Attorney and educator Frank D. Reeves (1916-1973) was a critical player in seminal civil rights victories, namely the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court school-segregation case. Born in…

“George E.C. Hayes was one of the great lawyers who fought for the little people of this Nation when it was extremely unpopular to do so.” (Wiley Branton, Director of the United Planning Organization,…

The James and Mary Hurd house at 116 Bryant Street in Bloomingdale was at the center of the Supreme Court's landmark 1948 decision ending court enforcement of racially restrictive real estate…

In 1954, James Nabrit and co-lead attorney George E.C. Hayes celebrated the outcome of Bolling v. Sharpe, DC's companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. For years, attorneys had argued in favor…

DC native Lemuel A. Penn was an educator, a decorated World War II veteran and an Army reservist. He was also a civil rights martyr.

Established in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) DC branch was the largest and most influential of some 50 branches across the United States. The group…

The Old City Hall Building at Judiciary Square was the site of a decades-long battle to desegregate the whites-only DC Bar Association and its law library, both housed at what was the US District…

As the highest court of the land, the United States Supreme Court is ultimately where significant, nationwide civil rights advances are made, and sometimes unmade. While Congress has a huge role, too,…

In 1942, the rowhouse at 2530 13th Street was at the center of a successful legal battle to open this section of Columbia Heights to Black residence.

"Liberty is not the loser when the pressures of conformity to prejudice are removed by law." (Thurgood Marshall, Solicitor General of the United States, March 1967)