The James and Mary Hurd house at 116 Bryant Street in Bloomingdale was at the center of the Supreme Court's landmark 1948 decision ending court enforcement of racially restrictive real estate covenants. The case, Hurd v. Hodge, was DC's companion to St. Louis and Detroit cases known together as Shelley v. Kraemer. Beginning in the 1920s, DC's Bloomingdale neighborhood had become a national epicenter of legal challenges to covenants as Blacks attempted to move to restricted houses in the neighborhood near unrestricted blocks where African Americans already lived. The proximity of Howard University made this area especially attractive to middle class Black families. Howard University Law School, meanwhile, generated a cadre of well-trained civil rights attorneys who were prepared to fight housing discrimination in the courts. Number 116 Bryant Street was the first of four  houses on this block with racial restrictions that were  purchased and resold to Black families by real estate broker Raphael Urciolo in the early 1940s. White neighbors, Lena and Frederic Hodge sued Urciolo and the new owners, James and Mary Hurd, for violating the covenant which barred the house’s sale to African Americans. Attorney Charles Hamilton Houston amassed extensive contextual evidence to show that covenants in Bloomingdale no longer served their intended purpose of keeping the neighborhood white and were depressing home values in an area where African Americans were willing to pay more than market rate.

Despite Houston's efforts in this and several other Bloomingdale cases, the DC courts upheld the covenant, but the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case as a companion to Shelley. Loren Miller and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP attorneys for Shelley and the Detroit case, McGhee v. Sipes, successfully argued that court enforcement of racial covenants violated the 14^th Amendment. However, because DC is not a state and not necessarily subject to the 14^th Amendment, the ruling in Hurd v. Hodge was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which requires the federal government to treat its citizens equally.  

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As the highest court of the land, the United States Supreme Court is ultimately where significant, nationwide civil rights advances are made, and sometimes unmade. While Congress has a huge role, too, in advancing (or taking away) civil rights, it is up to the Court to determine how laws are interpreted and enforced. In 1946, NAACP attorneys William Hastie and Thurgood Marshall came here to argue one of the first 20^th-century civil rights cases to make it to the Supreme Court.  The case involved 27-year-old Irene Morgan, a mother of two who, while recovering from a miscarriage, was arrested in the summer of 1944 for refusing to give up her seat on a bus from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. Spottswood Robinson III, of the NAACP and Howard University Law School, represented Morgan in the Virginia courts, arguing that the incompatibility of state laws regulating where people could sit served to impede interstate commerce. Although Robinson was unsuccessful, the Supreme Court ruled in Morgan v. Virginia that segregating interstate buses indeed posed an unconstitutional "burden on commerce." Two years later, the Supreme Court found in Shelley v. Kraemer and the DC case Hurd v. Hodge that the enforcement of racially restrictive housing covenants violated the 14^th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. While African Americans continued to face significant barriers to housing, the real estate industry, banks, and white homeowner associations could no longer rely on the courts to maintain segregation through deed restrictions. The Supreme Court's 1954 rulings in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and the DC companion case Bolling v. Sharpe struck down segregated schools as unconstitutional, reversing the court's landmark 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that had established “separate but equal” as the law of the land. The court cited Brown v. Board in 1956, when it ruled in the Montgomery, Alabama case Browder v. Gayle that the Constitution prohibited separating intrastate bus passengers by race.   In 1960, the Supreme Court ruled in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that gerrymandering—in this case, altering the boundaries of Tuskegee, Alabama's electoral district so that it excluded African Americans altogether—violated the 15^th Amendment.

The Supreme Court began to effectively dismantle schemes aimed at furthering integration beginning in 1974, when it ruled in Millikan v. Bradley that a suburban school district could not be required to join the city of Detroit in implementing a busing program designed to counter the influence of residential segregation on the area's public schools. The court's 1978 decision in University of California v. Bakke held that racial quotas violated the 14^th Amendment, resulting in the erosion of universities' efforts to offer opportunities to minority students. Most recently, in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder (2013), the court eliminated a key requirement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: that states with a history of preventing African Americans from voting must receive clearance from the federal Department of Justice to change any rules related to elections. Tools such as voter ID laws have since been adopted to suppress the black vote.   The Greek Revival Supreme Court building dates to 1935.

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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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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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Morgan School, which stood at 18th and California streets until 1977 (now occupied by the soccer field at Marie Reed Recreation Center), stood as a symbol of the success that this mostly Black community achieved in its fight to manage its own affairs and to run a public school that met the community's specific needs.

Originally built for white children, Morgan School was transferred to use by African Americans in 1929 when the new whites-only Adams Elementary opened one block west on 19th Street. When the Supreme Court ruled in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954) that segregated schools were unconstitutional, white and Black community members came together to form the Adams-Morgan Better Neighborhood Conference; the group's name soon became associated with the whole area.

