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.

Richardson lived at 1638 Florida Avenue NW.

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Poverty/Rights Action Center (P/RAC) opened its offices at 1713 R Street in April 1966 as an organizing base for grassroots activists across the country—mostly poor, Black women determined to ensure that they had a voice in President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty.

Founder George T. Wiley, a former national leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), worked alongside his wife Wretha Wiley and welfare rights organizers in Ohio, New York, DC, and elsewhere, cofounding the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in August 1966. P/RAC served as the national headquarters for the NWRO, which coordinated direct-action campaigns and legal efforts challenging punitive and racist welfare policies.

Wiley and his colleagues, including NWRO chair Johnnie Tillmon of Los Angeles, engaged federal policymakers and national leaders such as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in recognizing welfare recipients as a potent political force in advancing African American civil rights. The group organized marches and sit-ins on Capitol Hill and coordinated local groups throughout the US to lobby Congress, with the fundamental mission of establishing the right to a guaranteed minimum income.

In September 1966, the NWRO brought to DC some 2,000 people, members of 31 delegations from throughout the US, to a Poor People's March on Washington, a precursor to the Southern Christian Leadership's convergence on the National Mall two years later. Several months after that, in February 1967, NWRO brought 375 activists to DC for three days of seminars on welfare rights and lobbying on the Hill.

The group staged its first national convention that August, at Trinity College. Etta Horn, a tenant leader at Barry Farm Dwellings, was the NWRO's vice-chair and frequently testified before Congressional subcommittees to protest cuts to public assistance and the constant surveillance of welfare recipients. Families could be disqualified from receiving funds if a man—presumed to be capable of supporting the household—appeared to be living in the home.

The NWRO is credited with helping turn Dr. King's attention toward Black economic advancement, a goal of his 1968 Poor People's Campaign. In the last address he gave in DC, King vowed that the campaign would "establish that the real issue is not violence or nonviolence but poverty and neglect.

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As the Washington correspondent for Chicago Defender for 25 years, Ethel Lois Payne (1911-1991), quoted here, used journalism to raise awareness of racial discrimination and to demand justice. At her first White House press conference in February 1954, Payne questioned President Dwight D. Eisenhower about why the Howard University choir had been barred from a dinner at the Washington Coliseum by the police. The president, who was in attendance at the dinner event, chalked up the incident to a misunderstanding by the choir director. This was the first of many events and issues that the city’s white papers reported on only because Payne was in the press room.

Five months after her first White House press conference, Ethel Lois Payne asked the president if he'd support banning racial discrimination in interstate travel, drawing an angry rebuke and eliminating her chances of being called on again. "The white press was so busy asking questions on other issues that the Blacks and their problems were completely ignored," she said later. Indeed, she was the only reporter to ask how the White House would address racial discrimination in housing. Throughout her career, Payne continued to focus her attention on civil rights issues. She reported from the Columbia Heights home of Spottswood Bolling on the day of the Supreme Court's momentous decision in Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education, and later covered the emerging leadership of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the desegregation of the University of Alabama, and the murder of Emmett Till.

In 1976, Payne co-chaired a national conference for Black women in the media that featured luminaries such as former presidential candidate Shirley Chisolm (D-NY). Raised in Englewood on Chicago's South Side, Payne became active in civil rights as a young woman; at 29, she received an award from the NAACP for recruiting more than 20 new members. In 1941, she joined Asa Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement to demand compliance with a new law banning employment discrimination by federal contractors. After Randolph called off his march in exchange for an executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission, Payne was charged with making Black Chicagoans aware of the new rules and how to gain access to jobs.

In 1947, Payne was assaulted by a Chicago police officer when she defended a group of young men being arrested for loitering; shortly thereafter, in 1948, she left the city for good.

During her Washington years, Payne resided in various neighborhoods. Her last home—an apartment at The Rittenhouse on 16th Street where she lived from 1978 until her death in 1991—was described by the Washington Post as overflowing "with books, plants, posters from China and ivory plaques and figures from Africa" collected during her reporting years. Her neighbors in the building included Rev. Jesse Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline.

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The O Street Mansion was the Washington home-away-from-home of civil rights icon Rosa Parks (1913-2005) during her later years. Already a seasoned organizer, activist, and member of the NAACP, Parks helped spark the Civil Rights Movement in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. Three-quarters of the riders on city buses were African Americans, and some, fed up with racist abuse at the hand of drivers and white passengers, had been planning a boycott. Parks’s arrest became the triggering event, earning her the nickname “mother of the civil rights movement.”

