boarded shopfronts and empty parking lots. The early 2000s brought a county-led revitalisation built around walkable streets and public space, and the neighbourhood filled again with restaurants and shops.
What the planners did not draw on their maps was who would fill them. The answer, in large measure, was Ethiopian.
How It Became Ethiopian
The students who came first
The story does not start with refugees. It starts with scholars. In the 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie sent young Ethiopians to study in the United States, and a number of them landed at Howard University in Washington, just over the District line. They were the first thread of a connection between Ethiopia and the capital region that would later pull in tens of thousands.
That early presence mattered. When the larger waves came, there were already Ethiopians in Washington who knew the city, spoke the language of its bureaucracy, and could help newcomers find their feet.
Revolution and exile
In 1974 a military committee known as the Derg overthrew Haile Selassie and seized power. The years that followed brought political persecution, the violence remembered as the Red Terror, and famine. From the mid-1970s onward, Ethiopians fled in large numbers, and a disproportionate share of those who reached the United States gravitated to the Washington region, where that earlier student community had already put down roots.
The personal stories carry the weight that statistics cannot. Abeba Tsegaye fled Ethiopia with her younger brother in 1987, when their father was under house arrest for ties to a previous regime. After more than a year as refugees in Sudan, they were helped to the United States by Project Mercy, a nonprofit their aunt had founded. One of their brothers was already studying at Howard.
From the District to the suburb
For years the heart of the region’s Ethiopian life was in Washington itself, around the U Street and Shaw corridors, where the city even designated a stretch of Ninth Street as the District’s Little Ethiopia. But rising city rents and the steady suburban pull that shaped so much of immigrant America moved the centre of gravity outward.
It crossed the District line into Silver Spring. The Tsegaye sisters were ahead of the curve. They opened Kefa Cafe in 1996, when, as one account put it, downtown Silver Spring was still a wasteland of empty parking lots, and the little Ethiopian coffeehouse weathered the lean years and then the arrival of Starbucks and the other chains.
As the downtown revived in the 2000s, Ethiopian restaurants, groceries and cafes followed, clustering along Georgia Avenue and Fenton Street and the side streets between them. Dr. Getachew Metaferia, a professor at Morgan State University, summed up the shift plainly: this area became a hub for Ethiopians.
A community that kept growing
The growth did not slow. American Community Survey estimates put the number of Ethiopian-born residents in Montgomery County at roughly 8,700 in the 2005 to 2009 period and at roughly 22,000 in the 2020 to 2024 period, an increase of nearly 150 per cent in fifteen years. By that measure Ethiopians had become the fourth-largest immigrant group in the county, behind only Salvadorans, Indians and Chinese, joining established South Asian clusters like the Indians of Gaithersburg in reshaping suburban Montgomery County.
Community leaders have long argued that the official figures undercount the real population, which they place far higher across the wider Washington region. What is not in dispute is that more Ethiopians live in metropolitan Washington than in any city on earth except Addis Ababa, and that Silver Spring sits at the centre of it, much as the Ethiopians of Los Angeles anchor the diaspora on the West Coast. Ethiopians make up close to a third of one census tract beside downtown.
The Landmarks
Kefa Cafe, 963 Bonifant Street. The cafe that sisters Abeba and Lene Tsegaye opened in 1996 is the community’s quiet anchor, just off Georgia Avenue. It famously kept itself low on wireless and high on conversation, and the crime writer George Pelecanos, a Silver Spring neighbour, has worked the cafe and the sisters into more than one of his novels. A fire shut it for ten months, and the sisters reopened rather than walk away.
Abyssinia Restaurant, Georgia Avenue. Run by Solomon Abdella, Abyssinia is one of the older Ethiopian dining rooms along the avenue. Abdella has described the formula that lets these places last: a room that draws Ethiopians and Americans in roughly equal measure, so that the food never becomes a novelty act for outsiders alone.
Effoi Restaurant, 8233 Fenton Street. A family-run kitchen on Fenton Street serving the full table of combination meat and vegetable dishes eaten with injera, the spongy sourdough flatbread. Its long hours, stretching late into the night, make it a gathering point as much as a restaurant.
Lucy Ethiopian Restaurant, 8301 Georgia Avenue. A fixture of the Georgia Avenue cluster, co-owned by chef Seble Lemme, whose cooking has helped fix Silver Spring’s reputation as a place to eat Ethiopian food well rather than merely conveniently.
Ethiopian Community Center in Maryland, 8120 Fenton Street. Opened on 1 November 2014, the centre exists to provide accessible community services to all Ethiopians in Maryland, with the stated goal of cultural enrichment and appreciation of Ethiopian history. Its bilingual, English and Amharic staff help with immigration questions, jobs, education and crisis support.
