Sites tagged "Legal Campaigns": 14
Sites
Lucy Diggs Slowe Elementary School
The Lucy Diggs Slowe Elementary School first opened in 1945 in response to a lawsuit against segregated schooling in DC. John Preston Davis attempted to enroll his five-year old son at Noyes Elementary School in 1944, yet was rejected based upon…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Hurd v. Hodge, Landmark Supreme Court Case
The James and Mary Hurd house at 116 Bryant Street in Bloomingdale was at the center of the Supreme Court's landmark 1948 decision ending court enforcement of racially restrictive real estate covenants. The case, Hurd v. Hodge, was DC's companion to…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Old City Hall, Racial Equality
The Old City Hall Building at Judiciary Square was the site of a decades-long battle to desegregate the whites-only DC Bar Association and its law library, both housed at what was the US District Court for the District of Columbia until 1952.Huver…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Supreme Court, Arbiter of Civil Rights
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Non-Partisan Council
In 1938, the National Non-partisan Council on Public Affairs (NPC), an outgrowth of the Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, became the first organization devoted to lobbying the federal government to advance African American civil rights. The group…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - James Nabrit, Legislating for Change
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - NAACP, DC Branch
Established in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) DC branch was the largest and most influential of some 50 branches across the United States. The group devoted itself to protesting racial discrimination…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Thurgood Marshall, From Howard U to Highest Court
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…
Civil Rights Tour: Employment - Elmer Henderson, Fighter for Equality
Elmer W. Henderson was the plaintiff in a major civil rights case, a fair employment advocate for the federal government, and the longtime director of a national lobby for African American equality. In May 1942, Henderson was denied seating on a…
Civil Rights Tour: Legal Campaigns - Department of Justice, Enforcing Civil Rights
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…