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…

"They say we have outside agitators . . . . Heck, when you're living like this, you don’t need anybody from outside to agitate [for] you." (The Washington Post, December 25, 1966).

Church of God's modest appearance and location along a busy commercial corridor belie the grandiose dreams and significant accomplisments of its founder, Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux.

During the 1960s, the once-elegant apartment complex originally known as Wardman Courts, but renamed Clifton Terrace in 1921, had fallen into severe disrepair. As tenants were forced to endure a lack…

"Believing…that everyone has a right to good and decent housing, a right of choice to live where one can afford to buy and desires to live—our firm dedicated itself to finding such homes….We knocked…

As African American families began fleeing the South during the Great Migration, they discovered in Washington great opportunities in education and employment. However, finding capital to buy a home…

Langston Terrace Dwellings opened in 1938 as one of the nation’s earliest federally funded public housing projects for lower income residents and only the second one to be built for African Americans.…

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…

The enactment of fair housing regulation in the District in January 1964, more than four years before Congress passed the federal Fair Housing Act, was largely thanks to Neighbors, Inc.

“American cities have a choice to make. They can maintain strict residential segregation or they can initiate urban redevelopment and sound urban planning. They cannot do both.”(Robert Clifton Weaver,…