Veterans Plaza, corner of Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street. The civic square at the heart of downtown is where the Ethiopian Day Festival unfolds each summer, with traditional and modern music, a fashion show and food, turning the centre of an American suburb into something briefly and unmistakably Ethiopian.
Ethio-American Chamber of Commerce, downtown Silver Spring. Headquartered in the neighbourhood, the chamber runs an annual September business show and gives the community’s entrepreneurs, who run so many of its restaurants, cafes and shops, an organised voice.
Where They Came From
Ethiopia is not one people but many, and the Silver Spring diaspora reflects that breadth: Amhara and Oromo, Tigrayans, Gurage and others, speaking Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya and more. Amharic is the language most often heard in the neighbourhood’s shops and offices, and county social services routinely provide it.
The thread that binds most of these families is not a single home region but a shared moment of departure. The revolution of 1974 and the decades of conflict, repression and famine that followed pushed people out of every corner of the country, often by way of refugee camps in Sudan or Kenya before resettlement in the United States.
Once a community took shape in Washington, chain migration did the rest. People sponsored relatives, relatives sponsored friends, and a network of churches, restaurants and businesses made arrival softer for each new family than it had been for the last. Montgomery County has formalised the bond with a sister-city relationship with Gondar, the old imperial capital in the Ethiopian highlands. The same county draws other immigrant communities outward from the city, among them Jewish families further north toward Baltimore and Chinese households in Clarksville.
Silver Spring Today
Walk Georgia Avenue and Fenton Street today and the Ethiopian presence is plain. It is in the coffee ceremonies and the racks of injera, in the Amharic on shop signs, in the late tables at Effoi and the steady murmur at Kefa. The community is not a relic to be visited but a working part of how this downtown feeds and gathers itself.
It is not without strain. The Purple Line light-rail construction tore up Bonifant Street and the surrounding blocks for years, and small Ethiopian-owned businesses were among those squeezed by the disruption. Rising rents that once pushed the community out of the District now press on Silver Spring too, and the next generation, raised in Maryland schools, must decide how much of Addis to carry forward.
For now the answer seems to be a great deal. The festivals fill Veterans Plaza, the churches and the community centre keep the language and the calendar alive, and a new Ethiopian family arriving in 2026 finds, as the Tsegaye sisters did not in 1996, a neighbourhood already waiting that knows their food, their language and their story.
The mica still glints, the legend says, in the spring that named the place. So, now, does a community that turned an emptying suburb into a second Addis.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Ethiopians in Silver Spring, Maryland?
The Ethiopians in Silver Spring, Maryland are the suburban heart of metropolitan Washington’s Ethiopian community, the largest outside Addis Ababa. It grew from 1950s students at Howard University and the refugees who fled the 1974 revolution and its aftermath, then spread from the District into Silver Spring as city rents rose.
How large is the Ethiopian community in Montgomery County?
American Community Survey estimates put Ethiopian-born residents of Montgomery County at roughly 22,000 in the 2020 to 2024 period, up from about 8,700 fifteen years earlier, a rise of nearly 150 per cent. That makes Ethiopians the county’s fourth-largest immigrant group, and community leaders believe the true figure is higher still.
Where can I eat Ethiopian food in Silver Spring?
Downtown Silver Spring has a dense cluster of Ethiopian restaurants along Georgia Avenue and Fenton Street, including Abyssinia on Georgia Avenue, Lucy at 8301 Georgia Avenue and Effoi at 8233 Fenton Street. For coffee, Kefa Cafe on Bonifant Street has been a community fixture since 1996.
What is the Ethiopian Day Festival in Silver Spring?
The Ethiopian Day Festival is an annual late-summer celebration held at Veterans Plaza, at the corner of Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street in downtown Silver Spring. It features traditional and modern Ethiopian music, a fashion show, food and other performances, and is open to everyone.
Is there an Ethiopian community centre in Silver Spring?
Yes. The Ethiopian Community Center in Maryland opened at 8120 Fenton Street on 1 November 2014. Its bilingual English and Amharic staff offer immigration help, workforce and education support, crisis assistance and cultural programming for Ethiopians across Maryland.
When did Ethiopians first settle in the Washington area?
The first Ethiopians arrived in the 1950s as students, several sent by Emperor Haile Selassie to study at Howard University. Large-scale migration began after the 1974 military coup, when persecution, war and famine drove tens of thousands of refugees to the region over the following decades.
If your family’s story passed through Silver Spring, or any of the places Ethiopians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the highlands of Gondar and the streets of Addis Ababa, to a coffeehouse on Bonifant Street, to wherever you are now.