African American Civil Rights
Tour Description
The 20th Century Civil Rights Tour consists of historic sites in the District of Columbia that tell the stories of individuals, groups, and institutions associated with the struggle for African American civil rights. As the nation’s capital, Washington was the site of seminal civil rights events and was home to people who played pivotal roles in both the national civil rights movement and in local campaigns for racial equality.
The 20th Century African American Civil Rights Tour is currently populated with 100 historic sites, but will be updated and enhanced as new information and resources become available.
The majority of these sites still stand, but for those no longer extant, the name is followed by (site).
The Tour has been developed by the DC Office of Planning/Historic Preservation Office (HPO) with grant funds provided by the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, African American Civil Rights Grant program. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the Department of the Interior or U.S. Government.
Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute endorsement by the U.S. Government.
Research and writing by Prologue DC.
Locations for Tour
Civil Rights Tour: Raphael G. Urciolo Residence
Raphael Urciolo, who gave this testimony in Urciolo v. Hodge (U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, 1945) contributed to one of DC’s and the nation’s most significant civil rights victories of the 20th century: the Supreme Court’s 1948…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - All Souls Unitarian
All Souls Church, originally an all-white congregation, was founded at Judiciary Square in 1821; it moved to 16th and Harvard streets in 1924. During the 1940s and 50s under the leadership of Reverend A. Powell Davies (1944-1957), the church came to…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - Dorothy Ferebee, Access for All
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 Freedmen's Hospital. She had been among the top five…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - David A. Clarke, Legislating for Social Justice
In an interview with the Washington Post in 1990, longtime Ward 1 Councilmember David A. Clarke (1943-1997) described the lasting impact of his childhood discovery that as a DC resident he could not become a Congressional page since there was no…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - The Grimkés, An Activist Family
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,…
Civil Rights Site: Civic Activism - Hecht's Department Store
Hecht’s was one of the largest department stores in the city for much of the 20th century. In the 1950s, it became a key site of protest in the battle to end discrimination against Black shoppers.Although a 1929 survey by the Black-owned Washington…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - IPS, Home for Radicals
Shortly after it was first established in 1963 as a left-leaning think tank directed by two former Kennedy administration staffers, Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) became a hub for civil rights activists,…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism: Murray Brothers and the Black Press
Printing companies were an essential tool for independent Black newspapers, and these papers were a primary means for civil rights leaders to amplify the messages of organizations they led. F.H.M. Murray, whose sons ran the presses, worked closely…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - St. Stephen's Church, Demanding Racial Justice
Built in the 1920s to serve white residents of Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in 1957 became the first church of the Washington Episcopal Diocese to integrate its congregation. The St. Stephen's…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - Ethel Payne, Washington Correspondent
As the Washington correspondent for Chicago Defender for 25 years, Ethel Lois Payne (1911-1991), quoted here, used journalism to raise awareness of racial discrimination and to demand justice. At her first White House press conference in February…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - Greater Washington Urban League
Upon its opening, the Washington Urban League (WUL) was one of more than 40 branches of the National Urban League in as many cities across the country. The inter-racial Washington chapter, now known as the Greater Washington Urban League, devoted…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic Activism - Howard Woodson, Advocate for Northeast
Howard Dilworth Woodson, a civil engineer and civic leader, led successful campaigns for better services in neglected African American neighborhoods in far Northeast DC. Born in Pittsburgh, Woodson (1876-1962) earned a degree in civil engineering…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic and Social Life - Georgia Douglas Johnson's "Halfway House"
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…
Civil Rights Site: Civic and Social Life - The Clubhouse
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic and Social Life - James Reese Europe Post 5
Later that month the group received its charter as Post 5 of the DC Department of the American Legion and named itself for renowned musician, composer, and band leader James Reese Europe (1881-1919), who grew up in Washington. During World War I, Lt.…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Afro-American Institute
Vincent DeForest, quoted above, and his brother Robert DeForrest (they spelled their last names differently) worked for at least a decade out of the large rowhouse at 1236 Euclid Street to document African American historic sites across the United…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - John P. Davis and Equal Education Now!