Decades later, in 1994, Parks was left injured and traumatized after a targeted attack and robbery inside her Detroit home. At the request of their mutual friend Willis Edwards, president of the Beverly Hills branch of the NAACP, a Washington, DC hotelier, Ms. H.H. Leonards invited Parks to rest and heal at her Dupont Circle home and inn, known as the O Street Mansion. Parks eventually returned to Detroit but stayed with Lady H (Parks’ name for Leonards) during her frequent visits to DC. It was at the O Street Mansion that Parks met with heads of state and other dignitaries, as well as entertainers, and friends, and occasionally hosted formal Sunday Gospel Brunches, for example one in December 1998 to commemorate the 43rd anniversary of the start of the Montgomery bus boycott and another the next June to mark her receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal.

Over the years the O Street Mansion, which comprises five historic and more recent adjoining rowhouses (2016-2022 O Street) has hosted a number of other civil rights notables, including Willis Edwards and Emmet Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, and it has supported African American artists.

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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.

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After receiving a master's in African Studies at Howard University, helping to raise three nieces in her Kalorama home, and working two jobs to put her husband through medical school, Jewell Mazique (1913-2007) quit her clerical position at the Library of Congress in the early 1940s to become a full-time labor and civil rights organizer. She went on to cover local and African affairs for the Afro-American newspaper, and to be a respected leader in the Black Power and pan-Africanist movements of the 1960s and '70s.

With Thelma Dale, Marie Richardson and other local activists, Mazique helped launch a campaign in 1941 to desegregate Capital Transit, DC's privately owned bus and streetcar operator. Although seating wasn't segregated, as in other southern cities, the company hired African Americans only for poorly paid maintenance and custodial jobs. Mazique and her colleagues gathered support from the national NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston, Mary McLeod Bethune, Howard University professor Doxey Wilkerson, and others for a mass meeting at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in November 1942, where Rev. Adam Clayton Powell was a featured speaker.

In 1943, after Capital Transit refused to comply with a desegregation order by the federal Fair Employment Practices Commission, Mazique helped launch pickets at the Commission's headquarters, in advance of scheduled hearings in May, and at busy intersections around the city. At least 800 people joined a march from 10th and U streets NW to Franklin Square, and more than 100 ministers of both white and African American congregations condemned the transit company's policy during Sunday sermons. However, without President Harry S. Truman's backing, and as the federal government began using Communism as a tool for punishing labor and civil rights leaders, it would take until 1955 to get Capital Transit to hire Black operators.

In addition to leading the campaign against Capital Transit, Mazique served as an officer of the National Council of the Southern Youth Congress, which pushed for full integration of the military and its training programs. In 1960, she represented the Washington Elks Civil Liberties League at a mass meeting on the FBI's cooperation with groups that were working to suppress black voting and economic participation.

Mazique and her husband Edward owned the three-story rowhouse at 1861 California Street NW from 1939 to 1945, before moving to 1824 Upshur Street NW, in DC's Crestwood neighborhood.

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Ruth Bates Harris (1919-2004) is most remembered for blowing the whistle on NASA’s discriminatory hiring practices in the early 1970s. NASA hired her as an equal opportunity officer in 1971, but two years later it fired her for releasing a scathing report that called the agency's minority hiring program "a near-total failure," and ranked NASA well below other government offices and private companies in its employment of non-whites and women. According to the report, just 5.19% of NASA employees were minorities, with most in low-level clerical positions, compared to 20% in the whole federal government. Her firing led to Congressional hearings in January 1974; she was rehired that August.

Years earlier, Harris worked for the Washington Urban League, before joining the staff of the Council on Human Relations in 1961 and taking over as director three years later. The Council, a city agency, was charged with defending District residents against discrimination in housing, employment, and other areas, but it was provided only a tiny staff and minimal budget to investigate and resolve discrimination complaints.

Harris focused her efforts on discriminatory policing and in November 1967 persuaded the DC City Council to hold public hearings on the topic. Young Black men and antipoverty activists testified and demanded action, but the Council was not empowered to intervene. (Prior to the passage of DC's Home Rule Act five years later, the presidentially appointed Mayor and Council had no say over the police department.) When Black leaders demanded community control of the police department after a series of police shootings in the summer of 1968, Harris commented, "We have always had community control. The problem is that it has been white community control." Facing continued opposition in Congress to desegregating the police department or other agencies, Harris took a new job as the Montgomery County Schools director of human relations in 1969.

