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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…