Built in the 1920s to serve white residents of Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in 1957 became the first church of the Washington Episcopal Diocese to integrate its congregation. The St. Stephen's congregants who supported this decision stayed in the neighborhood and embraced its increasingly Black population at a time when most white churches and their congregants fled. With Rev. William (Bill) Wendt’s appointment to lead St. Stephen's in 1960, he and the the congregation made racial justice central to its mission.

Rev. Wendt joined the Freedom Riders in 1961 and led a delegation of DC clergy, including the former assistant minister of All Soul’s Unitarian Church, James Reeb, to march from Selma to Montgomery with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965. As uprisings broke out in cities across the country two years later, Rev. Wendt hosted a black power rally at St. Stephen's, where Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair H. Rap Brown spoke before an audience of 900 people. On April 4, 1968, just hours after Dr. King was shot down in Memphis, St. Stephen's became the first DC church to hold a requiem eucharist (a ceremony honoring the dead) for the civil rights leader. During the 1970s, the congregation tore down its parish house to devote all of the land surrounding the church building to affordable housing. The 72-unit Urban Village Apartments on either side of and behind the church opened in 1978 and remains accessible to low-income residents.

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For 60 years spanning much of the second half of the 20th century, New Bethel Baptist Church at 1739 9th Street was led by Rev. Walter Fauntroy, one of DC's most respected civil rights leaders. A native Washingtonian and graduate of Dunbar High School, Fauntroy was hired to lead his home church in 1959, when he was just 26 years old. Having gotten to know the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1950s, Fauntroy also led the DC chapter of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and chaired the local coordinating committee for the 1963 March on Washington. The group recruited 25,000-35,000 marchers from the DC area, arranged local lodging, oversaw a massive volunteer operation to maintain order and security, and worked closely with National Park Service officials to manage logistics.

When the northwest neighborhood of Shaw was slated for urban renewal in 1966, Rev. Fauntroy stepped up again. Some 23,000 mostly black residents had already been displaced from Southwest DC as part of a federal government urban renewal project there, and Fauntroy vowed to prevent the same "urban removal" in Shaw. He founded a coalition of some 150 churches, civic organizations, and businesses under the umbrella of the Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO) and secured $1.8 million from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for a community-led renewal plan. In March 1967, Dr. King joined Fauntroy for a march through the neighborhood to support the plan, culminating in a speech at Cardozo High School stadium.

In 1971, Fauntroy was elected as DC's first nonvoting delegate to Congress, a position he held until 1990. Fauntroy's first order of business was to rally Black South Carolina voters to unseat Rep. John McMillan, an avowed segregationist and the longtime chair of the House Committee on the District of Columbia. DC was 70% African American and had lacked self-governance for almost a century. Charles Diggs, a Black Michigan Democrat, took over McMillan's committee seat and used the position to secure home rule for DC in 1973. Seasoned civil rights activists, including former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were soon elected to office.

Five years later, Fauntroy was successful in getting both the House and the Senate to pass the DC Voting Rights Amendment, which would constitutionally require the District to have the same level of Congressional representation as a state, but the amendment failed to be ratified by enough states. In honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday on January 15, 1972, renowned civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at New Bethel. She was joined by Marion Barry and Rev. Douglas Moore. This church building dates to 1981. It replaced the congregation's previous 75-year-old building at the same location.

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By the time Bishop Williams (1907-1991) called for the resignation of the members of the Board of Education, he was already a well-known preacher and prominent civil rights activist. Williams began his career in DC as a street preacher at the corner of Seventh and O streets NW. In 1927, he organized the Bible Way Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ; as a bishop in the denomination, Williams used the bully pulpit to promote civil rights.

In 1948, soon after President Harry S. Truman abolished segregation in the U.S. military, Williams, then chairman of the National Prayer Service for Brotherhood, joined other civil rights leaders in urging the president to end segregation in DC as well.

Four years later when Bishop Smallwood’s son, Wallace, was just 5 years old, the two of them staged a sit-in at the whites-only Wheatley Elementary School. It was 1952, and as part of a plan to ease crowding in the “colored” schools, the Board of Education had transferred Wallace from Young Elementary School to another school much farther from his home at 1328 Montello Avenue NE. Wheatley, however, was just one block away with plenty of room for new students, so Williams sought to enroll Wallace there. Although he gave up his quest, the minister’s sit-in garnered attention in the local press.

