In 1968, Reverend Antonio Welty reopened the former National Presbyterian Church (where President Woodrow Wilson preferred to worship while in the White House) to Hispanic community members. Two years after this initial contact, the Reverend Welty…

In 1968, a growing need for accessible youth services in the neighborhood resulted in the founding of the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC). Only ten years after its establishment, the Center had received enough funding to become an official…

The rapid development of Petworth in the three decades after 1900 meant that it needed new schools. Until the early 1920s, there was only a single elementary school in the neighborhood. Addressing what has been characterized as a crisis in school…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…