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In the years between the Shrine's approval and dedication, the clergy believed there was “grand work” to do. At the Shrine and beyond its threshold, the clergy hoped their efforts would secure Catholicism's public presence. Ecclesiastical leaders not only hoped to contest Protestant interpretations of their faith, but—in a related effort—they also tried to claim civic space. They did so by working locally, regionally, and nationally to assert influence on American politics, culture, society, and economy. A few who ventured into the public arena had direct or indirect links with the Shrine. More important, in this chapter—which focuses on the building's geographical location, exterior design, and cultural function—it is argued that its clerical promoters helped to create the American tradition of making religious claims on civic space in the nation's capital, an important but overlooked pattern of public religious practice in the United States. Like the leaders of Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish groups, Roman Catholic advocates increasingly focused their attention on Washington, where they asserted their presence through rituals (vigils, processions, pilgrimages, and parades) and architecture (war memorials, the Vatican's embassy, churches, and shrines).

This chapter describes Washington, D.C. as the nation's most important city for African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Black Washingtonians' cultural and educational institutions, political connections, and prospects for stable employment stood out against the penury, terror, and segregation that plagued black lives elsewhere in the United States. Four decades of decent employment in federal offices had made Washington a city of opportunity and relative freedom for black men and women, a place where respectability and status could be earned by work in the nation's service. The salaries paid to black federal clerks fueled a growing black middle class, and its power and prestige limited racial discrimination in the city. Life in the District was hardly free of racism or struggle. But for ambitious African Americans, the social as well as economic value of federal positions was incalculable.

This chapter explores how, during the 1930s, black women waged an early civil rights movement in the nation’s capital. Inspired by the militancy of the Great Depression and influenced by on-going campaigns for safety and economic justice, activists protested racial segregation, lobbied for the passage of a civil rights bill, and pressed for the restoration of voting rights to all eligible residents of Washington, D.C., culminating in a referendum election in 1938. While African Americans waged similar types of movements around the country, activists in Washington, D.C. benefited from their close proximity to the federal government. As memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction surfaced in the 1930s, activists applied the lessons from these eras directly into their political campaigns as they worked to restore the freedoms that their ancestors had once enjoyed in Washington, D.C.

Chapter 4 describes the challenges and opportunities of life for women in the nation’s capital during the 1860s. During the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was on the front lines of the conflict. After the war, annual reports of the Board of Metropolitan Police to Congress make clear that Washingtonians continued to endure overcrowding, housing shortages, crime, and disease. Women not only survived in this chaotic context; many—including Patent Office clerk Julia Wilbur, whose diary offers an intriguing window into the everyday life of a female federal employee—thrived in this tough city, enjoying independence, filling their leisure time, and changing the demographics of Washington. For those who chose to do so, female federal employees’ salaries, newly acquired political knowledge, and personal associations provided them with the financial and practical wherewithal to participate in philanthropy and political movements, including the suffrage movement. Female federal employees were visible all over the city, helping to normalize the presence of middle-class women in the streets of Washington. In forming this new, conspicuous community of independent women in full view of the nation’s politicians, female federal employees became a part of the struggle for women’s rights, whether they intended to or not.

Chapter seven examines a Washington D.C. inner city hospitality house that has intentionally made itself present in “the forgotten quadrant” of the nation's capital. As a local presence it is consciously responding to, and taking responsibility for, society's neglect. This chapter argues that the ministry's very presence in the neighborhood stems from an initial act of repentance as the co-founders turned toward the forgotten quadrant and moved into the neighborhood in order to encounter the neighbor. Because the Southeast White House's existence is based on a desire to live for others, especially those on the margins of society, it manifests christological repentance. The chapter argues that the ministry's work may be viewed as an ongoing activity of repentance – a making right – as it fosters relationships and draws other people into its communal life, connecting people normally divided by race, religion, politics, economics, social standing, geography, and culture

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. remains the greatest public space in America, the ultimate destination monument. It is unlikely that the two men most responsible for the memorial's design imagined that, like the man whose memory they honored, the Lincoln Memorial would become a place of historical significance. Seated there in his flag-draped chair of state, protected by architect Henry Bacon's magnificent neoclassical temple, Daniel Chester French's Lincoln has witnessed history: civil rights rallies, protests against the Vietnam War, prayer vigils for a host of causes, assorted concerts, and celebrations for both Republican and Democratic Party presidential inaugurals. There is an affinity for Abraham Lincoln among not only Americans but also people all across the globe precisely because he was “one of us”, yet literally made it to the top. Deep down, people like Lincoln because they can relate to him in some way and at some level.

