As the highest court of the land, the United States Supreme Court is ultimately where significant, nationwide civil rights advances are made, and sometimes unmade. While Congress has a huge role, too,…

"I stick to my firm, unshakeable belief that the black press is an advocacy press, and that I, as a part of that press, can't afford the luxury of being unbiased."

In 1954, James Nabrit and co-lead attorney George E.C. Hayes celebrated the outcome of Bolling v. Sharpe, DC's companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. For years, attorneys had argued in favor…

Morgan School, which stood at 18th and California streets until 1977 (now occupied by the soccer field at Marie Reed Recreation Center), stood as a symbol of the success that this mostly Black…

". . . public libraries can no longer afford to have a policy of business as usual . . . . knowledge has always been recognized as a form of social power." (Hardy Franklin, D.C. Central Public Library…

"Liberty is not the loser when the pressures of conformity to prejudice are removed by law." (Thurgood Marshall, Solicitor General of the United States, March 1967)

“We gonna lay down our shufflin’ shoes.” (Howard University student protestors, 1968)

On her way to becoming a nationally renowned public health and civil rights activist in the 1940s, Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980) moved to DC in 1925 for an internship at Howard University's…

The US Department of Justice (DOJ), headquartered in a building designed for it as part of the Federal Triangle project in the 1930s, has been an essential tool in advancing African American civil…

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.…