As the highest court of the land, the United States Supreme Court is ultimately where significant, nationwide civil rights advances are made, and sometimes unmade. While Congress has a huge role, too, in advancing (or taking away) civil rights, it is up to the Court to determine how laws are interpreted and enforced. In 1946, NAACP attorneys William Hastie and Thurgood Marshall came here to argue one of the first 20^th-century civil rights cases to make it to the Supreme Court.  The case involved 27-year-old Irene Morgan, a mother of two who, while recovering from a miscarriage, was arrested in the summer of 1944 for refusing to give up her seat on a bus from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. Spottswood Robinson III, of the NAACP and Howard University Law School, represented Morgan in the Virginia courts, arguing that the incompatibility of state laws regulating where people could sit served to impede interstate commerce. Although Robinson was unsuccessful, the Supreme Court ruled in Morgan v. Virginia that segregating interstate buses indeed posed an unconstitutional "burden on commerce." Two years later, the Supreme Court found in Shelley v. Kraemer and the DC case Hurd v. Hodge that the enforcement of racially restrictive housing covenants violated the 14^th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. While African Americans continued to face significant barriers to housing, the real estate industry, banks, and white homeowner associations could no longer rely on the courts to maintain segregation through deed restrictions. The Supreme Court's 1954 rulings in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and the DC companion case Bolling v. Sharpe struck down segregated schools as unconstitutional, reversing the court's landmark 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that had established “separate but equal” as the law of the land. The court cited Brown v. Board in 1956, when it ruled in the Montgomery, Alabama case Browder v. Gayle that the Constitution prohibited separating intrastate bus passengers by race.   In 1960, the Supreme Court ruled in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that gerrymandering—in this case, altering the boundaries of Tuskegee, Alabama's electoral district so that it excluded African Americans altogether—violated the 15^th Amendment.

The Supreme Court began to effectively dismantle schemes aimed at furthering integration beginning in 1974, when it ruled in Millikan v. Bradley that a suburban school district could not be required to join the city of Detroit in implementing a busing program designed to counter the influence of residential segregation on the area's public schools. The court's 1978 decision in University of California v. Bakke held that racial quotas violated the 14^th Amendment, resulting in the erosion of universities' efforts to offer opportunities to minority students. Most recently, in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder (2013), the court eliminated a key requirement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: that states with a history of preventing African Americans from voting must receive clearance from the federal Department of Justice to change any rules related to elections. Tools such as voter ID laws have since been adopted to suppress the black vote.   The Greek Revival Supreme Court building dates to 1935.

For more 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

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).

For more (including 2 images) view the original article

It was with these words that 29-year-old Marion Barry launched the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on a campaign to “free DC.” The District's citizens had no elected city government and had only recently won the right to vote in US presidential elections.

Barry came to DC in June 1965 to lead the city's SNCC chapter headquartered in the rowhouse at 107 Rhode Island Avenue, where staff lived in an apartment upstairs. Six months later, SNCC pulled off a successful one-day bus boycott to protest a threatened fare increase. As part of the boycott, coordinated by antipoverty activist Willie J. Hardy, SNCC set up 45 stations at barbershops, churches, laundromats and other spots where people participating in the boycott could get rides.  A year later, SNCC moved its headquarters to the building at 1234 U Street, now demolished. 

Buoyed by the boycott's ability to mobilize thousands of black DC citizens, Barry launched Free DC in February 1966, shortly after Congress killed a home rule bill backed by President Johnson. The Congressional Quarterly reported that fears that “the Negro majority would dominate . . . city government” led to the bill's demise. Indeed, that same fear resulted in the loss of local self-government almost a century earlier when black Washingtonians exercised the right to vote and were elected to office. Free DC focused on getting businesses, especially those catering to African Americans along H Street NE and 14th Street NW, to support home rule or risk being boycotted. As a result, more than 700 businesses displayed Free DC stickers in their windows. To increase community support, and to protest the city's lack of recreation facilities, Barry also organized a popular series of SNCC block parties. Finally, DC regained limited home in 1973.

