Before the White House
On May 14, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford announced that construction of a new outdoor swimming pool on the White House South...
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Social Justice
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The Complexities of Slavery in the Nation's Capital
For the first seventy-two years of its existence, the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., harbored one of America’s most...
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The Slave Quarters at Decatur House
Nestled in the heart of Washington, D.C., Lafayette Park attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. From school...
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Benjamin Banneker
Benjamin Banneker, a free African-American man living in a slave state in the 18th century, never knew the weight of...
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The Enslaved Household of President James Madison
In a single week in early 1801, James Madison experienced two major life events. On February 27, his father James Madison Sr....
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Pathbreakers: Oscar Stanton DePriest and Jessie L. Williams DePriest
Shelley Stokes-Hammond prepared these biographical sketches as part of a project for a graduate documentation course at Goucher College where...
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The Enslaved Household of President Thomas Jefferson
These powerful words open the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the document by which the Second Continental Congress announced...
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The Enslaved Households of President Zachary Taylor
Born in 1784, Zachary Taylor grew up on a plantation in Virginia. His father, Richard Taylor, was an officer in the...
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The Enslaved Households of President Martin Van Buren
While many tend to think that slavery was strictly a “southern” issue, this system of racial captivity and exploitation existed acro...
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Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Washington's Most Notorious Slave Pen
In 1836, a striving, twenty-four-year-old New England shoemaker took an excursion southward to recuperate from a bout with ill health. By...
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Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818 along the Eastern Shore of Maryland. During his childhood, the wife of one...
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Gracy Bradley's White House
On November 24, 1831, Andrew Jackson, Jr. married Sarah Yorke. President Andrew Jackson, a devoted father, wanted to give his son’s ne...