The ClubHouse (also known as the Clubhouse and the Club House), constructed in phases between 1930 and 1945, served as an automobile garage and showroom before becoming DC’s top African American dance club from 1975 to 1990. As AIDS became an epidemic in the early 1980s, the ClubHouse became a center for activism by LGBTQ racial minorities, and the focal point for the Black gay community’s response to the disease. The ClubHouse was the third, and most successful, dance club project of the Metropolitan Capitolites, one of DC’s earliest gay-oriented social clubs. The Capitolites began throwing house parties in the 1960s, providing an essential entertainment and meeting space as well as social networking opportunities. The group opened the ClubHouse in the  former garage and showroom with 400 charter members, a number that swelled to 4,000. On weekends, 8,000 people lined up to enter the club. During the 1980s, under the leadership of John Eddy, Morrell Chasten, and Audrea Scott, the ClubHouse was instrumental in creating an awareness of HIV and AIDS among African Americans. The club lent its space, mailing list, and organizing ability to the first AIDS Forum for Black and Third World Gays, jointly sponsored in September 1983 with the Whitman Walker Clinic.  This was one of the first events during the AIDS crisis where public health workers reached out to the African American community. Several in attendance expressed concern about inadequate reporting on the disease’s impact on minorities—40 percent of people with AIDS were Black.   Less than 18 months later, ClubHouse staff organized a holistic health response to AIDS that by 1988 had become Us Helping Us, one of DC’s most important AIDS education and support organizations. Us Helping Us met at the ClubHouse until the venue closed in 1990; despite the club’s efforts to curb the spread of the disease, AIDS had dispirited the community and killed many of its members. Later a nightclub for teenagers, the building currently houses the DC Vets Center. It was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) as part of a project focused on sites related to LGBTQ nightlife in DC.

This is a stop on the DC's LGBTQ+ History Tour.

This site was documented, along with four other DC bars/clubs, by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in 2016 as part of its DC LGBTQ Nightlife project.

For more information about DC's LGBTQ History, please see the Historic Context Statement for Washington’s LGBTQ Resources.

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Uline Arena became the largest venue in the city for sports events when it opened in 1941, but its whites-only policy in an increasingly Black city, and in a neighborhood where many African Americans lived, made it a source of controversy and a site of protest. Although the renowned activist and performer Paul Robeson gave a concert here in the venue's opening year, the arena remained mostly off-limits to black Washingtonians.  Pickets and boycotts targeting Uline were led by Dr. Edwin B. Henderson, the longtime director of health and physical education for DC's Black schools and a leader of the NAACP's D.C. Branch. Henderson had learned to play basketball at Harvard, when the sport was first developing in the 1900s, and had founded the District's first Black basketball league at True Reformers Hall in 1908. He had formed school teams throughout the city and had organized DC's Black high school athletic conference as well as the first association of African American referees.    Henderson's activism extended beyond the District's boundaries to Falls Church, Virginia, where he moved with his wife in 1913 and cofounded the NAACP's first rural branch. "Too many of our best young people move to Washington and their economic and cultural influence is lost to the community wherein they were brought up," Henderson later wrote of employment discrimination in Northern Virginia.

In some 3,000 letters to the editor that he penned during his lifetime, and as a columnist for the Afro-American, Henderson urged a boycott of the whites-only Washington Redskins in 1961 and praised the Police Boys Club's desegregation the following year. Following Uline Arena's desegregation in 1948, Henderson helped organize an 80-person sit-in at the whites-only Child's Restaurant, across from Union Station. While unsuccessful, it paved the way for Mary Church Terrell's sit-ins and pickets at Thompson's Restaurant beginning in 1950.

The Uline Arena became the Washington Coliseum in 1959, the same year that Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed appeared with Malcolm X before an overflow crowd there.

The Uline Arena was listed in the National Register in 2007 and has since been renovated and coverted to office and retail space. 

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The Pigskin Club was founded by Dr. Charles B. Fisher on July 30, 1938, as a social organization of men who had participated in or contributed to collegiate football. A similar club, the Touchdown Club, was organized three years earlier for whites-only.

Despite its football-and-friendship mission, the Pigskin Club never shied away from social causes, some controversial. In 1957, for example, the Pigskin Club joined labor groups to picket the National Football League Owners, specifically targeting the owner of the Washington Redskins who refused to hire Black players. Earlier, at the outbreak of World War II, it instituted a program to combat the high rate of venereal diseases among Black draftees; this consisted of a 50-member corps of practical nurses trained by physician members to spread information on prevention and treatment. During the war the club also organized a blood bank, as well as an ambulance unit that provided instruction in first aid.