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Civic and Social Life - Billy Simpson and the Ebony Table
So chronicled newspaper columnist William Raspberry upon the death of Billy Simpson (1914-1975), owner of Billy Simpson’s House of Seafood and Steaks. Indeed, between 1958 and his death, Billy Simpson and his restaurant played a central role in the…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Gardner Bishop, Barber and Activist
Gardner Bishop moved to Washington from his home state of North Carolina in 1930. Ten years later, he opened his shop, which remained a fixture in the neighborhood until the building was converted to condominiums in the early 1980s. One Sunday…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - "Kelly Miller Says"
Born in South Carolina, Kelly Miller (1863-1939) graduated from Howard University in 1880. He was appointed to the Howard faculty in 1890, teaching mathematics and, after 1895, sociology. While teaching, he earned two more degrees from Howard, in…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Carter G. Woodson, Father of Black History
Carter G. Woodson, Ph.D. devoted his life to establishing and advancing the field of Black history. By creating, collecting and widely distributing scholarship authored by and about African Americans, Woodson asserted the existence of a black past…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Daniel A. P. Murray, Librarian
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 the 1900 Paris Exposition. In combination with…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Nannie Helen Burroughs
Uncompromising feminist Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) devoted her life to improving the career prospects for women and girls. She often went up against men who could not imagine women in leadership positions and, throughout her career,…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Louise Burrell Miller and Deaf Education
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 Kendall…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Federal City College, Education is Power
Originally the headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission, this 1949 building at 425 2nd Street NW became home to the nation's first urban land grant school when Federal City College (FCC) opened here in 1968. Funded via the sale of…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - New School of Afro-American Thought
Freeman conceived of the New School of Afro-American Thought as a much-need institution for educating and empowering Black residents through a wide array of Afro-centric offerings. As he later explained, some had begun to see Howard University as…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Browne Junior High, the Fight for School Desegregation
Carr’s school, Browne Junior High, had been built in 1932 for 888 students, but by 1941 it held close to twice that number. With class sizes ranging from 50 to 58 students, it was cited as the most overcrowded of the city’s public schools. The School…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Central for Cardozo
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 city residents mobilized to demand that…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Anna J. Cooper, Trailblazing Educator
These words, written by Anna Julia Hayward Cooper (1858-1964), who lived in LeDroit Park for 40 years, are found inscribed in the pages of every U.S. passport along with quotations by eleven other famous American authors. Cooper, the only woman of…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Howard University Law School
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - MLK Library, A Living Memorial
Upon its dedication in August 1972, the DC Public Library’s new central branch—designed by famed modernist architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe—became one of the first public buildings in the country to be named in honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Meyer Elementary School, Experiment in Busing
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 the nearby suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. That year,…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Morgan Community School
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 community achieved in its fight to manage its own affairs…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Rayford Logan, Historian
Although best known for his achievements as a historian and public intellectual, Rayford Logan (1897-1982) was, at heart, an activist devoted to the advancement of Africans and their descendants all over the world. After being exposed to racist…
Civil Rights Tour: Education - Sousa Junior High and Bolling v. Sharpe
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 Parents Group, had begun pushing seriously against…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Engine Company No. 4, All-Black Unit
In its first fifty years since it was professionalized in the 1870s, the DC Fire Department had employed a few Black firefighters, but none had ever achieved officer status until three African American firefighters petitioned the Fire Department for…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune began traveling to D.C. from her native Florida after her election as president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1924. After creating a school for African American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1905 and…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Non-Partisan Council
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Pride, Inc., Youth Empowerment
As uniformed, teenage workers for Pride, Inc. completed cleanup projects in the fall of 1967 and moved on to the next job, they slapped stickers with these words all over the Cardozo-Shaw neighborhood. Organized by future D.C. Mayor Marion Barry,…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Ruth Bates Harris, Whistle Blower for Equality
Ruth Bates Harris (1919-2004) is most remembered for blowing the whistle on NASA’s discriminatory hiring practices in the early 1970s. NASA hired her as an equal opportunity officer in 1971, but two years later it fired her for releasing a scathing…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Elmer Henderson, Fighter for Equality
Elmer W. Henderson was the plaintiff in a major civil rights case, a fair employment advocate for the federal government, and the longtime director of a national lobby for African American equality. In May 1942, Henderson was denied seating on a…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - John Lankford, Architect
