Guidebook Lets Tourists Explore Washington’s Black History : Community: It offers information on schools, churches, theaters, homes, hotels, monuments, even the alleys, important to the capital’s Afro-American heritage.

When the rest of America thinks of Washington, the city--not Washington, the world capital--what easily comes to mind is crime, drugs, poverty, corruption.

Washington did have 438 homicides in 1989, more than one a day. It does have an infant mortality rate like that of Third World countries. A fifth of its people do live in poverty. Its mayor was put on trial for using cocaine.

All too true, but incomplete. Washington is also a community, a place to grow up, a place where people worry about tent caterpillars, harangue the city government to get a new trash can and take pride in sons and daughters marching to “Pomp and Circumstance” at high school graduations.

It has a “state” bird (the wood thrush), flower (the American Beauty rose) and tree (the scarlet oak).

Two things make it different. It is the national capital. And it is the blackest big city in America. Seventy percent of its residents are black, a higher proportion than Atlanta, Detroit, Newark, N.J. or Birmingham, Ala.

The capital and the black city have intersected for generations. And history, largely hidden, has been made at the intersection.

A guidebook published last year, “The Guide to Black Washington,” by two Washingtonians, one white, one black, offers a chance to glimpse Washington as a black place and as a place where blacks made history.

The guide is intended to fit into a car’s glove compartment, offering a few paragraphs on the schools, churches, theaters, homes, hotels, monuments, cafes, even the alleys, important to Washington’s history as a black city.

“For 200 years,” say authors Sandra Fitzpatrick and Maria R. Goodwin, “the threads of two distinct communities have been woven through the intricate web of federal and local interests in Washington--the traditionally dominant white population and a vibrant, thriving black community which has attained majority status over the past three decades.”

So while other guidebooks tell how many steps there are to the top inside the Washington Monument (898), this one suggests how confusing the ground rules must have been when Washington was rigidly segregated by law and custom.

Here’s how confusing:

Black people could sit in the audience of Constitution Hall, but blacks could not perform on stage.

Black actors, on the other hand, could play the National Theater, but blacks were barred from attending performances.

At Griffith Stadium, the old ballpark, blacks could cheer the Washington Senators but, until baseball broke the color line after World War II, no black could play for the Senators or any other major league team.

However, the National Negro League had use of the field when the Senators were on the road.

One day in 1942, the often-somnambulant Senators drew all of 3,000 fans for an afternoon game. That night, the black Homestead Grays drew 28,000.

That’s the kind of everyday history Fitzpatrick and Goodwin revel in.

“We wrote the book for the white and black residents and to get the tourists off the Mall,” Fitzpatrick said. “The Mall is fine, but there’s more to this town than that.”

Fitzpatrick, who is white, is the co-owner of a Washington art gallery and wife of a prominent lawyer. She grew up in West Lafayette, Ind., but she’s lived in Washington since 1959, long enough to be considered a Washingtonian. As a guide on Smithsonian walking tours, she came to know all the city’s neighborhoods, white and black.

Goodwin is a historian for the U.S. Mint. She was researching a bibliography of Washington’s history when she and Fitzpatrick found each other and decided to collaborate.

Their guide recaptures the flavor of the time when the Howard Theater, the city’s first legitimate theater for blacks, would put on four shows a day, at 2, 5, 7:30 and 10 p.m. and again at midnight on Saturdays.

In sharp contrast to the stiff-necked segregation at the National Theater, whites could make up a quarter of the audience at the Howard, and white bands, such as Artie Shaw’s, often performed on stage. Pearl Bailey made her show business debut there as a member of the chorus line, “the Howardettes.”

The guide calls attention to institutions still flourishing--such as Ben’s Chili Bowl, where comedian Bill Cosby courted his wife and still drops in when he’s in town--as well as landmarks long gone, some gone with good riddance.

Blissfully gone are the alleys of shacks which for a century were to Washington what tenements were to New York: squalid, unwholesome, smelly places. Only their names were attractive.

Slop Bucket Row and Louse Alley were on Capitol Hill. In Goat Alley, in the Shaw neighborhood, lived 400 black people and one white family in 1900.

Long gone, too, is the St. Charles Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, which before the Civil War catered to a Southern clientele. It provided six basement cells where guests could keep slaves newly purchased from the city’s slave market. A sign posted by management made this offer: “In case of escape, full value of the Negro will be paid by the proprietor.”

President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in Washington, but segregation only became more deeply entrenched.

Long before the Lincoln Memorial was erected--and dedicated in a 1922 ceremony in which honored black guests sat in an all-Negro section--freed black slaves collected money to erect their own tribute to the Great Emancipator.

The Emancipation Memorial, near Capitol Hill, is a statue portraying a black man breaking his chains as Lincoln holds the Emancipation Proclamation in his outstretched hand.

In 1939, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial were the scene of an extraordinary concert, a landmark event in black and Washington history.

Contralto Marian Anderson sang there before 75,000 people on an Easter Sunday; she had been denied use of Constitution Hall by its owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Twenty-four years later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., standing at the same place, delivered his “I have a Dream” speech during a march on Washington to petition Congress to pass a civil rights bill.

“We were struck by how many of our black neighbors played out their lives on the national stage,” Fitzpatrick said.

She ticks some off--jazzman Duke Ellington, who grew up on T Street and also played the Howard Theater (a handsome local bridge is named for him now); Charles Houston, “Mr. Civil Rights,” who argued cases before the Supreme Court, including the monumental Brown vs. Board of Education, which desegregated schools across America and in its capital; and Frederick Douglass, the early black statesman (namesake of another bridge in this city of rivers).

Douglass, born into slavery, escaped to the North, bought his own freedom with his own earnings and as an anti-slavery lecturer became the spokesman for his race.

Lincoln called him “the most meritorious man of the 19th Century.” He lived in a row house near the Capitol. He spoke at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial. President Ulysses S. Grant was a guest.

Some of the guidebook’s other landmarks and personalities:

Dentist John Washington, collector of Lincoln memorabilia. For more than 35 years he interviewed elderly blacks who had known Lincoln or his aides and staff, and published it all in a book, “They Knew Lincoln.”

* Educator Anna Julia Cooper. Born into slavery, she taught high school Latin for nearly 40 years. At age 67 she won a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, defending--in French--her dissertation, “The Attitude of France in Regard to Slavery (American) During the Revolution.” She died at age 105 in 1964.

* Mary Church Terrell. She is believed to be the first black to serve on a school board in the United States. She served on Washington’s board for 24 years and worked with Susan B. Anthony for three decades in the women’s suffrage movement. Her life ran the span from the emancipation in 1863, the year of her birth, to the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in 1954, the year she died.

* Willis Richardson, who in the 1920s became the first black to have a serious play produced on Broadway. For 43 years, he was a clerk with the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving.

* Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux. A one-time fish peddler, he founded the Temple of Freedom, Under God, Church of God, in a storefront in 1928. Five years later, the Washington Post called him “the best-known colored man in the United States today” because of his national Saturday morning “Happy I Am” broadcast over CBS. In the Depression, his Happy News Cafe offered lunch for a penny a plate. His mass baptisms at Griffith Stadium used enormous canvas tanks and, on one occasion, water imported in barrels from the River Jordan.

“Forced to overcome the barriers imposed by segregation and discrimination, black Washingtonians molded a vital social and economic culture within their carefully delineated neighborhoods,” the authors wrote.