The Seafarers Yacht Club of Washington, DC, established in 1944, is the oldest African American boat club on the East Coast and represents a step in the long process of equal access to public…

"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…

John Philip Sousa Junior High School was at the center of Bolling v. Sharpe, D.C.’s companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. Parent activist Gardner Bishop, a co-founder of the Consolidated…

"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,…

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…

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…

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

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…

“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,…

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…