When the building that houses Cardozo High School was first constructed in 1914-1916, it was called Central High School and for the next thirty-five years was open to white students only. Then in 1950…

As assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852-1925), created the authors and literature exhibit for W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal exhibition on African Americans at…

Originally the headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission, this 1949 building at 425 2nd Street NW became home to the nation's first urban land grant school when Federal City College (FCC)…

For 40 years, the three-story building at 1900 15th Street NW housed B & D Barber Shop on the ground floor. The business was owned by Gardner LaClede Bishop (1909–1992), a leader in the mid-20th…

"Our training included not only learning the law and how to think on our feet but also how to conduct ourselves in hostile situations. . . . Bound together by an overriding passion, we were a tiny…

In February 1944 former National Negro Congress leader John P. Davis attempted to enroll his five-year-old son Michael at Noyes Elementary School in his Brookland neighborhood and was turned away.…

In 1952, Louise Burrell Miller and others sued the DC Board of Education to have deaf African American children educated within the District and won. Schools in DC were segregated by law, including…

For a few years beginning in September 1968, Eugene Meyer Elementary School on 11th Street in the Columbia Heights neighborhood was party to a little-known partnership with Bannockburn Elementary in…

". . . public libraries can no longer afford to have a policy of business as usual . . . . knowledge has always been recognized as a form of social power." (Hardy Franklin, D.C. Central Public Library…

Morgan School, which stood at 18th and California streets until 1977 (now occupied by the soccer field at Marie Reed Recreation Center), stood as a symbol of the success that this mostly Black…