When entrepreneur and former law student Geneva Valentine (1901-1971) opened Equitable Realty Co. on U Street in the early 1930s, she immediately went to work on "breaking" all-white blocks in Park View, where racially restrictive covenants barred African Americans from settling.

In the 1940s, Valentine worked with Black clients in Brookland and in Bloomingdale and other areas of the city to secure houses for those looking to buy. A 1950 Negro Digest article credited her with refusing "white clients' requests that [home prices] be raised for colored buyers," as was common among real estate brokers who knew that African Americans would pay more, due to the scarcity of houses available to them. Valentine’s assistance in finding a house for Clara Mays, on First Street NW in Bloomingdale, led to one of DC's most significant legal challenges to racial deed covenants, in Mays v. Burgess.

Around 1949, Valentine purchased a building at 2008 Sixteenth Street NW with the intention of establishing what she called the "first non discriminating cooperative apartment" in the city. By June 1950, the co-op was said to house "several Negro families who live there harmoniously with white families." Valentine's Futurers Cooperative, Inc., formed in 1941 to enable its ten women members to become homeowners, purchased investment properties in the District and a 56-acre farm in Prince Georges County, Maryland. "We plan to build our 'Dream City,'" wrote Valentine in a 1946 report, to provide "gracious living, financial security, and independence for us all, and a better life for the people of the community."

A cofounder of the Emergency Committee on Housing, established to address the increasing use of eminent domain and restrictive deed covenants to displace Black Washingtonians, Valentine recalled being the only Black real estate investor to attend a 1944 national meeting on housing in Chicago. There she expounded on her group's unsuccessful effort, in partnership with the Washington Urban League, to keep "a sizeable tract of land in Arlington County" from being taken by the federal government and sold for whites-only development (The George Pickett Homes).

In 1960, Valentine advocated for the inclusion, in redevelopment plans for Adams Morgan, of the area where most white residents lived. Otherwise, she testified, "the process of urban renewal would again become restricted to an area occupied predominantly by non-whites," and "the certainty of many that this urban renewal program is a means to an end, to uproot the minority, will be substantiated. "

The former Equitable Realty office at 1011 U Street NW is currently hosts retail on the first and second floors of the building.

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Arthur Ashe, who wrote this passage, was among the many luminaries who headed to this area—a center for black business, activism and entertainment since the turn of the 20th century—when he came to town for tennis tournaments in the early 1960s.

U Street had gained its reputation as a mecca for black culture decades earlier; many of the street’s businesses and institutions were black-owned and run, and the surrounding residential streets were home to a majority African American population. Still, while many white businesses in the neighborhood readily took money from black customers, they refused to employ them. In the 1930s, a Peoples Drug store near this intersection was the target of protests waged by the New Negro Alliance for its policy against hiring African Americans. Mary McLeod Bethune, the outspoken founder of the National Council of Negro Women, was among those who picketed.

In 1943, the Howard University Chapter of the NAACP held a sit-in and pickets at Little Palace Cafeteria. Pauli Murray, then the only woman and the top student in her class at Howard University Law School, later wrote that Little Palace was "a source of mortification for countless unsuspecting Negroes who entered it assuming that they would be served in the heart of the Negro section of the city." Five days after students began picketing, the restaurant dropped its whites-only policy.

By the mid-1960s, the area was a hub for civil rights organizations, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SCLC organized the 1963 March on Washington, the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, and advocated for DC home rule. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's D.C. branch and Marion Barry's Pride, Inc. were also headquartered here.

On April 4, 1968, black Washingtonians gathered around this intersection after learning of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis. In the autumn of 1968, the murder by a white police officer of a black citizen near this intersection during a dispute over jaywalking sparked renewed demands for fair treatment of black citizens and for hiring more black officers.

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In early 1950, Mary Church Terrell and other activists attempted to eat at Thompson’s Restaurant, a downtown cafeteria and one of many restaurants and eateries with a whites-only policy. The group was deliberately testing the validity of Reconstruction-era laws that gave African Americans equal access to restaurants, hotels and other commercial establishments—a test that landed three years later in the Supreme Court. The Court upheld these laws, dealing another blow to Jim Crow practices in the District and nationwide.

The sit-in followed earlier protests waged by Howard University students, notably Ruth Powell and Pauli Murray. In 1944, Murray discovered that local laws adopted in 1872 and 1873 promising African Americans equal access to commercial establishments in the city had mysteriously disappeared off the books. "Elated over these preliminary findings," she wrote, "I went around the law school waving the statute and arguing that the old civil rights legislation was still in force." (Murray, already a seasoned activist, was the only woman and the top student in Howard University's law school class of 1944.) 

