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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…