After his 2014 death, Barry was remembered for engaging local youth in cleaning up the neighborhood. In fact, the training and employment of young black men in public works projects—in part to protect them from police violence—was at the heart of his next endeavor, Pride, Inc. After becoming a member of the city's first elected school board and then the City Council, Barry was elected Mayor in 1978, eventually serving four terms. The rowhouse and former SNCC headquarters at 107 Rhode Island Avenue NW was recently converted into a multi-bed youth hostel. 

For more (including 4 images) view the original article

Although best known for his achievements as a historian and public intellectual, Rayford Logan (1897-1982) was, at heart, an activist devoted to the advancement of Africans and their descendants all over the world. After being exposed to racist treatment by white officers during his service in World War I (1917-1918), Logan remained in France after the war to coordinate the second Pan African Congress. He worked closely with NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois and the anti-colonialist Haitian diplomat Dante Bellegarde. Pan Africanists called for ending colonial European abuse of Africans and for African American civil rights. Logan later became the NAACP's consultant on colonial affairs.

In 1934, Logan made news in New York when he and his wife Ruth walked off a ship about to set sail for Haiti, refusing to be confined to the overcrowded "tourist" section reserved exclusively for non-white passengers. "The Haitian government cannot expect the sympathetic support that American colored folk have given it in the past, if it continues to permit ships of this line to come to Haiti," he protested. The Logans received a full refund.

Logan helped organize voter registration drives and citizenship schools during the 1920s and 1930s, pioneering a program to teach black southerners how to resist white intimidation at the polls. During World War II (1941-45), he chaired a federal committee on black participation in the military, co-authored President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order outlawing racial discrimination in government contracts, and persuaded the president to assign more black soldiers to active duty.

Logan was a member of the NAACP's national board for many years, and was awarded the organization's prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1980. Logan wrote hundreds of articles and numerous books during his many years as a history professor and department chair at Howard University. Among his best-known works is a title that described what Logan identified as the lowest point in American race relations: The Negro In American Life And Thought: The Nadir, 1877 to 1901, published in 1954.

Logan commissioned African American architect Hilyard Robinson to design his house at 1519 Jackson Street NE in 1939. It has since been demolished and replaced with a new one on the site.

For more (including 2 images) view the original article

This manifesto, proclaimed at a March 1969 news conference, announced the formation of the DC Statehood Party Committee. With a multiracial membership that included Rev. Doug Moore of the Black United Front, Rev. Jesse Anderson of St. Patrick's Episcopal Church, and Washington Afro-American editor Chuck Stone, the committee saw advocating statehood as a means for advancing civil rights and black power in a majority-black city controlled by the US Congress. (DC is a federal district that lacks voting representation in Congress to this day.)

A year later, the white DC activist and journalist Sam Smith published an article arguing that statehood was the clearest path toward putting a stop to the "endless quibbling over colonial reorganization" that plagued DC politics. He urged DC residents to embrace statehood as a "clear, just and attainable" means of self-determination.

Julius Hobson—a former leader of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), the successful plaintiff in a 1967 legal case charging the DC public schools with racial discrimination, and a member of DC's first elected school board—helped launch the DC Statehood Party in 1970 by running as the party's candidate to become DC's first non-voting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives. Although he lost to Rev. Walter Fauntroy, Hobson garnered enough votes to make the party official, and in 1974, was elected to the first home rule Council as the Statehood Party’s candidate. Following Hobson's death in 1977, Hilda Mason was appointed to his seat; she continued to serve as the party’s representative on the Council until 1998. Josephine Butler, a former labor organizer and public health activist, chaired the party beginning in 1977 and continued to advocate for statehood until her death in 1997.

The Statehood Party headquarters were located in the pre-Civil War building at 1017 K Street NW, recently renovated and part of the Moxy Hotel.

For more (including 5 images) view the original article