While the Buchanan School Plaza in the Capitol Hill neighborhood has shrunk greatly since its construction, the original playground and park facilities built in 1968 represented major changes in playground design, concepts of play, and urban…

Established in 1945 by mariner Lewis Thomas Green, the Seafarers Yacht Club became one of the first community spaces for black boaters in Washington, DC. Green began building his own boats around the late 1930s to early 1940s, in addition to his…

Twin Oaks Playground was established in 1920 to serve the rapidly growing rowhouse community of Petworth. Originally, Twin Oaks was little more than fenced lawns, with a clay tennis court on the northern section. It was not until 1933 that a…

The ClubHouse (also known as the Clubhouse and the Club House), constructed in phases between 1930 and 1945, served as an automobile garage and showroom before becoming DC’s top African American dance club from 1975 to 1990. As AIDS became an…

Uline Arena became the largest venue in the city for sports events when it opened in 1941, but its whites-only policy in an increasingly Black city, and in a neighborhood where many African Americans lived, made it a source of controversy and a site…

The Pigskin Club was founded by Dr. Charles B. Fisher on July 30, 1938, as a social organization of men who had participated in or contributed to collegiate football. A similar club, the Touchdown Club, was organized three years earlier for…

In 1938, the National Non-partisan Council on Public Affairs (NPC), an outgrowth of the Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, became the first organization devoted to lobbying the federal government to advance African American civil rights. The group…

During a campaign to exonerate the Scottsboro Boys—a group of imprisoned Black Alabama youth in danger of being lynched—the local chapter of the National Negro Congress (NNC) held its first mass meeting in DC at Metropolitan Baptist Church (then at…

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. Although approximately 100 elementary school-aged…

Lewis T. Green, Sr., a gifted wood carver, lover of waterways, and vocational arts teacher in the DC Public Schools, built boats as a hobby. In his search for a place to dock one of his vessels—a 49-foot cruiser named Valeria—Green contacted the US…