Members worked to ensure high-quality, integrated schools in the neighborhood, and a decade later they persuaded the city to cede control of the two schools to a community school board led by Bishop Marie H. Reed. Before her death in 1969, Reed led residents in planning for a new community center to replace the aging and overcrowded Morgan School. The larger Marie Reed Elementary School and Recreation Center, renovated in 2016, continues to reflect the community’s vision.

Organizing around the school led residents to come together on other issues that threatened the neighborhood. The community helped stop the construction of a freeway along Florida Avenue and successfully resisted urban renewal plans for Adams Morgan, which would have displaced thousands of low-income, mostly African American residents.

Co-led by statehood activist Josephine Butler and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer Frank Smith, residents formed the Adams Morgan Organization (AMO) in 1972. When a real estate company bought several run-down rowhouses on Seaton Street with plans to evict the residents—mostly African American women and children with nowhere else to go—AMO successfully worked with the families to resist eviction and ultimately enabled some of them to purchase their houses. AMO brokered a deal with Perpetual Building Association requiring that as a condition of opening a branch at 18th Street and Columbia Road in the heart of Adams Morgan, the bank provide financing for Seaton Street residents. Perpetual complied and also agreed to making favorable loans to neighborhood residents.

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In the same year that President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to serve as the first African American Supreme Court Justice, US Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall used these words in defense of the federal government's opposition to a California state constitutional amendment affirming the right of landlords and real estate officials to discriminate. In Reitman v. Mulkey, the US Supreme Court agreed with Marshall's argument, ruling this a violation of the 14^th Amendment. Marshall had been a lead civil rights attorney since the 1930s, after graduating from Howard University Law School at the top of his class. As a student, he had joined Charles Hamilton Houston, James Nabrit, and others in providing free legal assistance to DC's New Negro Alliance. He then began working with Houston and the NAACP on dismantling the racial segregation of schools, beginning with a case against University of Maryland Law School, which admitted whites only. The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in Pearson v. Murray (1936) that the university's racial ban violated the 14^th Amendment. In 1950, Marshall argued before the US Supreme Court that "separate but equal" facilities for Black law school students were also unconstitutional. Such schools not only lacked sufficient facilities and enough faculty, but also prevented black students from participating in the free exchange of ideas and views that was fundamental to a legal education, Marshall argued.This case, Sweatt v. Painter, set precedent for the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall and his family moved to Southwest DC from New York in the fall of 1965 when Marshall was appointed Solicitor General. As a Supreme Court Justice from 1967 until his retirement in 1991, he consistently argued against capital punishment and defended the rights of people charged with crimes. In the landmark affirmative action case, University of California v. Bakke (1978), Marshall endorsed race-conscious admission standards. "[D]uring most of the last 200 years," he wrote, "the Constitution as interpreted by this court did not prohibit the most ingenious and persuasive forms of discrimination.... Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy…, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier."

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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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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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For 60 years spanning much of the second half of the 20th century, New Bethel Baptist Church at 1739 9th Street was led by Rev. Walter Fauntroy, one of DC's most respected civil rights leaders. A native Washingtonian and graduate of Dunbar High School, Fauntroy was hired to lead his home church in 1959, when he was just 26 years old. Having gotten to know the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1950s, Fauntroy also led the DC chapter of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and chaired the local coordinating committee for the 1963 March on Washington. The group recruited 25,000-35,000 marchers from the DC area, arranged local lodging, oversaw a massive volunteer operation to maintain order and security, and worked closely with National Park Service officials to manage logistics.

When the northwest neighborhood of Shaw was slated for urban renewal in 1966, Rev. Fauntroy stepped up again. Some 23,000 mostly black residents had already been displaced from Southwest DC as part of a federal government urban renewal project there, and Fauntroy vowed to prevent the same "urban removal" in Shaw. He founded a coalition of some 150 churches, civic organizations, and businesses under the umbrella of the Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO) and secured $1.8 million from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for a community-led renewal plan. In March 1967, Dr. King joined Fauntroy for a march through the neighborhood to support the plan, culminating in a speech at Cardozo High School stadium.

In 1971, Fauntroy was elected as DC's first nonvoting delegate to Congress, a position he held until 1990. Fauntroy's first order of business was to rally Black South Carolina voters to unseat Rep. John McMillan, an avowed segregationist and the longtime chair of the House Committee on the District of Columbia. DC was 70% African American and had lacked self-governance for almost a century. Charles Diggs, a Black Michigan Democrat, took over McMillan's committee seat and used the position to secure home rule for DC in 1973. Seasoned civil rights activists, including former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were soon elected to office.

Five years later, Fauntroy was successful in getting both the House and the Senate to pass the DC Voting Rights Amendment, which would constitutionally require the District to have the same level of Congressional representation as a state, but the amendment failed to be ratified by enough states. In honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday on January 15, 1972, renowned civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at New Bethel. She was joined by Marion Barry and Rev. Douglas Moore. This church building dates to 1981. It replaced the congregation's previous 75-year-old building at the same location.

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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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