Black History

On the days leading up to the March on Washington, buses from every direction poured into the District of Columbia. Culie Vick Kilimanjaro and her husband John Marshall Kilimanjaro came from Greensboro, North Carolina. No one knew exactly what to expect prior to the March. Many feared violence. Many feared that no one would show up and the March would be a bust. 

On April 16, 1862 Congress passed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing more than 3,100 people in the capital months before the Emancipation Proclamation and spawning an annual Emancipation Day celebration that was revived in 2005.

In April 1848, more than 76 enslaved people in Washington, D.C. slipped aboard The Pearl under the cover of darkness and the small schooner set sail down the Potomac. Backed by abolitionists including Daniel Drayton, the voyage promised hope but calm winds and betrayal turned it into one of the most dramatic failed escapes in American history.

On February 2, 1959, four African American seventh‑graders walked into Stratford Junior High and became the first students to integrate a public school in Virginia. With over 100 Arlington County police officers in riot gear standing guard, it was an orderly and historic moment that helped break the state’s “Massive Resistance” to Brown v. Board and opened the door to wider desegregation across Virginia

Ask most people what Supreme Court case ended public school segregation and they will say, “Brown vs. Board of Education.” That is would be correct… for most of the country. But, for citizens in the federally-controlled District of Columbia another case would be more important: Bolling vs. Sharpe, a case filed on behalf of eleven African American parents whose children had been denied enrollment at D.C.'s John Phillip Sousa Junior High School on the basis of race. 

Yarrow Mamout — a West African who survived the Middle Passage, won his freedom, and became one of early Washington’s most remarkable figures — left a rare portrait of early Georgetown.