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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Marie Richardson (1920-1987) became a labor and civil rights activist in the 1930s, while a student at Cardozo High School. Her father handled baggage at Union Station, and together they helped organize the first local union in the country to represent station porters, or Red Caps. Once a national Red Caps union was established in 1938, Richardson founded and led its women's auxiliary while attending Howard University, studying law, and working at the Washington Navy Yard. There she became active in a federal employee union, rising to a position as the United Federal Workers' (UFW) national representative. For the UFW, she helped organize and demand higher wages and nondiscriminatory employment for federal workers, government cafeteria staff employed by private contractors, Freedmen's Hospital employees, and Howard University instructors. In October 1941, Richardson was the lead organizer of the National Conference of Negro Youth, where, with fellow youth activists Thelma Dale and Jewell Mazique, she helped launch a local committee to fight job discrimination in the District. The group focused its first campaign on Capital Transit, which operated all of DC's streetcars and buses and refused to hire African Americans for anything but low-level maintenance positions. They began by soliciting support from the DC NAACP and other organizations. In response to a petition signed by nearly 6,000 white and black Washingtonians who opposed the company's policy, the federal Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) ordered Capital Transit to stop discriminating, but the company refused to require white operators to work with Black trainees. When civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston resigned from President Harry Truman's Committee on Fair Employment Practices after the president ordered the FEPC not to comply with a committee directive to desegregate Capital Transit, Richardson drafted a letter to Truman for the National Negro Congress's (NNC) DC chapter. His order, she wrote, was "in substance, a declaration of support of the Jim Crow laws" and served as "a cynical welcome for colored veterans returning to their homes in Washington looking for fair employment." Richardson also led the NNC's local campaign for the establishment of a permanent FEPC, to ensure Black access to jobs and decent wages after World War II ended. In early 1946, she led pickets at the homes of each US senator responsible for a blocking a bill to establish the permanent commission. Although the bill died, President Truman used an executive order to bar federal government discrimination. In her role as executive secretary of the NNC's local chapter, Richardson also campaigned for DC voting rights and against police brutality. In July 1947, she organized an anti-lynching rally that drew 500 people. Richardson and her husband moved to New York in 1950. The following year, an FBI informant testified that she had been a member of the Communist Party, despite having signed a loyalty oath as a condition for temporary employment at the Library of Congress. No evidence supported the informant's claim, and Richardson's legal team included top civil rights attorneys George E.C. Hayes and James A. Cobb, but she was imprisoned for over four years.

Richardson lived at 1638 Florida Avenue NW.

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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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In 1938, the National Non-partisan Council on Public Affairs (NPC), an outgrowth of the Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, became the first organization devoted to lobbying the federal government to advance African American civil rights. The group initially focused on raising public awareness of police brutality against Black Washingtonians and advocating for DC home rule. Entirely funded by AKA, the group quickly expanded its mission to ensuring that African Americans benefited from New Deal jobs and entitlement programs such as Social Security, which then excluded domestic and agricultural workers. Along with the Washington Urban League, NPC also worked to abolish  the requirement that applications for federal government jobs include a photograph of the applicant, a practice that facilitated racial discrimination in hiring. In partnership with the national AKA, led by Dorothy Ferebee, and chapters around the country, NPC lobbied successfully for the admission of African American women into the US Navy during World War II and for integrating the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAC). In 1948, AKA collaborated with several other Greek organizations to replace NPC with a larger organization, the American Council on Human Rights. Led by Elmer Henderson, the ACHR continued to carry out NPC's mission of ensuring fair employment and wages, advancing Black voting rights, and demanding access to decent, non-segregated housing. In DC, the group worked to desegregate places of employment and public accommodations, including federally operated facilities such as Anacostia Pool.

The Non-Partisan Council on Public Affairs was located at 961 Florida Avenue NW.

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During a campaign to exonerate the Scottsboro Boys—a group of imprisoned Black Alabama youth in danger of being lynched—the local chapter of the National Negro Congress (NNC) held its first mass meeting in DC at Metropolitan Baptist Church (then at 13th and R streets NW) in 1936. At this meeting, NNC founder John P. Davis called for the group to address police brutality, so-called "urban lynching," in the nation's capital. Later that year, a Civilian Conservation Corps worker at the National Arboretum became "the fortieth colored person shot to death by Metropolitan police since 1925," reported the Afro-American, which also noted that "every officer involved has been exonerated." The NNC quickly ramped up its DC campaign, joining the newspaper, the NAACP, the Washington Bar Association and others in a coalition to demand that Congress investigate the "unnecessary and unlawful use of force" by District police. The radio station WOL broadcasted weekly on the topic.

Calling itself the Joint Committee for Civil Rights in the District of Columbia (and later the Citizens Committee Against Police Brutality), the coalition held a mock trial against "killer cops" in May 1937 at John Wesley AME Zion Church, 14th and Corcoran streets NW. George E.C. Hayes acted as a prosecuting attorney and Lucy Diggs Slowe, Howard University Dean of Women, served as a mock judge. The trial brought attention to a large public audience the District's abusive treatment of its Black citizens.

