The ClubHouse (also known as the Clubhouse and the Club House), constructed in phases between 1930 and 1945, served as an automobile garage and showroom before becoming DC’s top African American dance club from 1975 to 1990. As AIDS became an epidemic in the early 1980s, the ClubHouse became a center for activism by LGBTQ racial minorities, and the focal point for the Black gay community’s response to the disease. The ClubHouse was the third, and most successful, dance club project of the Metropolitan Capitolites, one of DC’s earliest gay-oriented social clubs. The Capitolites began throwing house parties in the 1960s, providing an essential entertainment and meeting space as well as social networking opportunities. The group opened the ClubHouse in the  former garage and showroom with 400 charter members, a number that swelled to 4,000. On weekends, 8,000 people lined up to enter the club. During the 1980s, under the leadership of John Eddy, Morrell Chasten, and Audrea Scott, the ClubHouse was instrumental in creating an awareness of HIV and AIDS among African Americans. The club lent its space, mailing list, and organizing ability to the first AIDS Forum for Black and Third World Gays, jointly sponsored in September 1983 with the Whitman Walker Clinic.  This was one of the first events during the AIDS crisis where public health workers reached out to the African American community. Several in attendance expressed concern about inadequate reporting on the disease’s impact on minorities—40 percent of people with AIDS were Black.   Less than 18 months later, ClubHouse staff organized a holistic health response to AIDS that by 1988 had become Us Helping Us, one of DC’s most important AIDS education and support organizations. Us Helping Us met at the ClubHouse until the venue closed in 1990; despite the club’s efforts to curb the spread of the disease, AIDS had dispirited the community and killed many of its members. Later a nightclub for teenagers, the building currently houses the DC Vets Center. It was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) as part of a project focused on sites related to LGBTQ nightlife in DC.

This is a stop on the DC's LGBTQ+ History Tour.

This site was documented, along with four other DC bars/clubs, by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in 2016 as part of its DC LGBTQ Nightlife project.

For more information about DC's LGBTQ History, please see the Historic Context Statement for Washington’s LGBTQ Resources.

For more (including 5 images) view the original article

Uline Arena became the largest venue in the city for sports events when it opened in 1941, but its whites-only policy in an increasingly Black city, and in a neighborhood where many African Americans lived, made it a source of controversy and a site of protest. Although the renowned activist and performer Paul Robeson gave a concert here in the venue's opening year, the arena remained mostly off-limits to black Washingtonians.  Pickets and boycotts targeting Uline were led by Dr. Edwin B. Henderson, the longtime director of health and physical education for DC's Black schools and a leader of the NAACP's D.C. Branch. Henderson had learned to play basketball at Harvard, when the sport was first developing in the 1900s, and had founded the District's first Black basketball league at True Reformers Hall in 1908. He had formed school teams throughout the city and had organized DC's Black high school athletic conference as well as the first association of African American referees.    Henderson's activism extended beyond the District's boundaries to Falls Church, Virginia, where he moved with his wife in 1913 and cofounded the NAACP's first rural branch. "Too many of our best young people move to Washington and their economic and cultural influence is lost to the community wherein they were brought up," Henderson later wrote of employment discrimination in Northern Virginia.

In some 3,000 letters to the editor that he penned during his lifetime, and as a columnist for the Afro-American, Henderson urged a boycott of the whites-only Washington Redskins in 1961 and praised the Police Boys Club's desegregation the following year. Following Uline Arena's desegregation in 1948, Henderson helped organize an 80-person sit-in at the whites-only Child's Restaurant, across from Union Station. While unsuccessful, it paved the way for Mary Church Terrell's sit-ins and pickets at Thompson's Restaurant beginning in 1950.

The Uline Arena became the Washington Coliseum in 1959, the same year that Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed appeared with Malcolm X before an overflow crowd there.

The Uline Arena was listed in the National Register in 2007 and has since been renovated and coverted to office and retail space. 

For more (including 2 images) view the original article

The Pigskin Club was founded by Dr. Charles B. Fisher on July 30, 1938, as a social organization of men who had participated in or contributed to collegiate football. A similar club, the Touchdown Club, was organized three years earlier for whites-only.

Despite its football-and-friendship mission, the Pigskin Club never shied away from social causes, some controversial. In 1957, for example, the Pigskin Club joined labor groups to picket the National Football League Owners, specifically targeting the owner of the Washington Redskins who refused to hire Black players. Earlier, at the outbreak of World War II, it instituted a program to combat the high rate of venereal diseases among Black draftees; this consisted of a 50-member corps of practical nurses trained by physician members to spread information on prevention and treatment. During the war the club also organized a blood bank, as well as an ambulance unit that provided instruction in first aid.

