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

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

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

Harris lived at 1218 E Street NE.

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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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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 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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Over the course of four transformative decades, Vermont Avenue Baptist Church was a hub for civil rights organizing in the District of Columbia. Beginning in 1929 with the leadership of Reverend C.T. Murray, the church expanded its rolls to nearly 9,000 members.

In January 1935, Nannie Helen Burroughs drew an audience of over 1,000 people to a meeting here of the NAACP's DC Branch. "There are enough colored people in Washington to make Pennsylvania Avenue tremble," she declared. "Lynchings and burnings start as much in the Federal government as in Mississippi." Three years later, more than 1,200 gathered for a speech by John P. Davis of the National Negro Congress who spoke on the "unwarranted beatings and needless killings perpetrated by police" in the District. Attorney Charles Hamilton Houston pledged legal support for the DC NAACP's campaign against police brutality. A. Philip Randolph later led meetings here for his planned March on Washington in the early 1940s.

In 1956, 27-year-old Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Vermont Avenue Baptist shortly after helping to lead a 180-day bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. This was his first major civil rights campaign. "Our church is becoming militant," he told the audience. King spoke here again on February 7, 1968, a day after leading a group of clergy in prayer at Arlington Cemetery to protest the Vietnam War. "It may appear that nonviolence has failed," he told an audience of civil rights dignitaries, "but don't give up yet." Two months later, King was assassinated.

On January 15, 2010, President Barack Obama attended services here with his family and spoke on King's legacy.

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