Hecht’s was one of the largest department stores in the city for much of the 20th century. In the 1950s, it became a key site of protest in the battle to end discrimination against Black shoppers.

Although a 1929 survey by the Black-owned Washington Tribune found DC’s department stores to be among the few places where white and Black women were treated equally, Hecht’s later closed its fitting rooms to Black customers. Despite protests and the threat of a boycott, the policy remained in place.

In 1951, Hecht’s was targeted in a campaign co-led by 87-year-old Mary Church Terrell to integrate downtown stores and restaurants. Three months of failed negotiations led Terrell’s group to launch pickets and lunch counter sit-ins. As explained by co-organizer Annie Stein, volunteers took two-hour shifts, with “between 15 and 20 people sitting down at a time all through the day on Saturday[s].” Over the course of several months, the group garnered citywide and national support, and in January 1952 Hecht’s finally began providing full service to Black customers.

In 1925, the Hecht Company built this eight-story building at 7th and F streets, significantly expanding its quarters from the two adjacent buildings to its south at 513-517 7th Street NW.

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The ClubHouse (also known as the Clubhouse and the Club House), constructed in phases between 1930 and 1945, served as an automobile garage and showroom before becoming DC’s top African American dance club from 1975 to 1990. As AIDS became an epidemic in the early 1980s, the ClubHouse became a center for activism by LGBTQ racial minorities, and the focal point for the Black gay community’s response to the disease. The ClubHouse was the third, and most successful, dance club project of the Metropolitan Capitolites, one of DC’s earliest gay-oriented social clubs. The Capitolites began throwing house parties in the 1960s, providing an essential entertainment and meeting space as well as social networking opportunities. The group opened the ClubHouse in the  former garage and showroom with 400 charter members, a number that swelled to 4,000. On weekends, 8,000 people lined up to enter the club. During the 1980s, under the leadership of John Eddy, Morrell Chasten, and Audrea Scott, the ClubHouse was instrumental in creating an awareness of HIV and AIDS among African Americans. The club lent its space, mailing list, and organizing ability to the first AIDS Forum for Black and Third World Gays, jointly sponsored in September 1983 with the Whitman Walker Clinic.  This was one of the first events during the AIDS crisis where public health workers reached out to the African American community. Several in attendance expressed concern about inadequate reporting on the disease’s impact on minorities—40 percent of people with AIDS were Black.   Less than 18 months later, ClubHouse staff organized a holistic health response to AIDS that by 1988 had become Us Helping Us, one of DC’s most important AIDS education and support organizations. Us Helping Us met at the ClubHouse until the venue closed in 1990; despite the club’s efforts to curb the spread of the disease, AIDS had dispirited the community and killed many of its members. Later a nightclub for teenagers, the building currently houses the DC Vets Center. It was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) as part of a project focused on sites related to LGBTQ nightlife in DC.

This is a stop on the DC's LGBTQ+ History Tour.

This site was documented, along with four other DC bars/clubs, by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in 2016 as part of its DC LGBTQ Nightlife project.

For more information about DC's LGBTQ History, please see the Historic Context Statement for Washington’s LGBTQ Resources.

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All Souls Church, originally an all-white congregation, was founded at Judiciary Square in 1821; it moved to 16th and Harvard streets in 1924.  During the 1940s and 50s under the leadership of Reverend A. Powell Davies (1944-1957), the church came to embrace a social justice agenda.  

In 1947 the congregation voted overwhelmingly to support the Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which proposed specific measures to improve civil rights laws. Two years later, the NAACP gave Davies its annual award. The publicity surrounding these activities, and others in the 1950s, started drawing African Americans to All Souls.

The church was one of the few in the city to sign on to the American Veterans Committee’s anti-discrimination campaign. In a 1953 sermon, “The Shelter of Good Intentions,” Davies pledged not to patronize restaurants and entertainment venues that refused to admit African Americans. The congregation developed a list of non-segregated DC establishments, distributing more than 40,000 copies to the public.

In 1954, when the church asked Police Boys Club No. 10 (which had been meeting in the church since 1937), to drop its whites-only policy, the club refused, so All Souls organized in its place the Columbia Heights Boys Club, Washington’s first integrated youth group.

In March 1965, the church's former associate minister, Rev. James Reeb, was killed by segregationists in Selma, Alabama. Reeb had answered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to ministers to join the voting rights efforts in that city, which had resulted in a bloody confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge a few days earlier. 

In 1969 All Souls called Rev. David Eaton, the first African American senior minister in the denomination. During his tenure (1969-1992) the church was equally represented by African American and white congregants. Among those Eaton invited to speak from the pulpit were Black Panther Angela Davis and Rev. Ben Chavis of the Wilmington Ten.