John Anderson Lankford (1874-1946) broke barriers when he put his stamp on Washington’s built environment begining in the early 20th century. At the same time, he promoted racial progress through various efforts including founding the Washington, DC…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Jewell Mazique, Equal Employment Activist
After receiving a master's in African Studies at Howard University, helping to raise three nieces in her Kalorama home, and working two jobs to put her husband through medical school, Jewell Mazique (1913-2007) quit her clerical position at the…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - A. Philip Randolph and the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
The Victorian rowhouse at 817 Q Street NW was, for more than three decades between 1943 and 1978, the local chapter office of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Socialist labor rights advocate A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979)…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Marie Richardson, United Federal Workers' Rep
Marie Richardson (1920-1987) became a labor and civil rights activist in the 1930s, while a student at Cardozo High School. Her father handled baggage at Union Station, and together they helped organize the first local union in the country to…
Civil Rights Tour: Sanitary Grocery, "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work"
The case, New Negro Alliance v Sanitary Grocery Store, came about in 1936 when the grocery store chain opened a new store at 1936 11th Street NW in the heart of the African American U Street neighborhood, yet refused to hire African Americans to work…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Rosina Tucker, Labor Organizer
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Clifton Terrace and Tenant Organizing
During the 1960s, the once-elegant apartment complex originally known as Wardman Courts, but renamed Clifton Terrace in 1921, had fallen into severe disrepair. As tenants were forced to endure a lack of heat, crumbling ceilings, peeling paint, leaky…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Equitable Realty, Opening Neighborhoods
When entrepreneur and former law student Geneva Valentine (1901-1971) opened Equitable Realty Co. on U Street in the early 1930s, she immediately went to work on "breaking" all-white blocks in Park View, where racially restrictive covenants barred…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Industrial Bank of Washington
In 1913 laborer and entrepreneur John Whitelaw Lewis founded the Industrial Savings Bank at 11th and U streets NW, opening up financial opportunities for African Americans. When it opened, Industrial Bank (designed by Black architect Isaah T.…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Langston Terrace Dwellings
Langston Terrace Dwellings opened in 1938 as one of the nation’s earliest federally funded public housing projects for lower income residents and only the second one to be built for African Americans. Planned during the Depression, with its housing…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Church of God and Elder Michaux
Much of Michaux's life work was devoted to advancing black economic independence. Soon after his arrival in DC around 1928, Michaux brokered a deal with the city to house evicted families in a building at Seventh and T streets NW, not far from where…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Lincoln Temple Congregational Church
In 1939, Lincoln Temple Congregational Church was the site of a mass meeting to "Abolish Modern Slavery," hosted by the National Negro Congress (NNC). With a goal of focusing attention on police enforcement of racial terrorism, the meeting's speakers…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Robert Weaver and the Fight for Fair Housing
Economist and fair housing advocate Robert Clifton Weaver (1907-1997) wrote these words in his seminal 1948 study, The Negro Ghetto. This book was the first to comprehensively address the racist housing policies that had segregated northern cities…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Barry Farm Dwellings
Barry Farm Dwellings was just over 20 years old in 1966, and already falling apart when a Washington Post reporter interviewed residents for her article, "Hope Ebbs and Tempers Rise: Underground Poor Fight Funds Cuts." Driven by poor living…
Civil Rights Tour: Housing - Neighbors, Inc., Fighting White Flight
A primary mission of Neighbors, Inc., founded in 1958, was persuading white homeowners to remain in the city. To do that, the group doggedly documented racist tactics that realtors used to convince white property owners to sell their houses and move…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Belford and Marjorie Lawson
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Corrigan v. Buckley, Racial Covenants Upheld
When the stately, turn-of-the 20th century rowhouse at 1727 S Street NW in Dupont Circle was sold to an African American couple in violation of a racial covenant that restricted its sale to whites, the house and everyone involved were thrust into a…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - The Hundleys and Racially Restrictive Covenants
Purchased by two educators, Mary and Frederick Hundley, this 1910 house was originally sold by developer Harry Wardman with a covenant in its deed that barred it from ever being sold to “any Negro or colored person.” Furthermore, in 1926-1928, white…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Hurd v. Hodge, Landmark Supreme Court Case
The James and Mary Hurd house at 116 Bryant Street in Bloomingdale was at the center of the Supreme Court's landmark 1948 decision ending court enforcement of racially restrictive real estate covenants. The case, Hurd v. Hodge, was DC's companion to…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Lemuel Penn, Civil Rights Martyr
Lemuel Penn was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klan night riders on July 11, 1964, just nine days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The new federal law, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and by businesses and other…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Campbell A.M.E. Church, Organizing Base
In the 1940s, Campbell African Methodist Episcopal Church was a hub of resistance to school segregation in the District. In collaboration with local and national organizations, the church planned for and staged events that would ultimately lead to…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Department of Justice, Enforcing Civil Rights
