Although best known for his achievements as a historian and public intellectual, Rayford Logan (1897-1982) was, at heart, an activist devoted to the advancement of Africans and their descendants all over the world. After being exposed to racist…

As uniformed, teenage workers for Pride, Inc. completed cleanup projects in the fall of 1967 and moved on to the next job, they slapped stickers with these words all over the Cardozo-Shaw neighborhood. Organized by future D.C. Mayor Marion Barry,…

Freeman conceived of the New School of Afro-American Thought as a much-need institution for educating and empowering Black residents through a wide array of Afro-centric offerings. As he later explained, some had begun to see Howard University as…

As assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852-1925), created the authors and literature exhibit for W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal exhibition on African Americans at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In combination with…

In 1952, Louise Burrell Miller and others sued the DC Board of Education to have deaf African American children educated within the District and won. Schools in DC were segregated by law, including the city’s only school for deaf children—the…

Born in South Carolina, Kelly Miller (1863-1939) graduated from Howard University in 1880. He was appointed to the Howard faculty in 1890, teaching mathematics and, after 1895, sociology. While teaching, he earned two more degrees from Howard, in…

Pauli Murray, who wrote these words, was the highest scoring student in the Howard University School of Law class of 1944. Although she faced discrimination as the only woman, she later recalled how important it felt to be part of what was happening…

DC native Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950) was a top civil rights attorney and a mentor to an entire generation of African American lawyers. Houston attended the city’s segregated school system, graduating from M Street High School (later…

George E.C. Hayes (1894-1968) graduated from the Howard University Law School in 1918 and spent much of the rest of his life working to dismantle racial segregation. Hayes taught law at Howard and served as the university’s general counsel for more…

For a few years beginning in September 1968, Eugene Meyer Elementary School on 11th Street in the Columbia Heights neighborhood was party to a little-known partnership with Bannockburn Elementary in the nearby suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. That…