In 1962, just as the Civil War Centennial Commission put the final touches on its planned centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, it hit a bump. Williams, who was president of the Washington branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, threatened a boycott if the Commission didn’t add an African American speaker to the lineup. The Commission quickly acquiesced, and Federal Judge Thurgood Marshall spoke at the September 22 event at the Lincoln Memorial. The next year, Williams joined other Washington clergy to form the Interreligious Committee on Race Relations, which urged passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963 (finally signed in 1964). Over the years Williams also served in leadership positions in the DC branch of the NAACP, DC Democratic Central Committee, National Negro Council, and Washington Home Rule Committee.

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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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Much of Michaux's life work was devoted to advancing black economic independence. Soon after his arrival in DC around 1928, Michaux brokered a deal with the city to house evicted families in a building at Seventh and T streets NW, not far from where he held services under a tent on Sherman Avenue. In 1945, he won a lawsuit brought against his Gospel Spreading Association for purchasing a house in DC's Bloomingdale neighborhood with a racially restrictive covenant in its deed.

More significantly, Michaux negotiated federal financing for the construction of Mayfair Mansions, a nearly 600-unit apartment complex in Kenilworth for Black residents, conceived and designed by Howard University architect Albert Cassell. At a time when it was nearly impossible to secure funds to build housing for African Americans, Michaux leveraged his friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to gain support for the project, which was completed in 1946. Michaux later received a $6 million loan from the Federal Housing Administration to build Paradise Manor, a 653-unit project next door to Mayfair completed in 1968.

Born in Virginia, Michaux moved to DC after establishing his ministry to serve the growing number of southern migrants who were settling in the nation's capital. In 1932, four years after Michaux arrived, the Church of God began construction of its first purpose-built church building, designed by African American architect Lewis W. Giles at 2030 Georgia Avenue. The Afro-American reported that hundreds had signed onto a fundraising campaign to pay Black laborers to build the church and that it was constructed "in record time, every brick and every dab of plaster put down by colored men."  The present church building on the site dates from 1958.

He took over a small restaurant near Seventh and T streets NW for his Happy News Café, where the poor could work in exchange for meals. Michaux also established a free employment agency, but he was better known for the mass baptisms he staged at Griffith Stadium, the present site of Howard University Hospital. His nationally-broadcast "Happy Am I" radio program attracted more than 25 million listeners every Saturday night.

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In the 1940s, Campbell African Methodist Episcopal Church was a hub of resistance to school segregation in the District. In collaboration with local and national organizations, the church planned for and staged events that would ultimately lead to Bolling v. Sharpe, a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education which ended legal school segregation nationwide. All of the Bolling plaintiffs were neighborhood residents, including Barbara and Adrienne Jennings who were members of the church.

Under the leadership of Rev. Samuel Everette Guiles, Campbell AME regularly hosted meetings of the NAACP and the Consolidated Parent Group—organized by Gardner Bishop and other DC parents to fight for equal education—as well as fundraisers to support their work.

In September 1950, when the John Philip Sousa Junior High for whites opened on Ely Place SE, Gardner Bishop and Rev. Guiles showed up to enroll a group of Black students whose own schools were far away and overcrowded. When the School Board turned down their request, the Consolidated Parent Group sued School Board President C. Melvin Sharpe on behalf of the Jennings sisters, Spottswood Bolling, Jr., and his brother Wanamaker, and other students who would be required to cross the Anacostia River to attend junior high school. (Frederick Douglass Junior High School did not open until 1952).

Rev. Guiles worked directly with attorney James Nabrit to map out strategy. After the Bolling decision came down, Rev. Guiles worked with the Anacostia Emergency Education Committee to push for the speedy admittance of African American students to Anacostia High School.

Campbell AME was established in 1867 when members of Allen Chapel in Southeast DC left to form Mount Zion AME Church on what is now Douglass Road. It became Campbell AME when it moved to its present location; the current building dates to 1938.

