Working for the Race

Carter G. Woodson, known as the Father of Black History, lived and worked at 1538 Ninth Street from 1912 until 1950. The son of formerly enslaved people, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard and became an acclaimed scholar, educator, and advocate. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro (now African American) Life and History and the Associated Publishers, organized Negro History Week, later Black History Month, and wrote The Mis-Education of American Negro, the landmark textbook The Negro in Our History, and other groundbreaking works. Because he often walked here carrying stacks of books, local schoolchildren called him "bookman." Poet Langston Hughes briefly worked here for Woodson, and many of his poems captured local working-class African American life; in The Big Sea (1940) he wrote, “I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street.” The house at 817 Q Street was once the Washington headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925 by A. Philip Randolph as the nation’s first and largest black trade union. Its some 12,000 members, including porters, attendants, and maids, all worked for the Pullman Palace Car Company, which in 1925 was the nation’s largest employer of African Americans. The union published The Messenger and fought discrimination practiced by most American labor unions. In 1938 female relatives of union members founded the International Ladies' Auxiliary, and much of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was planned at 817 Q Street by Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States