In 1948, the agency’s preparation of a 123-page amicus brief in Shelley v. Kraemer and Hurd v. Hodge—which challenged courts' enforcement of racially restrictive deed covenants that were used to create and maintain whites-only neighborhoods—marked…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Frank D. Reeves, Leveraging the Law
Attorney and educator Frank D. Reeves (1916-1973) was a critical player in seminal civil rights victories, namely the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court school-segregation case. Born in Montreal, Reeves arrived in Washington as a child.…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Charles Hamilton Houston, Civil Rights Attorney
DC native Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950) was a top civil rights attorney and a mentor to an entire generation of African American lawyers. Houston attended the city’s segregated school system, graduating from M Street High School (later Dunbar)…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Clara Mays, Racial Covenants Defied
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Thurgood Marshall, From Howard U to Highest Court
In the same year that President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to serve as the first African American Supreme Court Justice, US Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall used these words in defense of the federal government's opposition to a California state…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - James Nabrit, Legislating for Change
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 of equalizing white and Black schools, but in…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Old City Hall, Racial Equality
The Old City Hall Building at Judiciary Square was the site of a decades-long battle to desegregate the whites-only DC Bar Association and its law library, both housed at what was the US District Court for the District of Columbia until 1952.Huver…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - George E.C. Hayes, Lawyer and Leader
George E.C. Hayes (1894-1968) graduated from the Howard University Law School in 1918 and spent much of the rest of his life working to dismantle racial segregation. Hayes taught law at Howard and served as the university’s general counsel for more…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Supreme Court, Arbiter of Civil Rights
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, in advancing (or taking away) civil rights, it is…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - NAACP, DC Branch
Established in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) DC branch was the largest and most influential of some 50 branches across the United States. The group devoted itself to protesting racial discrimination…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - Howard Croft, Social Justice Crusader
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Croft started his activist career just after college in the early 1960s, registering voters in Mississippi. Croft earned his Master's in social work from Columbia University through a National Urban League fellowship…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - Drum and Spear Bookstore
The Drum and Spear Bookstore, which operated from 1968 to 1974, specialized in books by and about Black people. The bookstore, founded by Charlie Cobb, Courtland Cox, Judy Richardson and Curtis Hayes (later Curtis Muhammed)--all veterans of the…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - Oscar De Priest, Lone Legislator
Oscar Stanton De Priest (1871-1951) represented Chicago’s South Side in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1929 to 1935. He was the first African American Congressman in the 20th century and the first in 28 years. He was also the first-ever Black…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - Walter Fauntroy and New Bethel Baptist Church
For 60 years spanning much of the second half of the 20th century, New Bethel Baptist Church at 1739 9th Street was led by Rev. Walter Fauntroy, one of DC's most respected civil rights leaders. A native Washingtonian and graduate of Dunbar High…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - John A. Wilson/District Building
In 1874, as DC's African American population and political clout grew during Reconstruction (1865-1877), Congress stripped DC residents of the ability to elect their own mayor and city council, denying them the right of self-governance. For the…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - National Council of Negro Women
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - Henrietta Vinton Davis & the UNIA
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - DC Statehood Party
This manifesto, proclaimed at a March 1969 news conference, announced the formation of the DC Statehood Party Committee. With a multiracial membership that included Rev. Doug Moore of the Black United Front, Rev. Jesse Anderson of St. Patrick's…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - Wilhelmina and Calvin Rolark, Crusaders for Justice
Born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, Wilhelmina Jackson moved to Washington in 1933 to attend Howard University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science. Her career began with the National Negro Congress (NNC). Founded in…
Civil Rights Tour: Protests - 14th and U
Arthur Ashe, who wrote this passage, was among the many luminaries who headed to this area—a center for black business, activism and entertainment since the turn of the 20th century—when he came to town for tennis tournaments in the early 1960s. U…
Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment - Walter Washington, Mayor-Commissioner
Walter Washington (1915-2003) became the first African American mayor of a major American city, and the first mayor in DC since 1871 when President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the position in 1967. Washington served as mayor-commissioner from…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Ralph Bunche
Hired in 1926 by Mordecai Johnson, the university’s first black president, Ralph Bunche (1904-1971) established and chaired Howard’s Department of Political Science. He also advised a student group that went on to work with local churches and…
Civil Rights Tour: Protests - Childs Restaurant Sit-Ins
In February 1949, the Legislative Assembly and Rally to End Segregation and Discrimination was held in Washington, DC, attracting civil rights leaders from around the country. On Saturday afternoon of the conference, a group of participants planned a…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Willie Hardy, "Uninvited Woman Guest"
