Washington region based Ethiopian American Investment group is purchasing a land in Washington DC to build it first Investment based RealEstate property. The Investment group currently enrolled 650 members where each member purchased shares of the company. Today the largest concentration of Ethiopian businesses is in Silver Spring, Maryland, and to a similar extent, Alexandria, Virginia.
Indeed, the Ethiopian-American relationship dates back long before Motown. In the ’50s, Emperor Haile Selassie was the first Ethiopian emperor to visit the White House, where he met with President Dwight Eisenhower. In October of 1963, Selassi returned to get to know John F. Kennedy. Less than two months later, Selassie was the only African head-of-state to attend JFK’s funeral.
With such a longstanding relationship and fascination with American culture, it was a natural fit for Ethiopians who wanted to study abroad. Getachew Metaferia, professor of political science at Morgan State University, says many Ethiopians were drawn to D.C. There was an influx of students throughout the 1950s and ’60s.
“To the Ethiopians, the capital of the country was far more important than, say, New York,” says professor Elizabeth Chacko of George Washington University, who studies the connections between immigrants and their home countries. “They already had a cluster here from the students, the diplomats, the urban professionals. And this formed the beginning of a group of the Ethiopian community in the Washington area.”
‘D.C. was always our capital’
It’s important to note that what caused the initial influx is different than what continues to drive the Ethiopian ‘exodus,’” Assefa says.
“I’ve been coming to D.C. since I was a baby,” says Semhar Araia, a foreign policy analyst and Eritrean-American activist. Araia came “for demonstrations, for community meetings, for the Eritrean independence movement,” she says. “D.C. was always our capital.”