Harris lived at 1218 E Street NE.

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Activist and Ward 7 DC councilmember Willie J. Hardy (1922-2007), quoted above, lived most of her life around Marshall Heights, where, in the 1930s, her mother helped cut roads and haul water to the then-isolated, semi-rural Black community. Hardy later raised eight children and three nieces at 5046 Benning Road NE in a more modern Marshall Heights, calling them her "built-in picket line." Her husband Lloyd Hardy, a cabbie, drove the whole family to protest outside the whites-only Glen Echo amusement park in the summer of 1960.

Before her election to the DC Council in 1974, Hardy ran the Metropolitan Community Aid Council out of a Quonset building in Deanwood which Lloyd Hardy helped build, known as the Hut. The group provided housing, food, clothing, and legal assistance for people evicted from their homes or awaiting public assistance. "We don't receive any money from any Federal agency," she told a reporter, "and yet the Welfare Department has to refer starving people to us so they won't die while they complete their paper work." Lloyd used his cab to shuttle evicted families to the Hut and to pick up food and clothing for them.

In January 1966, Hardy coordinated the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) successful one-day bus boycott, led by Marion Barry. Two years later, she became the only woman on a steering committee for the Black United Front, a coalition of civil rights and Black Power groups across the city that demanded a voice in the city's governance and community control of the police. In January 1968 when the Department of Justice hosted a meeting on "preventing and controlling racial disorders," in Warrenton, Virginia for white police chiefs from across the country, Hardy attempted to crash it. Hardy, who objected to "white Americans getting together, with taxpayer money to discuss us," was physically prevented from entering the meeting. In 1969, she joined Marion Barry in opposing Mayor Walter Washington's plan to add 1,000 officers to DC's police force, urging that funds instead be directed to programs for rehabilitation and preventing crime. Shortly after winning her seat on the DC Council—she served two terms (one two-year, and one four-year) from 1975-1981—Hardy commented that "the ones who make laws are the ones who bring about change. That's where the power is."

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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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When entrepreneur and former law student Geneva Valentine (1901-1971) opened Equitable Realty Co. on U Street in the early 1930s, she immediately went to work on "breaking" all-white blocks in Park View, where racially restrictive covenants barred African Americans from settling.

In the 1940s, Valentine worked with Black clients in Brookland and in Bloomingdale and other areas of the city to secure houses for those looking to buy. A 1950 Negro Digest article credited her with refusing "white clients' requests that [home prices] be raised for colored buyers," as was common among real estate brokers who knew that African Americans would pay more, due to the scarcity of houses available to them. Valentine’s assistance in finding a house for Clara Mays, on First Street NW in Bloomingdale, led to one of DC's most significant legal challenges to racial deed covenants, in Mays v. Burgess.

Around 1949, Valentine purchased a building at 2008 Sixteenth Street NW with the intention of establishing what she called the "first non discriminating cooperative apartment" in the city. By June 1950, the co-op was said to house "several Negro families who live there harmoniously with white families." Valentine's Futurers Cooperative, Inc., formed in 1941 to enable its ten women members to become homeowners, purchased investment properties in the District and a 56-acre farm in Prince Georges County, Maryland. "We plan to build our 'Dream City,'" wrote Valentine in a 1946 report, to provide "gracious living, financial security, and independence for us all, and a better life for the people of the community."

A cofounder of the Emergency Committee on Housing, established to address the increasing use of eminent domain and restrictive deed covenants to displace Black Washingtonians, Valentine recalled being the only Black real estate investor to attend a 1944 national meeting on housing in Chicago. There she expounded on her group's unsuccessful effort, in partnership with the Washington Urban League, to keep "a sizeable tract of land in Arlington County" from being taken by the federal government and sold for whites-only development (The George Pickett Homes).

In 1960, Valentine advocated for the inclusion, in redevelopment plans for Adams Morgan, of the area where most white residents lived. Otherwise, she testified, "the process of urban renewal would again become restricted to an area occupied predominantly by non-whites," and "the certainty of many that this urban renewal program is a means to an end, to uproot the minority, will be substantiated. "

The former Equitable Realty office at 1011 U Street NW is currently hosts retail on the first and second floors of the building.

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