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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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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This quote by Mary Church Terrell, who moved to 1615 S Street in Dupont Circle with her husband Robert Heberton Terrell in 1920, closed an opinion piece by the editors of the Chicago Defender in June 1947. Mary Terrell was a vocal, internationally respected advocate for racial equality who risked being branded a Communist for opposing Jim Crow. 

By this time in her career, Terrell had written for a British magazine about white lawlessness and lynching; had brought international attention to the horror of convict labor, which she called more oppressive than slavery; and had participated in numerous other civil rights activities and protest efforts. Thanks largely to Terrell's leadership, and her participation in sit-ins and pickets, the Supreme Court would rule 1953 that racial discrimination by DC businesses serving the public was illegal.

A decade before becoming DC's first black judge in 1902, Robert Terrell had also spoken out against "southern mob rule," and called for "persistent and systemic agitation" to get white northerners to care about the rampant practice of lynching.

In 1893, decades before moving to this house in Dupont Circle, Mary and Robert Terrell became quiet advocates for fair housing as the second African American family to move into LeDroit Park. The couple moved to LeDroit Park just two years after the removal of a fence that had been built around the neighborhood to keep black people out. Many middle-class African American families followed the Terrells to LeDroit Park. The Mary Church Terrell House at 326 T Street NW is listed in the National Register.

Although her house at 326 T Street in LeDroit Park is commonly associated with Mary Church Terrell and her career, the house at 1615 S Street was her home from 1920 until her death in 1954. During this 34-year period, Mary Church Terrell was an influential and active participant in the Civil Rights Movement.

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John Philip Sousa Junior High School was at the center of Bolling v. Sharpe, D.C.’s companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. Parent activist Gardner Bishop, a co-founder of the Consolidated Parents Group, had begun pushing seriously against school segregation in 1947. Three years later, Sousa opened as one of several new DC schools for white children when there was not a single junior high school east of the Anacostia River for black students.

On opening day, September 11, 1950, Bishop attempted to enroll a group of African American students but was turned away. Attorneys James Nabrit and George E.C. Hayes stepped in and sued DC Board of Education President Melvin Sharpe on behalf of Spottswood Bolling, Jr., and four other students. The segregation of D.C.’s schools was unconstitutional, they charged.

The US District Court dismissed the suit, citing the recent ruling in Carr v. Corning (concerning Browne Junior High School in Northeast) that DC’s dual school system was constitutional. But then, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Bolling along with four other cases. And, on May 17, 1954, the Court ruled that segregating the District’s schools violated the 5th Amendment’s guarantee that the federal government treat all citizens with “due process of law.” Brown v. Board of Education was decided on the basis of the 14th Amendment which required only “states” to provide equal treatment.

Known today as Sousa Middle School, the school was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 and is a National Historic Landmark.

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Originally established in 1918 by the Ancient Order of the Sons and Daughters of Moses to serve African American children, Rose Park was known variously as Patterson’s Park, Jacob’s Park, or Winship’s Lot. The city acquired it in 1922 and designated it a “colored” facility, in keeping with its policy of segregated recreational facilities. However, Georgetown was a racially diverse neighborhood, and Rose Park was its main recreational facility, so people ignored the segregation rules. Children and adults, both Black and white, played basketball, volleyball, tennis, and dodgeball there. They held folk dances and learned crafts such as sewing and basketry as well as fine arts and music.

In the late 1930s the DC Department of Recreation remodeled the playground, strategically placing a sign “For Coloreds Only” on the gate. After the Rock Creek Civic Association protested, the sign was removed, but the official designation held. In the summer of 1949, when the American Friends Service Committee successfully operated Rose Park (as well as Garfield Park in Southeast) as an interracial facility, the District Recreation Board made the designation permanent, making Rose Park and Garfield Park the city’s first officially integrated playgrounds.

Rose Park was notably the home court for Margaret and Roumania Peters, two tennis stars of the late 1930s who lived at 2710 O Street, NW. Recruited to play for Tuskegee Institute, the sisters consistently won the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Roumania Peters Walker later returned to teach tennis at Dunbar High School and Rose Park summer camps.

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Attorney and educator Frank D. Reeves (1916-1973) was a critical player in seminal civil rights victories, namely the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court school-segregation case. Born in Montreal, Reeves arrived in Washington as a child. After graduating from Dunbar High School, he earned an undergraduate degree from Howard University and then, in 1939, a law degree. Reeves subsequently worked with Thurgood Marshall as assistant counsel for the NAACP and helped shape the arguments that would persuade the Supreme Court to find public-school segregation unconstitutional.

Known for taking pro bono cases, Reeves organized others to do the same as part of Neighborhood Legal Services at Howard University where he served on the faculty from 1939 intermittently until his death.

In 1960, Reeves ran for and was elected to the Democratic National Committee, becoming its first African American member. He advised Senator John F. Kennedy on minority affairs both during Kennedy’s presidential campaign and his presidency (1961-63). Reeves also served as legal counsel to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and helped negotiate the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as well as the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign.