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In an interview with the Washington Post in 1990, longtime Ward 1 Councilmember David A. Clarke (1943-1997) described the lasting impact of his childhood discovery that as a DC resident he could not become a Congressional page since there was no member of Congress from DC to sponsor him. "It was that day," in the mid-1950s, "that I dedicated myself to home rule for the District," said Clarke. He would go on to work for Rev. Walter Fauntroy (later DC's nonvoting delegate to Congress) and to enroll at Howard University Law School, where he was mentored by civil rights activist Franklin D. Reeves.

Over the next few years, Clarke also worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, organized lawyers for the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, and, beginning in 1971, headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's DC bureau.

When the District finally achieved the right to self-government in 1974, Clarke became one of just two white candidates to win seats on the Council. He represented Ward 1 (Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, and the Howard University area) for the next seven years, becoming Council chair in 1983. Clarke's home in Mount Pleasant doubled as headquarters for most of Clarke's campaigns.

During his tenure on the DC Council, Clarke focused largely on issues of racial justice. One of the most urgent issues that the newly elected Council faced when it first convened in January 1975 was the accelerating pace of evictions by landlords looking to cash in on DC's hot housing market. With black residents most at-risk of losing their homes, the preservation of affordable housing was a central civil rights issue in DC. Clarke joined Ward 6 representative Nadine Winter in prioritizing anti-displacement legislation, including rent control, restrictions on conversions of rental units to condominiums, and an "anti-speculation tax" designed to limit the profits investors could reap by purchasing and reselling houses. In 1980, Clarke helped put in place DC's Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), which gives tenants the right of first refusal to purchase their buildings at the time of sale.

Clarke also focused his attention on an alarming trend in policing during his early years on the Council, specifically a 900 percent rise in arrests for marijuana possession over the course of seven years. Clarke framed decriminalization as a racial justice issue, based on the disproportionate targeting of black citizens for minor infractions. Despite these efforts, Clarke was not able to overcome opposition by religious leaders who saw marijuana as a dangerous "gateway" drug to which black Washingtonians were especially vulnerable.

In 1986, Clarke led the University of the District of Columbia's takeover of the social justice-oriented Antioch School of Law, which was at risk of closing. Renamed for Clarke in 1998, UDC's law school remains committed to advancing justice for those most in need and to providing legal education that is affordable and hands-on.

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On her way to becoming a nationally renowned public health and civil rights activist in the 1940s, Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980) moved to DC in 1925 for an internship at Howard University's Freedmen's Hospital. She had been among the top five graduates in her class at Tufts University. At Howard, Ferebee went on to serve as a longtime clinical instructor in obstetrics and to direct the university's health service.

Just four years after her arrival in DC, Ferebee established Southeast Settlement House at 301 G Street SE to provide recreation and daycare for children living around Capitol Hill, where the only other such facility served whites only. In 1935, she began spending her summers leading the Mississippi Health Project, a mobile clinic and education program for sharecropper families whose diets were commonly limited to items they could purchase at a worksite commissary. Many had never tasted fruit, Ferebee later recalled. The program was staffed by student members of the prestigious Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, of which Ferebee became national president in 1939. That spring, she also helped enroll more than 2,200 new members in the newly reorganized DC branch of the NAACP, as director of its fundraising campaign.

During World War II (1941-1945), Ferebee was a fierce advocate for increasing women's employment in the military and in government service, and in 1944, she played an integral role in desegregating the US Navy's women's branch, known as the WAVES. After the war, Ferebee succeeded Mary McLeod Bethune as president of the National Council of Negro Women, where she continued to fight for integration and equal pay in federal employment, voting rights, and access to health care. During her tenure at the helm of NCNW, Ferebee organized a reception at the Shoreham, marking the first time a major DC hotel had rented its main ballroom to African Americans.

In 1955, Ferebee joined a delegation of women in urging the US Attorney General to help quell racial violence in the South. "How can we tell the women in those areas to register and vote when they are in fear and terror of their lives if they attempt to exercise this right?" she asked. The group blamed the Attorney General for encouraging violence by neglecting to thoroughly investigate crimes against Black citizens or to put white supremacist citizens councils "on the subversive list." Ten years later, when she was 65, Ferebee traveled to Alabama to help register voters in a county where fewer than two percent of more than 15,000 eligible African Americans were registered to vote.

As chair of the DC Commission on the Status of Women in her later years, Ferebee advocated for the hiring of women police officers and against the expansion of prison facilities for women, who, she said, would be better served by community-based programs.