Soon after these laws were publicized in the 1948 report Segregation in Washington, and after a team of civil rights attorneys presented the DC Commissioners with their findings that the laws were still valid, Mary Church Terrell and other local activists organized the multi-racial Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the DC Anti-Discrimination Laws. They chose DC’s newest branch of Thompson’s―part of a Chicago chain with four locations here―for a lunchtime visit on February 28, 1950. When Terrell and the other two African Americans in the group were refused service, they persuaded the city to sue, and the case eventually advanced to the US Supreme Court as District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc. On June 8, 1953, the Court ruled that the "lost laws" were still valid, thus ending the legality of enforced segregation of public accommodations in Washington. The 89-year-old Mary Church Terrell celebrated the victory in this landmark ruling just one year before her death. The building that housed Thompson's Restaurant was razed and replaced with the office building in the 1980s.

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In 1946, thirteen years after The Green Pastures played to a whites-only audience at the National Theatre, segregation was still the norm. But when a New York play starring Ingrid Bergman was booked at the Lisner Auditorium and Bergman and the company discovered that the venue barred black audiences, they organized protests and boycotts by both the Dramatists Guild and the Actors Equity Association. The protestors targeted the National Theatre as members of Congress, civil rights groups, religious leaders, and many others weighed in on the situation.

In 1948, activist and educator Edward B. Henderson sued the National Theatre for refusing to sell him tickets because of his race. His attorneys, James A. Cobb, George E.C. Hayes and Leon Ransom, argued that a 19th century anti-discrimination law applied to the National. In addition, they said, the Supreme Court ruling that found racially restrictive housing covenants unconstitutional logically meant that segregation was “contrary to the public policy of the United States.”

In June 1948, despite this legal argument, the judge upheld the discriminatory policy of the National Theatre. Meanwhile, the standoff with Actors Equity continued. That August, Actors Equity announced that its members were no longer required to perform before segregated audiences in Washington. As whites-only theaters such as the National lost bookings, people flocked to plays at the city’s non-segregated venues such as the Howard Theatre, the Gayety Burlesque house, and the brand-new Arena Stage. In 1952, under new management, and in an effort to remain competitive, National Theatre dropped its racial ban.

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John Anderson Lankford (1874-1946) broke barriers when he put his stamp on Washington’s built environment begining in the early 20th century. At the same time, he promoted racial progress through various efforts including founding the Washington, DC branch of the National Negro Business League. How to achieve equality was a sometimes rancorous debate, and although W.E.B. DuBois and others espoused radical action, Lankford and many others preached diligence and patience.

Born on his family’s farm in Missouri, Lankford attended Lincoln University, Tuskegee Institute, and Wilburforce University, among other institutions, earning degrees in the sciences, mechanics, and law, while also studying architecture. He arrived in Washington in 1902 when he was hired to complete the design and supervise construction of the Washington headquarters of the Richmond-based United Order of True Reformer at 1200 U Street NW. This commission jump-started his Washington architectural career, leading him to become one of the most prominent African American architects of his time. While Lankford practiced architecture throughout his lifetime, he also pursued other business and professional interests.

In 1905, Lankford spearheaded the organization of the DC branch of the National Negro Business League, a self-help association first established five years earlier by Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute while Lankford was a student there. The establishment of the group emanated from Booker T. Washington’s belief that the key to social equality lay in economic development and was consistent with Lankford’s own interest in pursuing racial equality.

When D.C.’s newly appointed Board of Architects established a licensing system in late 1924, Lankford became the first African American architect to be licensed here. Lankford and his wife Charlotte lived in several different houses in the greater U Street and Columbia Heights neighborhoods throughout their District residency. From about 1920 to 1928, they resided at 1448 Q Street NW; they then lived at 1750 S Street until the late 1930s, when they moved to 1261 Irving (demolished). By 1940 they occupied the house at 1239 Girard Street NW until Lankford's death in 1946.

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In 1913 laborer and entrepreneur John Whitelaw Lewis founded the Industrial Savings Bank at 11th and U streets NW, opening up financial opportunities for African Americans.  When it opened, Industrial Bank (designed by Black architect Isaah T. Hatton) was the only Black-owned bank in the city. Nineteen ministers immediately moved their churches’ funds there, encouraging their congregants to do the same.

In 1932, Industrial Bank, along with about 10,000 other US banks, was forced to close due to the national financial crisis that caused the Great Depression.