Club founder Charles Fisher (1890-1945), a Washington native, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and Howard University Medical School, working his way through school as a Pullman porter. He was a standout quarterback on the Howard University Bisons football team in 1917, 1919, and 1920, and this experience inspired him to form an organization in which former players could enjoy camaraderie and help new generations of athletes.

The Pigskin Club’s first organizational meeting took place at Fisher’s medical office in the basement of his house at 1842 15th Street NW, and included George E.C. Hayes, civil rights attorney; E.B. Henderson, advocate for civil rights in athletics/sports; John R. Pinkett, entrepreneur and real estate broker; and Garnet Wilkinson, former superintendent of DC’s African American schools.

In 1945, the club moved out of 1842 15th Street NW at the death of founder Charles Fisher. Meeting in various other locations, the club continued to grow from 52 to 400 members comprising some of Washington’s most prominent African American men. The Pigskin Club was still going strong in 2019. The home/office has since been divided into several residential units. 

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As the Washington correspondent for Chicago Defender for 25 years, Ethel Lois Payne (1911-1991), quoted here, used journalism to raise awareness of racial discrimination and to demand justice. At her first White House press conference in February 1954, Payne questioned President Dwight D. Eisenhower about why the Howard University choir had been barred from a dinner at the Washington Coliseum by the police. The president, who was in attendance at the dinner event, chalked up the incident to a misunderstanding by the choir director. This was the first of many events and issues that the city’s white papers reported on only because Payne was in the press room.

Five months after her first White House press conference, Ethel Lois Payne asked the president if he'd support banning racial discrimination in interstate travel, drawing an angry rebuke and eliminating her chances of being called on again. "The white press was so busy asking questions on other issues that the Blacks and their problems were completely ignored," she said later. Indeed, she was the only reporter to ask how the White House would address racial discrimination in housing. Throughout her career, Payne continued to focus her attention on civil rights issues. She reported from the Columbia Heights home of Spottswood Bolling on the day of the Supreme Court's momentous decision in Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education, and later covered the emerging leadership of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the desegregation of the University of Alabama, and the murder of Emmett Till.

In 1976, Payne co-chaired a national conference for Black women in the media that featured luminaries such as former presidential candidate Shirley Chisolm (D-NY). Raised in Englewood on Chicago's South Side, Payne became active in civil rights as a young woman; at 29, she received an award from the NAACP for recruiting more than 20 new members. In 1941, she joined Asa Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement to demand compliance with a new law banning employment discrimination by federal contractors. After Randolph called off his march in exchange for an executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission, Payne was charged with making Black Chicagoans aware of the new rules and how to gain access to jobs.

In 1947, Payne was assaulted by a Chicago police officer when she defended a group of young men being arrested for loitering; shortly thereafter, in 1948, she left the city for good.

During her Washington years, Payne resided in various neighborhoods. Her last home—an apartment at The Rittenhouse on 16th Street where she lived from 1978 until her death in 1991—was described by the Washington Post as overflowing "with books, plants, posters from China and ivory plaques and figures from Africa" collected during her reporting years. Her neighbors in the building included Rev. Jesse Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline.

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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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After receiving a master's in African Studies at Howard University, helping to raise three nieces in her Kalorama home, and working two jobs to put her husband through medical school, Jewell Mazique (1913-2007) quit her clerical position at the Library of Congress in the early 1940s to become a full-time labor and civil rights organizer. She went on to cover local and African affairs for the Afro-American newspaper, and to be a respected leader in the Black Power and pan-Africanist movements of the 1960s and '70s.

With Thelma Dale, Marie Richardson and other local activists, Mazique helped launch a campaign in 1941 to desegregate Capital Transit, DC's privately owned bus and streetcar operator. Although seating wasn't segregated, as in other southern cities, the company hired African Americans only for poorly paid maintenance and custodial jobs. Mazique and her colleagues gathered support from the national NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston, Mary McLeod Bethune, Howard University professor Doxey Wilkerson, and others for a mass meeting at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in November 1942, where Rev. Adam Clayton Powell was a featured speaker.

In 1943, after Capital Transit refused to comply with a desegregation order by the federal Fair Employment Practices Commission, Mazique helped launch pickets at the Commission's headquarters, in advance of scheduled hearings in May, and at busy intersections around the city. At least 800 people joined a march from 10th and U streets NW to Franklin Square, and more than 100 ministers of both white and African American congregations condemned the transit company's policy during Sunday sermons. However, without President Harry S. Truman's backing, and as the federal government began using Communism as a tool for punishing labor and civil rights leaders, it would take until 1955 to get Capital Transit to hire Black operators.

