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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…