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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Upon its dedication in August 1972, the DC Public Library’s new central branch—designed by famed modernist architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe—became one of the first public buildings in the country to be named in honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968). The naming of this iconic downtown edifice culminated four years of activism by residents from across the city.

African Americans comprised around 70 percent of DC's population, and many had known King both as a national figure and as a key ally in local campaigns for civil rights.

As King was first rising to national prominence as a co-leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, when he was just 27 years old, he visited DC and reportedly addressed 4,000 people at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church and at Howard University's Rankin Chapel. He urged students to devote themselves to dismantling segregation and wealth inequality, emphasizing his concern with "the slums in this city."

In May 1957, King helped organize the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, for which thousands of people converged at the Lincoln Memorial. There, on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe, he engaged the crowd in a call and response of "Give us the ballot!" Along with co-organizers, A. Philip Randolph and the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, King was awarded a key to the city during this visit. King returned in April 1959, where he spoke at the Washington Monument grounds to some 26,000 marchers who had gathered to demand "the orderly and speedy integration of schools," according to a petition that was circulated there. (At the first Youth March for Integrated Schools, a year earlier, Coretta Scott King had delivered a speech on her husband's behalf.)

As DC's Black leadership ramped up its campaign for home rule in 1965—the District had lost the right to self-governance almost a century earlier—King joined the DC Coalition of Conscience and 5,000 home rule activists for a vigil at Lafayette Park in August 1965. King charged "Southern congressmen" with being "derelict in their duties and sacred responsibility to make justice and freedom a reality for all citizens of the District of Columbia." The event was co-chaired by Rev. Walter Fauntroy, who invited King back to DC two years later to lead a parade through the Shaw neighborhood in support of a community-controlled urban renewal project.

In February 1968, King joined 2,500 members of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam in defying a court injunction to hold a service at Arlington National Cemetery in honor of fallen soldiers. During this visit, he also met with Black Panther H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, founder of D.C.'s Black United Front, in hopes of persuading them to support his Poor People's Campaign. A month later, and just five days before he was assassinated in Memphis, King delivered his last address in DC at the National Cathedral. Sit-ins at the District Building to demand that the city honor King with a holiday began in May 1968, prompting Council hearings and annual remembrances. The call for residents' input on a name for the new library prompted hundreds to weigh in, including school children. As a racially integrated facility devoted to learning, in a downtown area that had formerly been largely off-limits to black Washingtonians, the new central library was a fitting memorial to King. A Black Studies Division was launched during the first year it opened, and its free meeting rooms and event spaces have since become sites for political organizing and activism

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Activist and Ward 7 DC councilmember Willie J. Hardy (1922-2007), quoted above, lived most of her life around Marshall Heights, where, in the 1930s, her mother helped cut roads and haul water to the then-isolated, semi-rural Black community. Hardy later raised eight children and three nieces at 5046 Benning Road NE in a more modern Marshall Heights, calling them her "built-in picket line." Her husband Lloyd Hardy, a cabbie, drove the whole family to protest outside the whites-only Glen Echo amusement park in the summer of 1960.

Before her election to the DC Council in 1974, Hardy ran the Metropolitan Community Aid Council out of a Quonset building in Deanwood which Lloyd Hardy helped build, known as the Hut. The group provided housing, food, clothing, and legal assistance for people evicted from their homes or awaiting public assistance. "We don't receive any money from any Federal agency," she told a reporter, "and yet the Welfare Department has to refer starving people to us so they won't die while they complete their paper work." Lloyd used his cab to shuttle evicted families to the Hut and to pick up food and clothing for them.

In January 1966, Hardy coordinated the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) successful one-day bus boycott, led by Marion Barry. Two years later, she became the only woman on a steering committee for the Black United Front, a coalition of civil rights and Black Power groups across the city that demanded a voice in the city's governance and community control of the police. In January 1968 when the Department of Justice hosted a meeting on "preventing and controlling racial disorders," in Warrenton, Virginia for white police chiefs from across the country, Hardy attempted to crash it. Hardy, who objected to "white Americans getting together, with taxpayer money to discuss us," was physically prevented from entering the meeting. In 1969, she joined Marion Barry in opposing Mayor Walter Washington's plan to add 1,000 officers to DC's police force, urging that funds instead be directed to programs for rehabilitation and preventing crime. Shortly after winning her seat on the DC Council—she served two terms (one two-year, and one four-year) from 1975-1981—Hardy commented that "the ones who make laws are the ones who bring about change. That's where the power is."

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Freeman conceived of the New School of Afro-American Thought as a much-need institution for educating and empowering Black residents through a wide array of Afro-centric offerings. As he later explained, some had begun to see Howard University as failing "to accept its responsibility to do anything other than produce people for jobs." The New School was established to fill that gap. The project grew out of the Cardozo Area Art Committee which sponsored public exhibitions, and its March 1966 festival “Three Days of Soul,” which brought a variety of musicians, dancers, poets and other Black performance artists to DC for a festival celebrating black culture.

In a poor neighborhood that Freeman described as having "too many liquor stores," the New School transformed the former auto repair shop at 2208 14th Street NW into "a factory for Black minds," offering free classes in writing, drama, poetry, history, drumming, dance, Swahili, photography, data processing, and political thought, among other subjects. It brought in well-known speakers and encouraged members of the community, especially underserved neighborhood residents, to plan and participate in events. It also served as a free facility for political and community organizing, hosting the first meeting of DC's Black United Front in January 1968. Organized by Stokely Carmichael, the meeting attracted a standing-room-only crowd of around 100 local leaders.

Because DC was a mecca for Black political organizing and regularly attracted leaders from across the country, the New School became a seed for similar institutions in other cities. Although the school had closed by the spring of 1971, its impact continued to be felt through the spread of Afro-centric education and by Washingtonians who attended the school during its active years. After the school closed, the building fell into disrepair and stood boarded up and abandoned until it was renovated in recent years.

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Founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune as a national voice for Black women's organizations, NCNW signed onto the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, under the leadership of Dorothy Height from Mississippi. As a woman, Height was excluded as a speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, propelling NCNW to organize its own initiative to support the work of voting rights activists in Mississippi. This work evolved into securing 1960s-era War on Poverty funds for Black women in Mississippi and funding community organizing in more than a dozen states.

In the 1970s, inspired by the Black Power Movement, NCNW changed its slogan from “Faith, Leadership, Culture” to “Commitment, Unity, and Self-Reliance.”

NCNW's reputation among white politicians and funders as a moderate, gradualist organization helped secure funding for additional black power projects in the Mississippi Delta. Dorothy Height "could handle the bureaucrats in the fashion that she needed to handle them, in order to win the day for the cause," proclaimed Owen Brooks, who headed Delta Ministry, a grassroots anti-poverty group in Mississippi.

From 1943 until 1966, the NCNW headquarters and the private residence of its founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, was located at 1318 Vermont Avenue. The organization later moved to 1346 Connecticut Avenue in Dupont Circle before establishing its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1995 where it remains today.

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