New Negro Alliance's Sanitary Grocery Protest Site

In 1933 the New Negro Alliance instituted then-radial "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns: boycotts and pickets of white-owned businesses in black neighborhoods, including the Sanitary Grocery, forerunner of Safeway, at this address. Most businesses, struggling during the Great Depression, gave in quickly and hired black clerks. However, two argued that the Alliance had no right to picket where protesters didn't work, and went to court to stop the campaign. Alliance lawyers, including William Hastie, Belford Lawson, and Thurgood Marshall, sued all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1938 the Court ruled in favor of the Alliance, confirming the right to picket.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States