"If I'm criticized, then I've been heard." (Willie J. Hardy)

"I think I've been involved in every issue in the black community on the front lines."(Reginald Booker)

The corner of 14th and U was the grapevine. . . . If you were at that corner, you always had the sense that something big was about to happen.

Constructed in 1908 to serve as DC's city hall, this building at 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue was historically known as the District Building. It was re-christened in 1994 to honor John A. Wilson, a…

On February 9, 1954, Rev. Smallwood E. Williams stood up at a public meeting in a downtown church and called for the resignations of most members of the DC Board of Education, as well as of School…

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…

“If democracy is to live, segregation must die.” (Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, 1956)

In early 1950, Mary Church Terrell and other activists attempted to eat at Thompson’s Restaurant, a downtown cafeteria and one of many restaurants and eateries with a whites-only policy. The group was…

"Suspected of 'Communist' is every colored person in America who believes in civil and political rights and proposes to get them, and every white person who thinks he ought to."(Mary Church Terrell,…

"We want to free DC from our enemies, the people who make it impossible for us to do anything about lousy schools, brutal cops, slumlords, welfare investigators who go on midnight raids, employers who…