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.…

The Washington Urban League was established in 1939 as the DC branch of the National Urban League, a national, non-profit organization whose main objective was the development of job opportunities for…

In a 1982 interview with a Washington Post reporter when she was 100 years old, longtime labor activist Rosina Corrothers Tucker recalled how her house at 1128 7th Street had been the center of…

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…

Pride was here. Keep it!

Though unremarkable in appearance, the modest building at 1936 11th Street NW—once a Sanitary Grocery Store—looms large in civil rights history as the scene of a landmark Supreme Court decision…

“The National Theatre of Washington has the bold affront to bring to the District of Columbia a show, ‘The Green Pastures,’ played entirely by a cast of our own people, with the definite understanding…

In 1939, Lincoln Temple Congregational Church was the site of a mass meeting to "Abolish Modern Slavery," hosted by the National Negro Congress (NNC). With a goal of focusing attention on police…

“…[A]ll education should be in the direction of overcoming the awful monsters of Jim Crow and other evils that stand in the way of freedom.”(Belford Lawson, 1947)

John Anderson Lankford (1874-1946) broke barriers when he put his stamp on Washington’s built environment begining in the early 20th century. At the same time, he promoted racial progress through…