Activist and Ward 7 DC councilmember Willie J. Hardy (1922-2007), quoted above, lived most of her life around Marshall Heights, where, in the 1930s, her mother helped cut roads and haul water to the then-isolated, semi-rural Black community. Hardy…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Howard University
These first two lines of a song sung to the tune of “Down by the Riverside” by Howard University student protestors during a 1968 campus uprising capture the spirit of civic activism that has consistently defined a segment of the university’s student…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Bishop Smallwood Williams, Civil Rights Agitator
By the time Bishop Williams (1907-1991) called for the resignation of the members of the Board of Education, he was already a well-known preacher and prominent civil rights activist. Williams began his career in DC as a street preacher at the corner…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Marion Barry and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
It was with these words that 29-year-old Marion Barry launched the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on a campaign to “free DC.” The District's citizens had no elected city government and had only recently won the right to vote in US…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Reginald Booker, Anti-freeway activist
Reginald Booker (1941-2015) was propelled into activism by his family's displacement from southwest DC in the early 1950s, when he was a young teenager. They had recently moved to the city, where his mother worked a night job as a janitor on Capitol…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Thelma Dale (Perkins), Sojourner for Truth and Justice
In the late 1940s, Barry Farm/Hillsdale native Thelma Dale (later Perkins) quit her government job to become national secretary of the National Negro Congress (NNC) in New York. As a Howard University student in the 1930s, Dale had been a founding…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - The Lincoln Memorial
Since the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, the larger-than-life-size, seated statue of the “Great Emancipator” has witnessed many milestones in the fight for civil rights. The dedication day was, itself, a demonstration of racism in…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Poverty Rights Action Center, Welfare Rights
Poverty/Rights Action Center (P/RAC) opened its offices at 1713 R Street in April 1966 as an organizing base for grassroots activists across the country—mostly poor, Black women determined to ensure that they had a voice in President Lyndon B.…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - O Street Mansion, Rosa Parks' "Home Away from Home."
The O Street Mansion was the Washington home-away-from-home of civil rights icon Rosa Parks (1913-2005) during her later years. Already a seasoned organizer, activist, and member of the NAACP, Parks helped spark the Civil Rights Movement in 1955 by…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Thompson's Restaurant and the Lost Laws
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 deliberately testing the validity of…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Vermont Avenue Baptist Church
Over the course of four transformative decades, Vermont Avenue Baptist Church was a hub for civil rights organizing in the District of Columbia. Beginning in 1929 with the leadership of Reverend C.T. Murray, the church expanded its rolls to nearly…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Freedom Riders
The trip, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was planned to test individual states’ compliance with the 1960 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia that prohibited segregation in bus terminals and restaurants serving…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Julius Hobson, Iconoclast
Julius Hobson, quoted above, was famous for creating friction. An Alabama native who came to DC to pursue a masters in economics at Howard University, Hobson became an activist in the early 1950s when his son was required to attend an underfunded…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - Mary Church Terrell, Tireless Advocate
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - National Negro Congress, Demanding Change Through Direct Action
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Protest - National Theatre Goes Dark
In 1946, thirteen years after The Green Pastures played to a whites-only audience at the National Theatre, segregation was still the norm. But when a New York play starring Ingrid Bergman was booked at the Lisner Auditorium and Bergman and the…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Anacostia Pool, Swimming for All
National Capital Parks (NCP), the federal entity that operated six of the city’s eight public pools, announced it would desegregate Anacostia Pool on June 23. But when African American children showed up to swim that day, they were met with threats…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Langston Golf Course
In the decades before World War II, African Americans were denied access to most municipal golf courses and private clubs in the United States. Fewer than twenty out of more than 5,000 courses nationwide were open to blacks, and most of these were…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Park View Playground
Park View, located north of McMillan Reservoir and Howard University, started out as an all-white neighborhood in 1908. During the 1930s, despite the inclusion of racially restrictive covenants in deeds and attempts by white residents to enforce…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Pigskin Club, Football, Friendship and Civil Rights
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Rosedale Playground
In 1948, a local chapter of the Young Progressives of America—an anti-segregationist organization—organized with Black neighborhood residents to demand entry to Rosedale’s pool and recreation center. The racially mixed group picketed the facility…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Rose Park Playground
Originally established in 1918 by the Ancient Order of the Sons and Daughters of Moses to serve African American children, Rose Park was known variously as Patterson’s Park, Jacob’s Park, or Winship’s Lot. The city acquired it in 1922 and designated…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Seafarers Yacht Club
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Uline Arena and E.B. Henderson
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…