In July 1864, the nation's capital came under enemy attack. With 14,000 men, Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early launched a bold raid on the North which brought him to the outskirts of Washington D.C. Though Washington was surrounded by a ring of impressive forts, they were undermanned, and their defenders had seen little to no actual combat. Early's men arrived in front of Fort Stevens around noon on July 11. Fighting broke out between Confederate skirmishers and Federal pickets and continued throughout the afternoon. Union reinforcements arrived and the way to Washington was blocked, so while some fighting continued, on July 13th, Early withdrew and marched back to Virginia. Archaeological survey techniques conducted by the National Park Service in Rock Creek Park, just west of Fort Stevens, has allowed the main movements of both Union and Confederate forces to be determined across a substantial portion of this battlefield, which was long thought to have disappeared under Washington's sprawl.

This introduction contextualizes black women’s politics within the historical and social landscape of political culture in black Washington. While African American women’s political activism stretched back to the seventeenth century, it was during the 1920s and 1930s that their political campaigns gained more visibility, and Washington, D.C. was a key location for this process. Inspired by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and emboldened by World War I’s message of democracy, black women formed partisan organizations, testified in Congress, weighed in on legislation, staged protest parades, and lobbied politicians. But in addition to their formal political activities, black women also waged informal politics by expressing workplace resistance, self-defense toward violence, and performances of racial egalitarianism, democracy, and citizenship in a city that very often denied them all of these rights. Jim Crow Capital connects black women’s formal and informal politics to illustrate the complexity of their activism.

Chapter Fifty looks at Hodge and his family during the Civil War. As was true of most of the United States, Hodge had personal ties to the War. His fourth son, John, served for a time, and his brother-in-law, General David Hunter, kept Hodge abreast of Washington politics and news of the War more generally. Hodge was depressed throughout much of the War, saddened by the loss of life and the loss of the Union itself. During the War, Archie and his family returned to the North to take up a pastorate in Wilkes-Barré, Pennsylvania, while Mary returned to Princeton with her family, where her husband died of consumption soon after their arrival.

The Lyndon Johnson administration set in motion plans to commemorate the nation’s two hundredth anniversary with extensive urban renewal efforts. Chapter Five shows that as the Bicentennial Celebration neared, the Richard Nixon White House withdrew funds, decentralized programming, and minimized the importance of urban renewal to the overall celebration. In collaboration with both the Nixon administration and congressional representatives, the city’s white boosters planned to use the national celebration as a platform for the redevelopment of downtown Washington, D.C. They had an ally in the city’s black municipal leaders who supported the development of the city’s downtown core, including the building of the Eisenhower Convention Center and the redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue. Studies of these civic projects illustrate how a new coalition of stakeholders, including Downtown Progress, Mayor Walter Washington, and Representative Walter Fauntroy, tried to cash the Bicentennial’s promissory note for permanent development. During this time, some black leaders and groups returned to the fight for home rule, opening up new, but gradualist, political possibilities during the Bicentennial planning period. Thus the Bicentennial became a battle not only over urban development but also over the leadership and direction of the city.

Five years after the March on Washington and just one month after the April 1968 riots, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) returned to Washington, D.C., to stage the Poor People’s Campaign, a national antipoverty campaign planned while King was still alive but executed after his assassination. Chapter 3 examines how the Poor People’s Campaign unfolded in a city that operated with nascent black political power, federal oversight, and law-and-order measures that undermined grassroots activism. By ignoring the city’s radical voices, racial tensions, and local organizations in planning the Poor People’s Campaign, SCLC overlooked systemic injustices taking place just blocks beyond the monumental core. Quite the opposite, the campaign put a strain on local resources, sidetracked municipal government officials, increased tensions with the local police department, and provided fodder for a presidential candidate eager to make the city’s lawlessness a focal point of his campaign. Meanwhile, in the shadow of the Poor People’s Campaign, local activists battled the federal government over its War on Poverty efforts, revealing the ways Johnson’s Great Society undermined black self-determination.

