Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966) was a nationally recognized figure of the New Negro Renaissance who attacked lynching through her writing. In the 1920s and ‘30s, she wrote six one-act plays in a literary genre known as lynching drama, which…

The Victorian rowhouse at 817 Q Street NW was, for more than three decades between 1943 and 1978, the local chapter office of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Socialist labor rights advocate A. Philip Randolph…

In 1913 laborer and entrepreneur John Whitelaw Lewis founded the Industrial Savings Bank at 11th and U streets NW, opening up financial opportunities for African Americans.  When it opened, Industrial Bank (designed by Black architect Isaah T.…

In its first fifty years since it was professionalized in the 1870s, the DC Fire Department had employed a few Black firefighters, but none had ever achieved officer status until three African American firefighters petitioned the Fire Department for…

Mary McLeod Bethune began traveling to D.C. from her native Florida after her election as president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1924. After creating a school for African American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1905 and…