It was with these words that 29-year-old Marion Barry launched the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on a campaign to “free DC.” The District's citizens had no elected city government and had only recently won the right to vote in US…

In 1948, a local chapter of the Young Progressives of America—an anti-segregationist organization—organized with Black neighborhood residents to demand entry to Rosedale’s pool and recreation center. The racially mixed group picketed the facility…

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…

Since the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, the larger-than-life-size, seated statue of the “Great Emancipator” has witnessed many milestones in the fight for civil rights. The dedication day was, itself, a demonstration of racism in…

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…

Julius Hobson, quoted above, was famous for creating friction. An Alabama native who came to DC to pursue a masters in economics at Howard University, Hobson became an activist in the early 1950s when his son was required to attend an underfunded…

These words, written by the prominent sociologist and journalist Kelly Miller, described Civil Rights leader Archibald Grimké (1849-1930). Born to an enslaved mother and her white owner in South Carolina, Grimké earned a law degree from Harvard,…

The trip, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was planned to test individual states’ compliance with the 1960 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia that prohibited segregation in bus terminals and restaurants serving…