After a series of violent episodes in the winter of 1937-38—a Howard student was beaten and a young man fleeing a traffic accident was fatally shot—the NNC-led coalition held mass meetings in the summer of 1938 at Lincoln Temple Congregational Church and at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, where Charles Hamilton Houston called for voting rights as a prerequisite for ending police terror in the District. That July, for the first time, an officer was indicted but was ultimately acquitted for fatally shooting a mentally ill veteran. The NNC continued to help organize protests and demand accountability, eventually gaining establishment of a civilian review board.

In contrast to more conservative allies such as the NAACP, the NNC promoted direct action. Its pickets at a federal agency charged with ensuring that African Americans were hired for war-related jobs led the Glenn Martin aircraft factory, near Baltimore, to integrate its workforce, and ultimately to employ 5,000 Black workers.

The local NNC also worked to desegregate federally operated parks and sports facilities, including the Washington Tourist Camp, which was open to whites only until April 1940. A 1939 report documenting segregated and prohibitively expensive recreation sites was produced by the NNC's Thelma Dale, who also co-led a campaign to end discriminatory hiring practices by Capital Transit, which operated DC's streetcars.

During the 1930s, the NNC Headquarters were located at 717 Florida Avenue NW, built in 1922 as a bank with offices on the second story designed by the Black architecture firm, Woodson, Vaughn and Ferguson. The building currently has a restaurant on the first story. 

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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 devoted itself to protesting racial discrimination and violence against Black residents in the nation's capital. Unlike the national NAACP, whose early leadership was mostly white, African Americans led the DC branch from the beginning and constituted most of its membership.

Archibald A. Grimke led the DC Branch for more than a decade during its formative years, beginning in 1913 when he grew the group's membership from 143 to 700. Under his leadership, the NAACP organized a rally to protest President Woodrow Wilson's segregation of the federal government, attracting nearly 10,000 people. In 1922, the branch helped organize 5,000 marchers to parade silently past the Capitol and the White House to spur passage of an anti-lynching bill that was pending in the Senate. This bill and subsequent bills died due to powerful opposition from Southern Democrats who filibustered. It was not until 2018 that the Senate passed anti-lynching legislation.

In the late 1920s and early ‘30s, the branch was victorious in getting segregation orders overturned at workplaces and in public facilities, and in securing the dismissal of at least two police officers for brutality against Black men. 

Culminating decades of protest against violent policing, in 1957 the branch presented the DC Commissioners with a scathing report, detailed affidavits, and photographic evidence testifying to the abusive treatment of Black Washingtonians, including women and children. "Our police department is the most dangerous spot in the District," remarked branch president Eugene Davidson. The department was also charged with the discriminatory hiring and treatment of officers, but after nine days of hearings, the Commissioners refused all of the branch's policy recommendations and fully exonerated the police.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the NAACP-DC had its headquarters at the small 19th century rowhouse with a storefront at 1019 U Street NW. The building currently houses a barbershop in its first floor shop. 

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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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Elmer W. Henderson was the plaintiff in a major civil rights case, a fair employment advocate for the federal government, and the longtime director of a national lobby for African American equality.

In May 1942, Henderson was denied seating on a Southern Railway dining car en route from DC to Atlanta, because the tables designated for Black passengers were partially occupied by white diners. Henderson recognized that he was unlikely to win a lawsuit against the railway, so instead filed a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which acknowledged he had been treated unfairly. However, when the railway proceeded to resolve the issue by designating two tables closest to the kitchen as the only seating for Black passengers, and required a curtain be drawn to hide their presence from white diners, Henderson sued again, and this time the US Department of Justice (DOJ) backed him up.

In a brief for this case, DOJ attorney Philip Elman attacked "separate-but-equal" seating, legalized half a century earlier by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Court finally ruled, in 1950, that the railway had violated the Interstate Commerce Act, and, while it did not address the constitutionality of separating the races, DOJ's efforts in Henderson v. United States marked a turning point in the federal government's role in dismantling segregation. Influenced by his work on Henderson's case, attorney Elman became the principal author four years later of the Justice Department's brief in Brown v. Board of Education, which argued that separate-but-equal schools violated the Constitution.

During the 1940s, as his case moved through the courts, Elmer Henderson was the Midwest regional director for the Fair Employment Practices Commission, where he worked to ensure that African Americans were hired and paid fairly for World War II-related jobs. As the founding president of the American Council on Human Rights, beginning in 1948, Henderson lobbied Congress and President Harry S. Truman to end racial discrimination in the military and in non-government industries; African Americans were the first to be fired once the war was over. Henderson also urged the government to make direct loans to Black homebuilders as they were unable to secure bank loans, and to require white developers to integrate new housing. "The unwritten code of the home building and real estate industry in banning the sale of new houses to Negroes is still in full force," remarked Henderson in a 1954 speaking tour.

Here in DC, Henderson lobbied President Truman to appoint an African American to the DC Board of Commissioners, which governed the city for nearly a century before District citizens achieved home rule in 1974. "We have made this request many times before but…the time is peculiarly ripe for such an appointment," said Henderson in 1952, referring to the recent Census showing that black residents comprised more than a third of the city's population. Logan Circle resident and New Negro Alliance co-founder Belford V. Lawson represented Henderson in his cases against the U.S. government and Southern Railway as well as in a 1949 lawsuit that desegregated restaurants at the Cincinnati airport.

In the 1950s, Elmer Henderson's office was located at 1130 6th Street NW.

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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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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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