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All Souls Church, originally an all-white congregation, was founded at Judiciary Square in 1821; it moved to 16th and Harvard streets in 1924.  During the 1940s and 50s under the leadership of Reverend A. Powell Davies (1944-1957), the church came to embrace a social justice agenda.  

In 1947 the congregation voted overwhelmingly to support the Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which proposed specific measures to improve civil rights laws. Two years later, the NAACP gave Davies its annual award. The publicity surrounding these activities, and others in the 1950s, started drawing African Americans to All Souls.

The church was one of the few in the city to sign on to the American Veterans Committee’s anti-discrimination campaign. In a 1953 sermon, “The Shelter of Good Intentions,” Davies pledged not to patronize restaurants and entertainment venues that refused to admit African Americans. The congregation developed a list of non-segregated DC establishments, distributing more than 40,000 copies to the public.

In 1954, when the church asked Police Boys Club No. 10 (which had been meeting in the church since 1937), to drop its whites-only policy, the club refused, so All Souls organized in its place the Columbia Heights Boys Club, Washington’s first integrated youth group.

In March 1965, the church's former associate minister, Rev. James Reeb, was killed by segregationists in Selma, Alabama. Reeb had answered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to ministers to join the voting rights efforts in that city, which had resulted in a bloody confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge a few days earlier. 

In 1969 All Souls called Rev. David Eaton, the first African American senior minister in the denomination. During his tenure (1969-1992) the church was equally represented by African American and white congregants. Among those Eaton invited to speak from the pulpit were Black Panther Angela Davis and Rev. Ben Chavis of the Wilmington Ten.

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These three buildings on Howard University’s Main Yard are nationally significant as the setting for the institution’s role in the legal establishment of racially desegregated public education, and for its association with two nationally recognized leaders of that fight—Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall—as well as many others. Through Houston’s vision, beginning in 1929, Howard Law School became an educational training ground for activist lawyers dedicated to securing the civil rights of all people of color. In 1936, the nation’s first legal course in Civil Rights was established there. Howard University also provided critical support to Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as they developed the legal strategy that culminated in the historic U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, thus ending segregation in public education.

Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel: Completed in 1894, the chapel was dedicated to the brother of Jeremiah C. Rankin, president of the university from 1890-1903. Eclectic and asymmetrical in design, it is set picturesquely into the hillside. It continues to be used for religious activities and as an auditorium.

Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall: Completed in 1935, this Neoclassical building was also built under the direction of Albert Cassell. It housed classrooms and offices for the Departments of Education, History, and Psychology, as well as the Deans of the College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate School.

Founders Library: Completed in 1939, Founders Library was designed in the Colonial Revival style by architects Cassell and Willinston. One of Albert I. Cassell’s primary design architects, Louis E. Fry, Sr., who had a significant hand in the design of the library, once commented on its resemblance to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, stating “since the Library was dedicated to liberty, there was no more appropriate design for Howard University’s major building to emulate.”

Carnegie Building: Designed by Henry Whitfield and completed in 1910, this building housed the principal library and School of Religion until 1945. Although not fully documented with respect to National Historic Landmark (NHL) criteria, the building is included as a property that contributes to the setting of the site.

The Yard: Howard University's upper quadrangle provides the setting for the above buildings and five other academic buildings. The Yard became the university’s symbolic heart as the campus evolved, and it remains the center of campus life. The design is by landscape architect David A. Willinston. 

National Register: January 3, 2001

National Historic Landmark: January 3, 2001

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Originally established as the Georgetown Academy for Young Ladies, the Georgetown Visitation Convent was the first Catholic girls’ school in America. It was established by religious women in 1799 and received the first American charter of the Order of the Visitation in 1816. This property serves as the mother house for 13 convents and is also notable for housing Saint Joseph's Benevolent School from about 1800 to 1918. Various buildings, dating from 1819 to 1934, contribute to this historic site.

DC Inventory: November 8, 1964 (Chapel of the Sacred Heart); March 7, 1968 (Monastery and Academy Building) (Joint Committee on Landmarks)

National Register: March 29, 1991

Within Georgetown Historic District

This site is included in the Capital City Slavery Tour for the sale and enslavement of 121 individuals by the Georgetown Visitation Convent and School. For further information on slavery in the District, view DC Preservation League's Capital City Slavery Digital Exhibit.

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