Constructed in the 1920s, the 12th Precinct Station House is architecturally significant as a prominent example of the Colonial Revival style in the District. Additionally, the station house is historically emblematic of DC’s expanding police force…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…