In addition to leading the campaign against Capital Transit, Mazique served as an officer of the National Council of the Southern Youth Congress, which pushed for full integration of the military and its training programs. In 1960, she represented the Washington Elks Civil Liberties League at a mass meeting on the FBI's cooperation with groups that were working to suppress black voting and economic participation.

Mazique and her husband Edward owned the three-story rowhouse at 1861 California Street NW from 1939 to 1945, before moving to 1824 Upshur Street NW, in DC's Crestwood neighborhood.

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Shortly after it was first established in 1963 as a left-leaning think tank directed by two former Kennedy administration staffers, Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) became a hub for civil rights activists, including lead organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). IPS Fellow Robert Moses organized the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, a massive voter registration drive conducted mostly by white college students recruited from the North in partnership with Black volunteers from the South. The summer project also generated membership in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which would soon send shock waves through the Democratic Party by demanding to be seated at the party's national convention in Atlantic City.

Frank Smith, a SNCC organizer who would eventually be elected to the DC Council, credits IPS with providing essential insider knowledge of Capitol Hill and strategic support for the Freedom Party, which brought national attention to Black disenfranchisement in the South. Smith first became affiliated with IPS during Freedom Summer. In 1966, the organization helped him bring 90 sharecroppers from Mississippi for a five-day camp-in across from the White House. Many had been kicked off rented land for registering to vote or for striking for better pay. They demanded that War on Poverty funds be provided to the groups helping them and other sharecroppers survive.

Over the next decade, IPS facilitated a network of intellectuals, activists, and policymakers focused on advancing black civil rights, working for women's liberation, and ending the Vietnam War. IPS also hosted political education seminars, giving local public housing tenants and welfare right advocates the opportunity to meet with grassroots activists from other parts of the country. Dick Gregory visited in 1967 during his campaign as a write-in candidate for US president. IPS "created synergy, intellectual engagement, and was productive," recalled Smith, who worked alongside fellow SNCC veteran Ivanhoe Donaldson to advise newly elected Black mayors throughout the country while at the same time building Black political power in DC, especially after the city regained home rule in 1974.

Other IPS fellows and staff included SNCC organizers Courtland Cox, Charles Sherrod, and John Wilson, who would later chair the DC Council; Tony Gittens, a co-founder of the Drum and Spear Bookstore; Topper Carew, who created the New Thing Art and Architecture Center; and Roger Wilkins, who spent a decade at IPS beginning in 1982. Wilkins, the nephew of longtime NAACP director Roy Wilkins, helped organize the Free South Africa Movement during his tenure as a senior fellow at IPS.

From 1968 until 1978, IPS was located in a former townhouse at 1520 New Hampshire Avenue in Dupont Circle, now the Embassy of Jamaica. In 1978, the organization moved to R Street; it is currently located at 1301 Connecticut Avenue NW.

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These first two lines of a song sung to the tune of “Down by the Riverside” by Howard University student protestors during a 1968 campus uprising capture the spirit of civic activism that has consistently defined a segment of the university’s student body.

Founded by an act of Congress in 1867 as the District's first institution of higher education to welcome African Americans, Howard students and professors have long engaged in political protests both on and off campus. Individually and collectively, their actions have contributed to the desegregation of public and private facilities in the city. In 1925, Howard's Glee Club and Choral Society walked out of a downtown theater upon discovering that the audience was segregated by race. Twelve years later, demands by the Howard community led to Marian Anderson's famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial.

In 1934, Howard students staged a protest outside a national conference on crime after learning that lynching—the most serious criminal justice issue facing the country—was not to be addressed. Professors and students also waged a six-month campaign that year to desegregate the restaurants within the US Capitol building, where African Americans had once been welcome. After Ralph Bunche and history professor Charles Wesley were turned away, and a Howard junior was fired from his job as a waiter for serving a fellow student, he and others rallied a group of students to demand entrance to one of the Capitol's whites-only cafes. Police assaulted and arrested the students, while Congressional Democrats tarred them as communists and as a "a mob of toughs and hoodlums." The dining rooms would remain segregated until the early 1950s.

In 1943, law students Pauli Murray and Ruth Powell organized students to protest the segregation of commercial establishments, clinching a short-lived victory at Thompson’s Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue NW before Howard’s president Mordecai Johnson demanded an end to student sit-ins and picketing. In 1950, political science department chair Ralph Bunche and the Howard Teachers Union threatened to picket the National Theatre for barring African Americans, winning a temporary victory before the theater went back to its whites-only policy.

