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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…