Ed Smith Community Quotations

So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.

The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own newspapers, our own restaurants, our own theaters, our own small shops, our own clubs, our own Masonic lodges.

One of the aspects of the Post-Civil War period is that it unleashed in the black community this latent talent that had always been there but had not been manifested in so many different areas of activity.

I think in terms of the specific aspects making Washington different than, say, Atlanta, or even Richmond or many other southern cities is the immediate post-civil war period. The fact that you create Howard University in 1867 just two years after the war ends. No other city that has a black community can claim a Howard.

We were visited by whites, who always found coming into the black community to be interesting. Some even found it exotic. They knew that some of our restaurants were superior to their own. One of the interesting things is that whites discriminated against blacks. Blacks never discriminated against whites, and so they were always welcome.

The community put such a premium on success. And you had no excuse to blame racism or discrimination as a reason why you couldn't succeed.