This chapter compares the standardized test achievement of students who are randomly given and not given school vouchers in New York City, Washington D.C. and Dayton, Ohio, and discusses the key features of the randomized voucher distribution in these three locations. It also analyzes the programmatic impacts on student test scores, parents' satisfaction with their child's school, and parent reports of the characteristics of the schools the child attended.

On April 4, 1968, riots broke out in the capital and more than one hundred other cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The uprising left thirteen people dead and more than twelve hundred injured, as well as an estimated $27 million in property losses, troop deployment, and city expenditures in Washington, D.C. alone, catapulting the city to the center of national debates about civil rights and law and order. Chapter 2 shows how Johnson’s riot prevention and control measures—and particularly the ways in which they were implemented in the District—reordered the government around the problem of crime, challenged the local black government’s authority, dampened the potential for radical change, and laid the groundwork for the conservative ascendance. In particular, local white business and civic groups and national lawmakers used the disturbance as a means to challenge the prudence of home rule legislation and pose questions about the future success of black self-determination—questions that remained long after the riots’ duration.

In search of greater educational, employment, social, political, and cultural opportunities, many African American women migrated to Washington with formerly unimaginable aspirations and expectations for themselves. Colored No More establishes this search as formative to a New Negro ethos.The introductory chapter defines “New Negro” and constructs a gender-specific understanding of this historical era and identity, while introducing Washington as both a unique and a representative site for the emergence of New Negro womanhood. Challenging the temporal primacy on the Interwar period in New Negro studies, the introduction asserts the importance of examining the lives of African American women to revisit how we conceptualize the “New Negro.” This chapter also deconstructs our understanding of “colored” as simply a racial marker- gender mattered in how Blackness was experienced during the New Negro era. In search of greater educational, employment, social, political, and cultural opportunities, many African American women migrated to Washington with formerly unimaginable aspirations and expectations for themselves.

This chapter closely engages African American beauty culture. Advertisements for beauty products such as hair pomades and skin bleaches comprised a significant portion of advertisements in African American newspapers throughout the early twentieth century. The advertisements for beauty products targeting African American women unveil a discourse and an industry that were instrumental to the materialization of a New Negro culture. Through advertisements and open discussions about African American beauty, self-presentation and adornment shifted from an individual/private sphere issue to a formidable public culture site of individual and collective expressivity during the New Negro era. African American beauty culture thrived as a site of reinvention and re-imagining for New Negro women. It also offered multiple authorial roles in which these women could partake, including: producer, consumer, and manufacturer. In Washington, this black women’s beauty culture was a thriving industry as well as a battleground and playground for black women actualizing themselves as New Negro women.

The movement in southern cities is the subject of chapter 5. It explores black worker-consumer alliances (built on “linked fate”) in sit-in demonstrations and their utility in helping black southerners claim middle-class citizenship during the civil rights movement. From Washington, D.C., to Charlotte to Nashville, African Americans organized widely publicized sit-ins and picket lines to force the desegregation of public accommodations and democratization of the transitional nature of customer-business interactions. But African Americans had other goals. What began as protests aimed at restructuring the physical space of the public sphere and procuring the right to experience the indulgences of customer service often grew into organized endeavors to dismantle the formidable barriers to black economic emancipation. These endeavors maintained a broad understanding of the black community’s shared interests and involved challenging segregation and discrimination in the marketplace on behalf of black customers and workers.

This introduction outlines the basic parameters of the city-federal relationship, explaining how Congress’s broad controls over the nation’s capital made Washington, D.C., unique among American cities. It discusses D.C.’s civil rights movement, race relations, and urban renewal legislation from the 1930s through the 1950s. It emphasizes Great Society, War on Crime, and civil rights policies and highlights the book’s central argument, main themes, and key local and national actors. The introduction provides background on local groups like the Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade, the Federal Citizens Associations, and Downtown Progress, as well as Congressional leaders like Senator Theodore Bilbo and Representative John L. McMillan.