Two years later, Jesse H. Mitchell, a Howard University Law School graduate and former vice president at Industrial, reopened it as the Industrial Bank of Washington. Despite the losses they’d suffered when the bank closed, investors quickly reappeared, and Industrial thrived. Industrial Bank contributed to the growth of Washington’s Black middle class by offering mortgages and business lending and by hiring African Americans when white banks refused to do so well into the mid-20th century.

In the early 1970s, 94 percent of the bank’s mortgage loans stayed in the District, while only 39 percent of mortgages by DC’s biggest lender, Riggs National Bank, covered District properties. In addition, Riggs and other white-owned banks lent mostly west of Rock Creek Park, while Industrial focused on areas where African Americans lived.

Mitchell's son B. Doyle Mitchell took over the bank's leadership in 1954. The bank remains in operation today. 

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George E.C. Hayes (1894-1968) graduated from the Howard University Law School in 1918 and spent much of the rest of his life working to dismantle racial segregation. Hayes taught law at Howard and served as the university’s general counsel for more than 30 years. He was also legal counsel to the NAACP’s national office and led its DC branch.

In the mid-1920s he and his wife Louise were one of several families who defied a racially restrictive deed covenant by moving to the 1700 block of S Street NW. By the time the courts upheld the covenant in Corrigan v. Buckley—endorsing the right of white residents to legally bar Black settlement—the Hayes and other Howard University faculty had effectively turned over the block and asserted their right to stay. No further attempts were made to enforce the covenant.

In 1925, Hayes joined a group of young attorneys, including Charles Hamilton Houston, in breaking from the Colored Bar Association to form a new black lawyers group that would work more aggressively to demand full citizenship for African Americans. (Known as the Washington Bar Association, it is now the DC branch of the National Bar Association, which was founded the same year.) He later represented the Committee for Racial Democracy in its attempt to desegregate the National Theatre. Although the court ultimately upheld the theater’s policy, Hayes ably prevented its lawyers from having the case dismissed.

Hayes was part of a team of attorneys who represented Marguerite Carr in an anti-segregation lawsuit against the DC schools. An appeals court upheld segregation in Carr v. Corning in 1950, the same year that Hayes and his Howard University law colleague James Nabrit attended a NAACP lawyers conference where they urged the organization to take a new, more aggressive approach in directly attacking segregated schools as unconstitutional. Hayes and Nabrit soon became the lead attorneys in Bolling v. Sharpe, DC’s companion case to Brown v. Board of Education; Hayes authored the brief and “possessed one of the most skillful and elegant trial techniques I have ever seen,” said Brown’s lead attorney, later a federal judge.

While Hayes is less recognized than his colleagues Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall for his role in the legal desegregation of public schools, he gained significant attention for another 1954 case. Hayes represented government cafeteria worker Annie D. Moss before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that year. He advised Moss to voluntarily testify, rather than be subject to a subpoena, on her activities as the member of a union allegedly affiliated with the Communist Party. Covered on national television, the hearing undermined McCarthy’s mission by revealing Moss to have been unfairly targeted by a spy posing as a co-worker. During this period of anti-Communist fervor, Hayes also negotiated on behalf of noted scholar and pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois and performer/activist Paul Robeson when the State Department revoked their passports due to alleged Communist ties.

In 1955, President Eisenhower appointed Hayes to the DC Public Utilities Commission. As the agency’s first Black member and its chairman, Hayes pushed against discriminatory hiring and contracting practices, not only by his agency but also by the utilities it regulated.

Hayes’s law partner James A. Cobb (1876-1958), shared the Hayes home. Cobb earned two law degrees from, and taught at, Howard University Law School and served as judge of the Municipal Court for the District of Columbia from 1926 to 1935, an appointee of President Calvin Coolidge. He was also the lead attorney in the anti-covenant Corrigan v. Buckley case, centered on this block, and with Hayes, represented Clara Mays in her effort to defy a racial covenant in Bloomingdale. This case, Mays v. Burgess, gained wide notoriety and provided traction toward the Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling in Hurd v. Hodge that the enforcement of racial covenants was unconstitutional.

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The Drum and Spear Bookstore, which operated from 1968 to 1974, specialized in books by and about Black people. The bookstore, founded by Charlie Cobb, Courtland Cox, Judy Richardson and Curtis Hayes (later Curtis Muhammed)--all veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--and Tony Gittens who became its first manager, was a literary oasis steeped in the Black Power and Black Consciousness movements. It served as a local, national and international resource for reliable information about the African American and African world at a time when such information was not widely available.

