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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The Old City Hall Building at Judiciary Square was the site of a decades-long battle to desegregate the whites-only DC Bar Association and its law library, both housed at what was the US District Court for the District of Columbia until 1952.

Huver Brown, a 1913 graduate of Howard University School of Law, filed a suit against the District Bar in January 1939 for unconstitutionally operating a private, racially segregated organization in a federal courthouse. Unlike today's DC Bar, which requires membership as a condition for practicing law in the District, the DC Bar, the Women's Bar, and the predominantly Black Washington Bar were professional associations in which membership was voluntary. Rather than address Huver Brown's argument that it was unconstitutional for a federal court to house the facilities of a whites-only bar association, lawyers settled the case out of court  in 1941 with a requirement by the US Attorney General that African Americans and other non-members have access to the library. Faced with complying with this order or moving out of the courthouse, the group voted to admit white women as members and to let African Americans use the library for a fee.  

As planning began in September 1950 for a new federal courthouse, attorney Aubrey E. Robinson, Jr. filed another lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a segregated organization being headquartered inside a federal courthouse. Robinson was fresh off another desegregation case, Carr v. Corning, where he represented a group of Black parents who sued the DC schools for access to equal facilities. Among the judges who ruled in Carr that segregated schools were constitutional was E. Barrett Prettyman, a former president of the DC Bar who rejected Robinson's appeal. Along with his colleagues, Prettyman—for whom the new federal court would be named—upheld the right of the segregated Bar to operate in the courthouse.

In the summer of 1950, the DC Bar began polling its members on whether to drop the whites-only provision from the group's bylaws. In 1955, it elected officers who supported integration, but it took seven votes over eight years before the Bar finally desegregated in October 1958, admitting Black lawyers the following year. The Washington Post reported sarcastically that "warmest congratulations are due…for excising a restriction which was as embarrassing to the legal profession as it was to the community."

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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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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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In 1954, James Nabrit and co-lead attorney George E.C. Hayes celebrated the outcome of Bolling v. Sharpe, DC's companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. For years, attorneys had argued in favor of equalizing white and Black schools, but in Bolling and Brown, they successfully attacked segregation as inherently unequal. Because DC is not a state, and therefore not necessarily subject to the 14th Amendment, Nabrit and Hayes under Bolling led the Court to establish that the federal government had the same obligation as would a state government in guaranteeing its citizens equal protection.

Several years earlier, in Lane v. Wilson (1939), Nabrit successfully argued before the Supreme Court that a law preventing African Americans from ever being able to vote in the Oklahoma was unconstitutional. Nabrit also prevailed in 1955, when the Supreme Court ruled in Terry v. Adams that pre-primary elections limited to white voters violated the 15th Amendment. (NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall had won a similar case, Smith v. Allright, a decade earlier, but a private, whites-only association had continued to exercise control over which candidates advanced to the Democratic primaries in Texas.)

Throughout his active career as a trial attorney, Nabrit served on the faculty at Howard University Law School; he is credited with teaching the first formal course in civil rights law beginning in 1938. The documentation he gathered for this course, on some two thousand civil rights-related cases from across the country, provided support for continued litigation by Nabrit and his colleagues throughout the 1930s-50s. Nabrit became Howard University's president in 1960. In a decade of increasing campus unrest, students sharply criticized his conservative leadership and staged a 5-day takeover of the Administration Building in 1968. He retired the following year.

During the 1940s, Nabrit lived at the Howard Manor at 654 Girard Street NW.

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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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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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In 1948, the agency’s preparation of a 123-page amicus brief in Shelley v. Kraemer and Hurd v. Hodge—which challenged courts' enforcement of racially restrictive deed covenants that were used to create and maintain whites-only neighborhoods—marked the beginning of the agency's unofficial partnership with the NAACP. In Henderson v. United States (1949), the agency challenged the longstanding legality of providing "separate-but-equal" facilities for African Americans, leading DOJ to make the same argument in Brown v. Board of Education and the DC companion case Bolling v. Sharpe. In Brown, the Supreme Court finally overturned the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that had upheld the provision of separate transportation, schools, and other public accommodations for African Americans. Segregated schools violated the 5th and 14th amendments, said the Court.

Established in 1957, DOJ's Civil Rights Division was initially charged with defending black voting rights in the South, especially after the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that gerrymandering—the adjustment of voting district boundaries to suppress the influence of black voters—violated the 15th Amendment. (Protecting black voting rights had been the reason for DOJ's establishment in 1870.) After the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Division helped eliminate literacy tests and other barriers to black voting. It also worked to enforce court orders mandating the desegregation of universities (Division Director John Doar escorted James Meredith onto the University of Mississippi's campus in 1962); to desegregate interstate travel as required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act; and to investigate racially targeted violence, including the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1965 murders in Alabama of Viola Liuzzo and Rev. James Reeb.

In the 1990s, the Division's investigation of black church burnings resulted in hundreds of arrests. Following the brutal beating by Los Angeles police of Rodney King in 1991, DOJ was charged with investigating and overseeing police departments across the country, including in DC.

The FBI, which is part of DOJ, essentially endorsed racial violence in the South until the 1960s by neglecting to prevent or investigate lynchings, debt peonage, police terror, voter suppression, and other tools of maintaining white supremacy. The FBI also wiretapped the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues, and used undercover surveillance to track individuals and groups such as A. Philip Randolph, Julius Hobson, the NAACP, the National Negro Congress, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

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In February 1944 former National Negro Congress leader John P. Davis attempted to enroll his five-year-old son Michael at Noyes Elementary School in his Brookland neighborhood and was turned away. Although approximately 100 elementary school-aged Black children lived in the area, Noyes admitted Whites only. Davis’s goal in attempting to enroll his son was to challenge the "separate-but-equal" school system by filing a lawsuit exposing the inequality of facilities available to White and Black children. When his suit was initially dismissed, Davis compiled a more detailed case, showing there were no elementary schools for African Americans within walking distance; the closest one was at least 17 blocks from his house. This was in contrast to white neighborhoods that had schools within close walking distance.

As it would for another decade, the court upheld segregated schools as constitutional. However, in a small victory, the DC Commissioners approved the school board's request for an elementary school to be built across the street from Davis's house at 3105 14th Street NE. The Afro-American newspaper reported in January 1945 that, as a result of Davis's lawsuit, the four-grade school for African American children had opened with 75 children enrolled. The school was housed in a private residence with two portable buildings before the Lucy Diggs Slowe Elementary School opened on the site at 3115 14th Street NE in January 1948 to a larger 143-student body. (Slowe Elementary closed in 2009; its building is now occupied by the Mary McLeod Bethune Day Academy.)

A decade earlier, Davis had worked closely with fellow Dunbar High School graduate Robert C. Weaver, who grew up several blocks north of Davis's home in Brookland. Together they pressured the Roosevelt administration to extend New Deal jobs and housing programs to African Americans, and to ensure Black workers received fair wages. Davis founded the National Negro Congress in 1936 and worked with its DC chapter to fight police brutality, organize and support labor unions, demand Black hiring by Capital Transit and other private employers, and persuade the federal government to desegregate recreation sites in the District.

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