Dorothy Ferebee lived at 1809 2nd Street NW.

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As the Washington correspondent for Chicago Defender for 25 years, Ethel Lois Payne (1911-1991), quoted here, used journalism to raise awareness of racial discrimination and to demand justice. At her first White House press conference in February 1954, Payne questioned President Dwight D. Eisenhower about why the Howard University choir had been barred from a dinner at the Washington Coliseum by the police. The president, who was in attendance at the dinner event, chalked up the incident to a misunderstanding by the choir director. This was the first of many events and issues that the city’s white papers reported on only because Payne was in the press room.

Five months after her first White House press conference, Ethel Lois Payne asked the president if he'd support banning racial discrimination in interstate travel, drawing an angry rebuke and eliminating her chances of being called on again. "The white press was so busy asking questions on other issues that the Blacks and their problems were completely ignored," she said later. Indeed, she was the only reporter to ask how the White House would address racial discrimination in housing. Throughout her career, Payne continued to focus her attention on civil rights issues. She reported from the Columbia Heights home of Spottswood Bolling on the day of the Supreme Court's momentous decision in Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education, and later covered the emerging leadership of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the desegregation of the University of Alabama, and the murder of Emmett Till.

In 1976, Payne co-chaired a national conference for Black women in the media that featured luminaries such as former presidential candidate Shirley Chisolm (D-NY). Raised in Englewood on Chicago's South Side, Payne became active in civil rights as a young woman; at 29, she received an award from the NAACP for recruiting more than 20 new members. In 1941, she joined Asa Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement to demand compliance with a new law banning employment discrimination by federal contractors. After Randolph called off his march in exchange for an executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission, Payne was charged with making Black Chicagoans aware of the new rules and how to gain access to jobs.

In 1947, Payne was assaulted by a Chicago police officer when she defended a group of young men being arrested for loitering; shortly thereafter, in 1948, she left the city for good.

During her Washington years, Payne resided in various neighborhoods. Her last home—an apartment at The Rittenhouse on 16th Street where she lived from 1978 until her death in 1991—was described by the Washington Post as overflowing "with books, plants, posters from China and ivory plaques and figures from Africa" collected during her reporting years. Her neighbors in the building included Rev. Jesse Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline.

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The Washington Urban League was established in 1939 as the DC branch of the National Urban League, a national, non-profit organization whose main objective was the development of job opportunities for African Americans.

Upon its opening, the Washington Urban League (WUL) was one of more than 40 branches of the National Urban League in as many cities across the country. The inter-racial Washington chapter, now known as the Greater Washington Urban League, devoted itself to the improvement of employment, health and housing of African Americans. In 1940, the WUL joined the NAACP in demanding an end to the requirement that federal government job applications include photographs. This photo provision, along with the civil service rule requiring that at least three qualified applicants be considered for any position, effectively barred African Americans from being hired when an apparently white candidate was available.

In 1943, the WUL joined other organizations in demanding that federally financed war housing for whites, just across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, be converted for use by Black households displaced two years earlier for the Pentagon's construction. Six months later, the WUL argued that the city’s zoning regulation that restricted development in a section of Southeast DC to detached, single-family housing, was "tantamount to zoning by race." Despite a legal appeal by the local white citizens association, the Board of Zoning agreed and opened the area up to multi-family housing that could more readily accommodate African American residents.

In June 1969, the WUL staged a rally at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church for Black employees of the General Services Administration (GSA), where the vast majority were concentrated in low-paying jobs with little hope of being promoted. And when Pepco—the city’s power provider—sought a rate increase in the 1960's, WUL asked the District's Public Service Commission to defer approval of the increase until Pepco was investigated for racial discrimination.

The Greater Washington Urban League is still active and is headquartered at 3501 14th Street NW.

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Howard Dilworth Woodson, a civil engineer and civic leader, led successful campaigns for better services in neglected African American neighborhoods in far Northeast DC. Born in Pittsburgh, Woodson (1876-1962) earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 1899. He moved to Washington in 1907 and began working as a structural engineer in the supervising architect’s office for the Public Buildings Administration. One of the few black licensed architectural engineers in the District, Woodson designed portions of Union Station, the Metropolitan Baptist and Vermont Avenue Baptist churches, and hundreds of private buildings in D.C., as well as government buildings throughout the United States.

Woodson also served as supervising architect for the Universal Development and Loan Company, Inc., a real estate and development company that owned considerable property in the upper Northeast section of the city. Most notably, Universal built the nine-acre Suburban Gardens Amusement Park in 1921 at 50th and Hayes streets NE in Deanwood, which for about two decades offered a recreational haven for African Americans who were barred from whites-only amusement parks.