Drum and Spear quickly developed into a combination bookstore, library, community and education center, arts and crafts outlet, and literary haven, where writers held readings and people of all walks of life and all political persuasions met and exchanged ideas. For a time, Drum and Spear was the largest bookstore of its kind in the United States. It inspired the establishment of black bookstores around the country. It also inspired special surveillance by the FBI, which considered black bookstores to be subversive organizations.

An ancillary business, Drum and Spear Press, at 1802 Belmont Road in Adams Morgan, released its first title in 1969: A History of Pan-African Revolt, by C.L.R. James. The Trinidadian-born historian, author, and political activist had joined the faculty of the University of the District of Columbia in 1968. Other releases included Eloise Greenfield's children’s series, the first of which was Bubbles. Some of the bookstore founders also helped open the Center for Black Education, one block west at 1435-1437 Fairmont Street, as an alternative to Federal City College, DC’s new land grant school. The Center embraced a Pan-Africanist philosophy and required its students to do likewise. Through the 1970s it taught a variety of courses, including welding, food science, civil engineering, and politics.

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So chronicled newspaper columnist William Raspberry upon the death of Billy Simpson (1914-1975), owner of Billy Simpson’s House of Seafood and Steaks. Indeed, between 1958 and his death, Billy Simpson and his restaurant played a central role in the social and political culture of the city, providing Washington’s African American community with an upscale venue not just for dining and socializing, but for strategizing on the political and civil rights events of the day. Simpson never ran for public office himself, but his influence was widespread.

As soon as it opened in 1956, the restaurant—with its Tudor half-timbering exterior—filled a void for African Americans who had few options for dining out. The restaurant became a popular meeting place for intellectuals, professionals, politicians, entertainers, and African diplomats who came to enjoy the elegant “white table-cloth service” on the restaurant’s first floor and its intimate Ebony Table bar on the second. In keeping with the medieval motif of the restaurant, Simpson established an informal “Round Table” where black Congressmen, journalists, and federal officials gathered.

Congressmen Charles C. Diggs and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., were personal friends of Simpson’s, and regulars at the restaurant. Among other causes, Simpson—a life-long advocate for home rule for the District—actively supported the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (Jesse Jackson used the restaurant as his headquarters during the Campaign), and the anti-war movement.

Billy Simpson’s House of Seafood and Steaks was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

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Following the merger of two banks, this building operated as the headquarters for the new Federal-American National Bank. The bank building was designed by architect Alfred C. Bossom (1881-1965), in association with Washington’s leading Beaux-Arts practitioner, Jules Henri de Sibour (1872 -1938). Built between 1925 and 1926, the bank has an unusual plan, with the banking room on a raised main floor and retail space at street level (as illustarted by the shoe store that once operated on the lower level, below the bank). This architectural design is unique to DC bank buildings in the early 20th century, in that it utilized the second floor to separate internal financial business from the cacophonous noise of the street. The building features a monumental Classical Revival façade in limestone, with large arched windows, engaged columns, sculptural embellishment, and a bronze vestibule. The banking room is designed in the Renaissance Revival style and has a marble entrance stair, mezzanine, elaborate polychrome coffered ceiling, chandeliers, ornamentation in classical motifs, and an innovative open counter design. In October 1930, Federal-American merged with Merchants Bank and Trust, and operated four branches in the city — in addition to its central office. Despite this apparent success, the banking crisis of 1933 and the ensuing financial turmoil of the Great Depression rendered the bank insolvent. Thus, it did not receive a government license to resume operation. Part of this closure was due to the Federal-American building itself, an impressive and costly structure that constituted the majority of the bank’s financial reservoirs during a time of crisis. This type of investment is not easily liquidated, and was a major factor in the closure of banks, which precipitated the Great Depression. Federal-American was just one of many bank casualties across the nation. The federal government established Hamilton National Bank out of seven local banks (including Federal-American) and the central office was operated out of this building. In 1954, Hamilton merged with the National Bank of Washington and retained residence at this stunning building on 14th Street NW. The building then sat vacant for a number of years, awaiting a new use. In recent years, the original bank building has undergone an extensive restoration and renovation, and now operates as office, retail, and restaurant space. The building now includes a rooftop deck, fitness club, and terrace gardens. An 11-story office building facing G Street has also been added to the building’s rear elevation. Both the bank building’s exterior and interior are historically designated. DC Inventory: July 18, 1990