Club founder Charles Fisher (1890-1945), a Washington native, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and Howard University Medical School, working his way through school as a Pullman porter. He was a standout quarterback on the Howard University Bisons football team in 1917, 1919, and 1920, and this experience inspired him to form an organization in which former players could enjoy camaraderie and help new generations of athletes.

The Pigskin Club’s first organizational meeting took place at Fisher’s medical office in the basement of his house at 1842 15th Street NW, and included George E.C. Hayes, civil rights attorney; E.B. Henderson, advocate for civil rights in athletics/sports; John R. Pinkett, entrepreneur and real estate broker; and Garnet Wilkinson, former superintendent of DC’s African American schools.

In 1945, the club moved out of 1842 15th Street NW at the death of founder Charles Fisher. Meeting in various other locations, the club continued to grow from 52 to 400 members comprising some of Washington’s most prominent African American men. The Pigskin Club was still going strong in 2019. The home/office has since been divided into several residential units. 

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

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.

For more view the original article

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. 

For more (including 4 images) view the original article

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.

For more (including 4 images) view the original article

Lewis T. Green, Sr., a gifted wood carver, lover of waterways, and vocational arts teacher in the DC Public Schools, built boats as a hobby. In his search for a place to dock one of his vessels—a 49-foot cruiser named Valeria—Green contacted the US Department of the Interior about leasing a section of the government-owned land along the Anacostia River. The Department of the Interior required that, before such a request could be reviewed, Green would need to establish a club. So, he and several others established the Seafarers Boat Club whose stated mission was to offer African Americans the opportunity to engage in the enjoyment of the waterways through safe boating and “gentlemanly sportsmanship.”

Despite fulfilling its pre-requisite, the Department of the Interior ignored Green’s follow-up request to lease the land. Eventually, Mary McLeod Bethune, an advisor to both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt intervened on his behalf, and the Department rented the club the site on the west bank of the Anacostia, between the Sousa and CXS Railroad bridges.

In 1965, the DC Mariners Club, established in the 1950s and in need of a yard and club house, took over Seafarers, retaining the latter's name. The boat club later changed its name to Seafarers Yacht Club.

The original members of Seafarers improved the marshy land and built docks and a clubhouse. Seafarers also promoted boating safety and engaged in community service projects such as the annual Anacostia River Cleanup Day, which the club initiated in 1985.

For more (including 2 images) view the original article

In 1948, a local chapter of the Young Progressives of America—an anti-segregationist organization—organized with Black neighborhood residents to demand entry to Rosedale’s pool and recreation center. The racially mixed group picketed the facility several times over the course of a few weeks, chanting “Jim Crow Must Go,” and bringing attention to the fact that four neighborhood black boys who were playing in the street outside the playground were arrested when their ball hit a street lamp. Despite these demonstrations, the Board of Recreation renewed its commitment to the whites-only policy at Rosedale.

In May 1952, when a group of ministers pointed out the obvious safety concerns: “colored children . . . must either play in the streets or cross dangerous Benning Road to play in the school grounds adjacent to Browne Junior High School,” protestors gained traction. Numerous civic groups stood behind the effort, lobbying District Commissioners.  

Later that summer after a young Black teenager, seeking relief on a hot night climbed the fence at Rosedale Pool and drowned, protests ratcheted up. Pacifist activists with the Summer Interracial Workshop—organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—descended on the District, where they joined the Citizens Committee to Integrate Rosedale Playground in picketing the Recreation Department and the playground. After fighting broke out, the city closed the playground. Within one week of its closure, more than 100 neighborhood children climbed over and under the fence in what was “believed to have been a spur of the moment inspiration by several parents in the area who have grown impatient,” reported The Afro-American.

Finally, on October 17, 1952, the Board announced that the playground and recreation center would be open to all. Rosedale Pool was officially desegregated six months later. However, it was not until shortly after the public schools were legally desegregated in 1954 that all of DC’s recreation facilities became open to Black patrons.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

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.

For more (including 4 images) view the original article

Park View, located north of McMillan Reservoir and Howard University, started out as an all-white neighborhood in 1908. During the 1930s, despite the inclusion of racially restrictive covenants in deeds and attempts by white residents to enforce them, African Americans had begun renting and buying houses there. By the late 1940s, Park View's residents were majority African American, yet both its elementary school and its playground, across the street from the school, remained open to white children only.

In response to community demand, the DC Department of Recreation reluctantly implemented a split-use plan for integration of Park View Playground for the 1948-49 academic year. The playground would be whites-only during school hours, but open to black children after 3:00 when school let out. As more African Americans moved to the neighborhood Park View Elementary became an African American school in 1949.  However, white children continued to use the playground.

Eventually, the Board of Recreation recognized the “growing community sentiment that Park View should serve the recreation needs of all people” and in May 1952 officially desegregated this playground along with several others. Two years later, in May 1954, segregation at all DC playgrounds ended.  

Park View Playground was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article