The Early Civil Rights Struggle in the National Capital Area, 1900–1941

From emancipation through the Great Migration of the early 1900s, Black Americans moving north met the same racism associated with the South. The years from 1900 to 1941 made plain that the nation was not keeping its promise of liberty and justice "for all." Under President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921), the federal government backed segregation, and violence against African Americans went unpunished. Against terror, Jim Crow laws in every part of life and a world that closed doors to them, Black activists and their allies fought back — and laid the foundation of the modern civil rights movement.

Three African American men on the steps of the White House, 1922. Harris & Ewing, photographer; Library of Congress.

This timeline draws on the Park Service's Historic Resource Study: Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area, by Cheryl LaRoche, Patsy Fletcher, Caroline Spencer and Lauren Hughes.

1900–1912

• 1900 — About 31% of Washington, D.C.'s residents (86,702 of 278,718) were Black, according to the Census Bureau.
• 1901 — George H. White, the only Black member of Congress (1897–1901), left his seat on March 3. Twenty-eight years passed before another African American served in Congress.
• 1902 — Educator and activist Fannie Barrier Williams put women at the center of the philosophy of self-respect, reshaping the "New Negro" movement in Washington.
• 1902–1948 — More than 50 racially restrictive laws took hold across the region, limiting Black property ownership in Silver Spring, Maryland, and requiring Black voters to read and explain part of the Constitution to registrars' satisfaction.
• 1906 — The Niagara Movement, devoted to full civil and political rights, held its first public meeting on American soil at Storer College in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. It later cut ties with the college after its white president was replaced by a conservative.
• 1909 — The Loudoun County Emancipation Association chose September 22 as Emancipation Day. The same year, Carter G. Woodson came to Washington to research his dissertation at the Library of Congress and teach in the city's public schools, beginning a long career there.
• 1910 — The Baltimore Normal School (founded 1865), Maryland's oldest historically Black college, moved to Prince George's County, becoming the Maryland Normal and Industrial School at Bowie and eventually Bowie State University.
• 1912 — Wilson fired hundreds of Black federal workers after his election.

George H. White. Photographer unknown; Library of Congress.

1913–1925

• 1913 — Wilson approved segregation in federal buildings by the end of his first term. Neval Thomas, one of the twelve founders and an early president of the NAACP's Washington branch, built it into the largest chapter in the country.
• 1915 — A second Jefferson School opened in Arlington View, Virginia, after activists pressed the school board in 1912 for another grade school for Black children in grades 1–9; the first, founded in 1884, had quickly filled.
• 1919 — The Red Summer, a wave of riots and violence after World War I, reached Washington. Carter G. Woodson saw a white mob seize a Black man and shoot him.
• Musician James Reese Europe lived in Washington from 1891, when he arrived with his family at age nine, until he left for New York in 1904; as an adult he fought to win fair, contracted employment for Black musicians.
• 1921 — Montgomery County developer, veteran and politician Colonel Edward Brooke Lee began writing racial restrictions into the deeds of all his suburban properties, barring African Americans from buying or renting unless they were domestic servants. It foreshadowed redlining — color-coded maps that denied Black Americans home loans — which the Federal Housing Administration formalized nationwide in the 1930s and 1940s.
• 1922 — On June 14, 5,000 African Americans marched silently past the Capitol and the White House, carrying signs against lynching and urging a federal anti-lynching law.
• 1925 — Howard University professor Alain Locke, considered an originator of the Harlem Renaissance, published The New Negro, describing a generation "vibrant with a new psychology," free of the "tyranny of social intimidation" and seeking "full initiation into American democracy."

Founding members of the Niagara Movement, 1905. R. P. Slater; Library of Congress.

1928–1940

• 1928 — Minnie Buckingham Harper of West Virginia became the first African American woman to serve in a state legislature in the United States.
• 1935 — Loudoun County's Black parent-teacher associations united in the County-Wide League to improve their children's schools.
• 1936 — Cabin Camp 1, later Camp Lichtman, opened for Black youth in Prince William Forest Park; white youth had a separate camp.
• 1937 — Thurgood Marshall represented William Gibbs, principal of Rockville Colored High School, in Gibbs v. Board of Education, a suit for equal pay for Black teachers — one of a run of cases chipping away at Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal."
• 1938 — Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority created the National Non-Partisan Lobby on Civil and Democratic Rights, later the National Non-Partisan Council on Public Affairs: the first full-time congressional lobby for minority civil rights.
• 1939 — Attorney Samuel Tucker led four men in a sit-in against Alexandria, Virginia's segregated public library.
• 1940 — After repeated failed appeals to the school board, Loudoun County's Black community bought eight acres near Leesburg for $4,000, deeded them to the board for $1, and built Douglass High School for Black students.

Sources

Based on "The Early Civil Rights Struggle in the National Capital Area," National Park Service, drawing on the Historic Resource Study: Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area; a work of the United States government in the public domain.