“… heavy, heavy is the load That bends my body to the road.” (Georgia Douglas Johnson, The Ordeal)

In mid-June 1919, a group of Navy Yard employees, all veterans of World War I, gathered during their lunch break and formed an all-Black unit of a newly established organization, the American Legion,…

The Victorian rowhouse at 817 Q Street NW was, for more than three decades between 1943 and 1978, the local chapter office of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Socialist…

As African American families began fleeing the South during the Great Migration, they discovered in Washington great opportunities in education and employment. However, finding capital to buy a home…

"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…

The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I…

"If we’re going to have civilization in Washington, we need more friction."

“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,…

“He was a radical among the radicals ... It is only the gentleman and the scholar who can be a radical and an agitator without being a nuisance.”

In May 1961, at the former Greyhound Bus Station on New York Avenue NW, a group of activist volunteers boarded a bus to begin what would become a tumultuous and violence-filled “Freedom Ride 1961.”