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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Shortly after it was first established in 1963 as a left-leaning think tank directed by two former Kennedy administration staffers, Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) became a hub for civil rights activists, including lead organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). IPS Fellow Robert Moses organized the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, a massive voter registration drive conducted mostly by white college students recruited from the North in partnership with Black volunteers from the South. The summer project also generated membership in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which would soon send shock waves through the Democratic Party by demanding to be seated at the party's national convention in Atlantic City.
Frank Smith, a SNCC organizer who would eventually be elected to the DC Council, credits IPS with providing essential insider knowledge of Capitol Hill and strategic support for the Freedom Party, which brought national attention to Black disenfranchisement in the South. Smith first became affiliated with IPS during Freedom Summer. In 1966, the organization helped him bring 90 sharecroppers from Mississippi for a five-day camp-in across from the White House. Many had been kicked off rented land for registering to vote or for striking for better pay. They demanded that War on Poverty funds be provided to the groups helping them and other sharecroppers survive.
Over the next decade, IPS facilitated a network of intellectuals, activists, and policymakers focused on advancing black civil rights, working for women's liberation, and ending the Vietnam War. IPS also hosted political education seminars, giving local public housing tenants and welfare right advocates the opportunity to meet with grassroots activists from other parts of the country. Dick Gregory visited in 1967 during his campaign as a write-in candidate for US president. IPS "created synergy, intellectual engagement, and was productive," recalled Smith, who worked alongside fellow SNCC veteran Ivanhoe Donaldson to advise newly elected Black mayors throughout the country while at the same time building Black political power in DC, especially after the city regained home rule in 1974.
Other IPS fellows and staff included SNCC organizers Courtland Cox, Charles Sherrod, and John Wilson, who would later chair the DC Council; Tony Gittens, a co-founder of the Drum and Spear Bookstore; Topper Carew, who created the New Thing Art and Architecture Center; and Roger Wilkins, who spent a decade at IPS beginning in 1982. Wilkins, the nephew of longtime NAACP director Roy Wilkins, helped organize the Free South Africa Movement during his tenure as a senior fellow at IPS.
From 1968 until 1978, IPS was located in a former townhouse at 1520 New Hampshire Avenue in Dupont Circle, now the Embassy of Jamaica. In 1978, the organization moved to R Street; it is currently located at 1301 Connecticut Avenue NW.
]]>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.
]]>On her way to becoming a nationally renowned public health and civil rights activist in the 1940s, Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980) moved to DC in 1925 for an internship at Howard University's Freedmen's Hospital. She had been among the top five graduates in her class at Tufts University. At Howard, Ferebee went on to serve as a longtime clinical instructor in obstetrics and to direct the university's health service.
Just four years after her arrival in DC, Ferebee established Southeast Settlement House at 301 G Street SE to provide recreation and daycare for children living around Capitol Hill, where the only other such facility served whites only. In 1935, she began spending her summers leading the Mississippi Health Project, a mobile clinic and education program for sharecropper families whose diets were commonly limited to items they could purchase at a worksite commissary. Many had never tasted fruit, Ferebee later recalled. The program was staffed by student members of the prestigious Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, of which Ferebee became national president in 1939. That spring, she also helped enroll more than 2,200 new members in the newly reorganized DC branch of the NAACP, as director of its fundraising campaign.
During World War II (1941-1945), Ferebee was a fierce advocate for increasing women's employment in the military and in government service, and in 1944, she played an integral role in desegregating the US Navy's women's branch, known as the WAVES. After the war, Ferebee succeeded Mary McLeod Bethune as president of the National Council of Negro Women, where she continued to fight for integration and equal pay in federal employment, voting rights, and access to health care. During her tenure at the helm of NCNW, Ferebee organized a reception at the Shoreham, marking the first time a major DC hotel had rented its main ballroom to African Americans.
In 1955, Ferebee joined a delegation of women in urging the US Attorney General to help quell racial violence in the South. "How can we tell the women in those areas to register and vote when they are in fear and terror of their lives if they attempt to exercise this right?" she asked. The group blamed the Attorney General for encouraging violence by neglecting to thoroughly investigate crimes against Black citizens or to put white supremacist citizens councils "on the subversive list." Ten years later, when she was 65, Ferebee traveled to Alabama to help register voters in a county where fewer than two percent of more than 15,000 eligible African Americans were registered to vote.
As chair of the DC Commission on the Status of Women in her later years, Ferebee advocated for the hiring of women police officers and against the expansion of prison facilities for women, who, she said, would be better served by community-based programs.
Dorothy Ferebee lived at 1809 2nd Street NW.
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