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 operations for meetings and other events as she helped…

This quote by Mary Church Terrell, who moved to 1615 S Street in Dupont Circle with her husband Robert Heberton Terrell in 1920, closed an opinion piece by the editors of the Chicago Defender in June 1947. Mary Terrell was a vocal, internationally…

Founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune as a national voice for Black women's organizations, NCNW signed onto the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, under the leadership of Dorothy Height from Mississippi. As a woman, Height was excluded as a…

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 the city’s only school for deaf children—the…

In February 1944 a federal employee named Clara Mays purchased the house at 2213 First Street NW in DC's Bloomingdale neighborhood. Despite warnings she’d be taking a risk in buying the house because a racial covenant barred its sale to African…

Washington attorney Belford V. Lawson (1909-1985) spoke these words at a 1947 forum at Lincoln University that followed the release of a much-anticipated report by the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. He urged Lincoln students to study the…

Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966) was a nationally recognized figure of the New Negro Renaissance who attacked lynching through her writing. In the 1920s and ‘30s, she wrote six one-act plays in a literary genre known as lynching drama, which…

Pauli Murray, who wrote these words, was the highest scoring student in the Howard University School of Law class of 1944. Although she faced discrimination as the only woman, she later recalled how important it felt to be part of what was happening…

These words, written by the prominent sociologist and journalist Kelly Miller, described Civil Rights leader Archibald Grimké (1849-1930). Born to an enslaved mother and her white owner in South Carolina, Grimké earned a law degree from Harvard,…

Henrietta Vinton Davis (1860-1941) was an elocutionist and dramatic actor who later in life worked closely with Marcus Garvey as a leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a self-reliance movement. Davis’s speeches boosted…