Woodson was an active civic leader in Deanwood and the far Northeast section of the city. He was a founder and the first president of the Northeast Boundary Civic Association and the Far Northeast Business and Professional Association. Through these organizations he led residents in battles for public schools, parks, water and sewer systems, street paving and lighting.

In the 1950s, Woodson, along with other residents of far Northeast began agitating for a public high school as students on that side of town had to go across the river to Spingarn or Eastern, or much farther south to Anacostia High School. In 1972, ten years after Woodon’s death, the city finally opened a new high school in Deanwood and named it Howard D. Woodson Senior High School in honor of the pioneering civil engineer and crusading neighborhood activist. The high school building—a nine-story concrete tower dubbed the Tower of Power—was a state-of-the-art facility designed during the heyday of Brutalism. The school building, which began falling into serious disrepair in the late 1980s, was replaced in 2011 with a new school building, still bearing Woodson’s name.

Woodson built his own house at 4918 Fitch Place NE in 1913, along with the adjacent houses on the street.

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Shortly after it was first established in 1963 as a left-leaning think tank directed by two former Kennedy administration staffers, Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) became a hub for civil rights activists, including lead organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). IPS Fellow Robert Moses organized the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, a massive voter registration drive conducted mostly by white college students recruited from the North in partnership with Black volunteers from the South. The summer project also generated membership in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which would soon send shock waves through the Democratic Party by demanding to be seated at the party's national convention in Atlantic City.

Frank Smith, a SNCC organizer who would eventually be elected to the DC Council, credits IPS with providing essential insider knowledge of Capitol Hill and strategic support for the Freedom Party, which brought national attention to Black disenfranchisement in the South. Smith first became affiliated with IPS during Freedom Summer. In 1966, the organization helped him bring 90 sharecroppers from Mississippi for a five-day camp-in across from the White House. Many had been kicked off rented land for registering to vote or for striking for better pay. They demanded that War on Poverty funds be provided to the groups helping them and other sharecroppers survive.

Over the next decade, IPS facilitated a network of intellectuals, activists, and policymakers focused on advancing black civil rights, working for women's liberation, and ending the Vietnam War. IPS also hosted political education seminars, giving local public housing tenants and welfare right advocates the opportunity to meet with grassroots activists from other parts of the country. Dick Gregory visited in 1967 during his campaign as a write-in candidate for US president. IPS "created synergy, intellectual engagement, and was productive," recalled Smith, who worked alongside fellow SNCC veteran Ivanhoe Donaldson to advise newly elected Black mayors throughout the country while at the same time building Black political power in DC, especially after the city regained home rule in 1974.

Other IPS fellows and staff included SNCC organizers Courtland Cox, Charles Sherrod, and John Wilson, who would later chair the DC Council; Tony Gittens, a co-founder of the Drum and Spear Bookstore; Topper Carew, who created the New Thing Art and Architecture Center; and Roger Wilkins, who spent a decade at IPS beginning in 1982. Wilkins, the nephew of longtime NAACP director Roy Wilkins, helped organize the Free South Africa Movement during his tenure as a senior fellow at IPS.

From 1968 until 1978, IPS was located in a former townhouse at 1520 New Hampshire Avenue in Dupont Circle, now the Embassy of Jamaica. In 1978, the organization moved to R Street; it is currently located at 1301 Connecticut Avenue NW.

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Built in the 1920s to serve white residents of Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in 1957 became the first church of the Washington Episcopal Diocese to integrate its congregation. The St. Stephen's congregants who supported this decision stayed in the neighborhood and embraced its increasingly Black population at a time when most white churches and their congregants fled. With Rev. William (Bill) Wendt’s appointment to lead St. Stephen's in 1960, he and the the congregation made racial justice central to its mission.

Rev. Wendt joined the Freedom Riders in 1961 and led a delegation of DC clergy, including the former assistant minister of All Soul’s Unitarian Church, James Reeb, to march from Selma to Montgomery with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965. As uprisings broke out in cities across the country two years later, Rev. Wendt hosted a black power rally at St. Stephen's, where Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair H. Rap Brown spoke before an audience of 900 people. On April 4, 1968, just hours after Dr. King was shot down in Memphis, St. Stephen's became the first DC church to hold a requiem eucharist (a ceremony honoring the dead) for the civil rights leader. During the 1970s, the congregation tore down its parish house to devote all of the land surrounding the church building to affordable housing. The 72-unit Urban Village Apartments on either side of and behind the church opened in 1978 and remains accessible to low-income residents.

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