The Roots of Freedom and Equality

In April 1848, city officials tried to calm an angry mob on this corner after the attempted escape of some 77 enslaved African Americans on the schooner Pearl. The crowd blamed the abolitionist newspaper the National Era, whose offices were nearby, and threatened to destroy its printing press. Its editor, Gamaliel Bailey, was among the anti-slavery activists who made Washington, D.C. a national center of abolitionist activity, regularly pointing to the irony of slavery in the capital of a nation dedicated to liberty and equality. Most of the captured freedom-seekers were sold and taken south, but the mayor and others prevented a riot, and the National Era continued its work. In 1851 and 1852, the paper serialized Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sold 300,000 copies in its first year and intensified anti-slavery feeling and sectional rivalry, leading many to believe war had become inevitable. One hundred years later on the same block, attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, practicing at 615 F Street and teaching at Howard University, carried forward the struggle for freedom and equality for African Americans by teaching Thurgood Marshall the legal strategies that led to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Marshall later credited Houston with laying the groundwork for the modern Civil Rights movement.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States