On her way to becoming a nationally renowned public health and civil rights activist in the 1940s, Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980) moved to DC in 1925 for an internship at Howard University's Freedmen's Hospital. She had been among the top five…

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…

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…

Vincent DeForest, quoted above, and his brother Robert DeForrest (they spelled their last names differently) worked for at least a decade out of the large rowhouse at 1236 Euclid Street to document African American historic sites across the United…

Howard Dilworth Woodson, a civil engineer and civic leader, led successful campaigns for better services in neglected African American neighborhoods in far Northeast DC. Born in Pittsburgh, Woodson (1876-1962) earned a degree in civil engineering…

Carter G. Woodson, Ph.D. devoted his life to establishing and advancing the field of Black history. By creating, collecting and widely distributing scholarship authored by and about African Americans, Woodson asserted the existence of a black past…

By the time Bishop Williams (1907-1991) called for the resignation of the members of the Board of Education, he was already a well-known preacher and prominent civil rights activist. Williams began his career in DC as a street preacher at the corner…

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…

John Philip Sousa Junior High School was at the center of Bolling v. Sharpe, D.C.’s companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. Parent activist Gardner Bishop, a co-founder of the Consolidated Parents Group, had begun pushing seriously against…