In 1969 he co-founded the National Conference of Black Lawyers, which promoted racial justice through legal defense. The next year he became the first executive director of the Joint Center for Political Studies, a black think tank.

Reeves and his family lived at 3934 New Hampshire Avenue NW for many years until moving to 7760 16th Street NW in 1961. In 1986, the city named its new municipal building at 14th and U Streets in the historic heart of Black Washington in his honor.

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Although best known for his achievements as a historian and public intellectual, Rayford Logan (1897-1982) was, at heart, an activist devoted to the advancement of Africans and their descendants all over the world. After being exposed to racist treatment by white officers during his service in World War I (1917-1918), Logan remained in France after the war to coordinate the second Pan African Congress. He worked closely with NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois and the anti-colonialist Haitian diplomat Dante Bellegarde. Pan Africanists called for ending colonial European abuse of Africans and for African American civil rights. Logan later became the NAACP's consultant on colonial affairs.

In 1934, Logan made news in New York when he and his wife Ruth walked off a ship about to set sail for Haiti, refusing to be confined to the overcrowded "tourist" section reserved exclusively for non-white passengers. "The Haitian government cannot expect the sympathetic support that American colored folk have given it in the past, if it continues to permit ships of this line to come to Haiti," he protested. The Logans received a full refund.

Logan helped organize voter registration drives and citizenship schools during the 1920s and 1930s, pioneering a program to teach black southerners how to resist white intimidation at the polls. During World War II (1941-45), he chaired a federal committee on black participation in the military, co-authored President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order outlawing racial discrimination in government contracts, and persuaded the president to assign more black soldiers to active duty.

Logan was a member of the NAACP's national board for many years, and was awarded the organization's prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1980. Logan wrote hundreds of articles and numerous books during his many years as a history professor and department chair at Howard University. Among his best-known works is a title that described what Logan identified as the lowest point in American race relations: The Negro In American Life And Thought: The Nadir, 1877 to 1901, published in 1954.

Logan commissioned African American architect Hilyard Robinson to design his house at 1519 Jackson Street NE in 1939. It has since been demolished and replaced with a new one on the site.

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Lemuel Penn was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klan night riders on July 11, 1964, just nine days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The new federal law, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and by businesses and other facilities that served the public, was seen by southern segregationists as violating white people's right to practice racial exclusion.

Penn was murdered near Athens, Georgia, while driving home to Washington after two weeks of Army reserve training at Fort Benning, Georgia. His two companions, fellow reservists, were uninjured. The murder made the national news. President Lyndon Baines Johnson condemned racial terrorism and vowed to get the case solved quickly. "Penn was slain for no reason other than he happened to be black and his car bore DC plates," said reporter and author Bill Shipp, who has written about the incident. "The original reason for our following the colored men was because we had heard that Martin Luther King might make Georgia a testing ground," confessed the driver of those who shot Penn.

An FBI investigation quickly led to arrests of two men, but in a trial overseen by a judge outspoken in his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, an all-white jury acquitted them. In 1966, in the first federal case argued under the new law, the two were convicted of violating Penn’s civil rights and sentenced to just ten years in prison.

At the time of his death at age 49, Penn was director for industrial and adult education in the office of the assistant superintendent of D.C. Public Schools. In the Army Reserves, he’d achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. He and his wife Georgia, who taught home economics, lived with their three children at 1622 Upshur Street NW.  

Penn is honored on a marker erected by the Georgia Historical Society Lemuel Penn Memorial Committee, and Colbert Grove Baptist Church in Madison County, Georgia. His name also appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

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The case, New Negro Alliance v Sanitary Grocery Store, came about in 1936 when the grocery store chain opened a new store at 1936 11th Street NW in the heart of the African American U Street neighborhood, yet refused to hire African Americans to work there. Three years earlier, the New Negro Alliance (NNA) was organized by writer/activist John Aubrey Davis, lawyer Belford V. Lawson, Jr., and activist M. Franklin Thorne to promote civil rights through pickets, economic boycotts, and other direct-action protests. To that end, NNA instituted a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign that involved boycotting and picketing white-owned businesses in black neighborhoods. So, when the Sanitary Grocery, with its discriminatory hiring practices, opened on 11th Street just steps from black Washington’s famed U Street, NNA was quick to respond by launching a picketing campaign the very next day.  

Most businesses, which were suffering during the Depression era, gave in quickly and hired black clerks. However, Sanitary argued that NNA had no right to picket where protesters didn’t work and successfully persuaded a court to issue an injunction to stop the campaign. NNA lawyers, including Belford Lawson, William Hastie, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit Jr., fought back, all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1938, the Court declared NNA had the legal right to picket a business regardless of whether the pickets worked there or not. New Negro Alliance v Sanitary Grocery Store became a landmark in the struggle by African Americans against discriminatory hiring practices, and “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” groups multiplied throughout the nation. NNA estimated that, by 1940, the group had secured an estimated 5,106 jobs in more than 50 businesses around the city.

Although no longer a Sanitary Grocery store, the building remains a market today. 

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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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