As assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852-1925), created the authors and literature exhibit for W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal exhibition on African Americans at…

In 1952, Louise Burrell Miller and others sued the DC Board of Education to have deaf African American children educated within the District and won. Schools in DC were segregated by law, including…

In 1895, Kelly Miller, a prominent intellectual, author and faculty member at Howard University, convinced the university to add to its curriculum the new discipline of sociology. Sociologists, Miller…

"Our training included not only learning the law and how to think on our feet but also how to conduct ourselves in hostile situations. . . . Bound together by an overriding passion, we were a tiny…

The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I…

“George E.C. Hayes was one of the great lawyers who fought for the little people of this Nation when it was extremely unpopular to do so.” (Wiley Branton, Director of the United Planning Organization,…

For a few years beginning in September 1968, Eugene Meyer Elementary School on 11th Street in the Columbia Heights neighborhood was party to a little-known partnership with Bannockburn Elementary in…

“That was the whole point of the store…to have a space where Black people, whatever their political persuasions were, or maybe they didn’t have any political persuasions…could encounter ideas, could…

“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class―it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

When the building that houses Cardozo High School was first constructed in 1914-1916, it was called Central High School and for the next thirty-five years was open to white students only. Then in 1950…