Arthur Ashe, who wrote this passage, was among the many luminaries who headed to this area—a center for black business, activism and entertainment since the turn of the 20th century—when he came to town for tennis tournaments in the early 1960s.

U Street had gained its reputation as a mecca for black culture decades earlier; many of the street’s businesses and institutions were black-owned and run, and the surrounding residential streets were home to a majority African American population. Still, while many white businesses in the neighborhood readily took money from black customers, they refused to employ them. In the 1930s, a Peoples Drug store near this intersection was the target of protests waged by the New Negro Alliance for its policy against hiring African Americans. Mary McLeod Bethune, the outspoken founder of the National Council of Negro Women, was among those who picketed.

In 1943, the Howard University Chapter of the NAACP held a sit-in and pickets at Little Palace Cafeteria. Pauli Murray, then the only woman and the top student in her class at Howard University Law School, later wrote that Little Palace was "a source of mortification for countless unsuspecting Negroes who entered it assuming that they would be served in the heart of the Negro section of the city." Five days after students began picketing, the restaurant dropped its whites-only policy.

By the mid-1960s, the area was a hub for civil rights organizations, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SCLC organized the 1963 March on Washington, the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, and advocated for DC home rule. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's D.C. branch and Marion Barry's Pride, Inc. were also headquartered here.

On April 4, 1968, black Washingtonians gathered around this intersection after learning of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis. In the autumn of 1968, the murder by a white police officer of a black citizen near this intersection during a dispute over jaywalking sparked renewed demands for fair treatment of black citizens and for hiring more black officers.

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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.

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Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966) was a nationally recognized figure of the New Negro Renaissance who attacked lynching through her writing. In the 1920s and ‘30s, she wrote six one-act plays in a literary genre known as lynching drama, which displayed some of the ways African Americans’ lives were controlled by white men, via sexual violence and lynching, or threats of these forms of terror. Some of Johnson’s plays also touched upon efforts in Congress to adopt an anti-lynching law, and she joined other members of the Writers League Against Lynching in urging President Roosevelt to demand that Congress act.

Johnson graduated from the Oberlin College Conservatory in 1903 and moved to DC with her attorney husband, Henry Lincoln Johnson, in 1910. Although her husband discouraged her from writing (he preferred that she stick to housekeeping), she published her first book of poetry in 1916, followed by a second one in 1922. When her husband died three years later, and Johnson needed to support herself and her two teenaged sons, she took a position in the Department of Labor as Commissioner of Conciliation, charged with investigating the conditions under which workers lived.

She also continued to write, and at the suggestion of writer Jean Toomer, began welcoming the city’s luminaries for Saturday evening salons at her home which she nicknamed the "Halfway House." Among the regulars discussing literature, politics, civil rights, and the issues of the day were fellow poets Alice Dunbar Nelson, Angelina Grimké, and Langston Hughes; playwrights Mary Burrell and Willis Richardson; philosopher and writer Alain Locke; and sociologist and columnist Kelly Miller. Johnson published four volumes of poetry, and her work also appeared in The Crisis, published by the NAACP, and The Messenger, a journal founded by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen.

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Later that month the group received its charter as Post 5 of the DC Department of the American Legion and named itself for renowned musician, composer, and band leader James Reese Europe (1881-1919), who grew up in Washington. During World War I, Lt. Europe served in France with the 369th Infantry—aka the Harlem Hellfighters—and organized that unit’s celebrated band, introducing early syncopated American Jazz to French audiences. About the time the American Legion was forming, Lt. Europe died in New York from injuries inflicted in an assault by a disgruntled band member. 

Along with serving as a gathering place and service provider for veterans, the Post has spoken out on various civil rights issues. For example, it joined a nationwide campaign against police brutality by adopting a resolution condemning the 1938 DC police shooting of an unarmed, shell-shocked veteran. It also petitioned the US Congress to find a suitable venue for Marian Anderson to perform in 1939; demanded the abolition of the poll tax in 1942; demanded an end to the mistreatment by the U.S. military of African American servicemen in 1943; and, that same year, demanded that the DC Department of the American Legion remove the discrimination clause from its articles of incorporation.

Post 5 bought its headquarters, the rowhouse at 2027 North Capitol Street NE, in 1954 where it remains active today.

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So chronicled newspaper columnist William Raspberry upon the death of Billy Simpson (1914-1975), owner of Billy Simpson’s House of Seafood and Steaks. Indeed, between 1958 and his death, Billy Simpson and his restaurant played a central role in the social and political culture of the city, providing Washington’s African American community with an upscale venue not just for dining and socializing, but for strategizing on the political and civil rights events of the day. Simpson never ran for public office himself, but his influence was widespread.

As soon as it opened in 1956, the restaurant—with its Tudor half-timbering exterior—filled a void for African Americans who had few options for dining out. The restaurant became a popular meeting place for intellectuals, professionals, politicians, entertainers, and African diplomats who came to enjoy the elegant “white table-cloth service” on the restaurant’s first floor and its intimate Ebony Table bar on the second. In keeping with the medieval motif of the restaurant, Simpson established an informal “Round Table” where black Congressmen, journalists, and federal officials gathered.

Congressmen Charles C. Diggs and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., were personal friends of Simpson’s, and regulars at the restaurant. Among other causes, Simpson—a life-long advocate for home rule for the District—actively supported the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (Jesse Jackson used the restaurant as his headquarters during the Campaign), and the anti-war movement.

Billy Simpson’s House of Seafood and Steaks was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

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