Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
LITTLE ETHIOPIA
The Central District has a history of reinventing itself to incorporate successive
waves of new immigrants. In the 1910s it was a primarily Jewish neighborhood,
pre-WWII it welcomed Japanese settlers, and postwar it became Seattle's main
African American enclave, a characteristic it partly retains. However, since the
1970s the neighborhood has seen an increasing number of African immigrants
moving in, particularly from Ethiopia.
The first Ethiopians arrived in 1974 after the country's Derg takeover provoked
a massive exodus. In 1970 there were no more than 20 Ethiopians in Seattle;
today the region counts approximately 25,000, one of biggest communities in the
US. The East African flavor is most prevalent along E Cherry St, where you'll see
taxi businesses, grocery stores selling local Amharic-language newspapers, and a
slew of Ethiopian restaurants (five alone color the crossroads of E Cherry St and
Martin Luther King Jnr Way). Not surprisingly, the name 'Little Ethiopia' is some-
times used to describe the area. In 2013, Joseph W Scott and Solomon A Ge-
tahun published a book about the diaspora calledLittle Ethiopia of the Pacific
Northwest.
CD
NORTHWEST AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM MUSEUM
(NAAM; 206-518-6000; www.naamnw.org ; 2300 S Massachusetts St; adult $6;
11am-4:30pm Wed & Fri, to 7pm Thu, to 4pm Sat, noon-4pm Sun; 60 from Capitol Hill) Small,
concise and culturally valuable, NAAM opened in 2008 after over 30 years of planning.
It occupies the space of an old school that until the 1980s educated a large number of
African American children in the Central District. After the school closed, it was occu-
pied for a while by community activists who prevented it from being demolished.
Inside, the museum's main exhibits map the story of black immigration to the Pacific
Northwest, especially after WWII. Details are given of some of the leading African
American personalities, including George Washington Bush (the first black settler in
Washington state), Manuel Lopes (Seattle's first black resident), Quincy Jones (the re-
cord producer who grew up in Seattle) and Jimi Hendrix (no introduction required).
One of the prize exhibits is a hat Hendrix wore at a 1968 concert in LA. A separate
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