A 25-year old Howard divinity student named Laurence Henry led a group of Howard students, the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), in picketing the US Capitol in March 1960 to demand passage of a federal civil rights bill. Henry went on to lead successful sit-ins at restaurants and lunch counters in northern Virginia, Rockville, and Bethesda, where he sustained a picket line for 100 hours straight. Henry also initiated the campaign to desegregate Glen Echo, an amusement park in Montgomery County, Maryland. After being beaten and arrested there by police in early August 1960, he was released from jail after waging a hunger strike. When Glen Echo's owners continued to bar black patrons, Henry led a 12-hour overnight march to Baltimore, where NAG demanded a federal court injunction against the park. It finally desegregated the following spring.

Henry went on to work with another Howard student, Stokely Carmichael, to demand federal government support for integrated schools, voting rights, non-discrimination by entities with federal contracts, and removing Congressional barriers to the passage of civil rights laws.

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Ruth Bates Harris (1919-2004) is most remembered for blowing the whistle on NASA’s discriminatory hiring practices in the early 1970s. NASA hired her as an equal opportunity officer in 1971, but two years later it fired her for releasing a scathing report that called the agency's minority hiring program "a near-total failure," and ranked NASA well below other government offices and private companies in its employment of non-whites and women. According to the report, just 5.19% of NASA employees were minorities, with most in low-level clerical positions, compared to 20% in the whole federal government. Her firing led to Congressional hearings in January 1974; she was rehired that August.

Years earlier, Harris worked for the Washington Urban League, before joining the staff of the Council on Human Relations in 1961 and taking over as director three years later. The Council, a city agency, was charged with defending District residents against discrimination in housing, employment, and other areas, but it was provided only a tiny staff and minimal budget to investigate and resolve discrimination complaints.

Harris focused her efforts on discriminatory policing and in November 1967 persuaded the DC City Council to hold public hearings on the topic. Young Black men and antipoverty activists testified and demanded action, but the Council was not empowered to intervene. (Prior to the passage of DC's Home Rule Act five years later, the presidentially appointed Mayor and Council had no say over the police department.) When Black leaders demanded community control of the police department after a series of police shootings in the summer of 1968, Harris commented, "We have always had community control. The problem is that it has been white community control." Facing continued opposition in Congress to desegregating the police department or other agencies, Harris took a new job as the Montgomery County Schools director of human relations in 1969.

Harris lived at 1218 E Street NE.

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On her way to becoming a nationally renowned public health and civil rights activist in the 1940s, Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980) moved to DC in 1925 for an internship at Howard University's Freedmen's Hospital. She had been among the top five graduates in her class at Tufts University. At Howard, Ferebee went on to serve as a longtime clinical instructor in obstetrics and to direct the university's health service.

Just four years after her arrival in DC, Ferebee established Southeast Settlement House at 301 G Street SE to provide recreation and daycare for children living around Capitol Hill, where the only other such facility served whites only. In 1935, she began spending her summers leading the Mississippi Health Project, a mobile clinic and education program for sharecropper families whose diets were commonly limited to items they could purchase at a worksite commissary. Many had never tasted fruit, Ferebee later recalled. The program was staffed by student members of the prestigious Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, of which Ferebee became national president in 1939. That spring, she also helped enroll more than 2,200 new members in the newly reorganized DC branch of the NAACP, as director of its fundraising campaign.

During World War II (1941-1945), Ferebee was a fierce advocate for increasing women's employment in the military and in government service, and in 1944, she played an integral role in desegregating the US Navy's women's branch, known as the WAVES. After the war, Ferebee succeeded Mary McLeod Bethune as president of the National Council of Negro Women, where she continued to fight for integration and equal pay in federal employment, voting rights, and access to health care. During her tenure at the helm of NCNW, Ferebee organized a reception at the Shoreham, marking the first time a major DC hotel had rented its main ballroom to African Americans.

In 1955, Ferebee joined a delegation of women in urging the US Attorney General to help quell racial violence in the South. "How can we tell the women in those areas to register and vote when they are in fear and terror of their lives if they attempt to exercise this right?" she asked. The group blamed the Attorney General for encouraging violence by neglecting to thoroughly investigate crimes against Black citizens or to put white supremacist citizens councils "on the subversive list." Ten years later, when she was 65, Ferebee traveled to Alabama to help register voters in a county where fewer than two percent of more than 15,000 eligible African Americans were registered to vote.

As chair of the DC Commission on the Status of Women in her later years, Ferebee advocated for the hiring of women police officers and against the expansion of prison facilities for women, who, she said, would be better served by community-based programs.

Dorothy Ferebee lived at 1809 2nd Street NW.

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