This 2018 BLM rally calls back to the long history of the Black Power Movement in DC Image by Lorie Shaull licensed under Creative Commons.
“Washington represents the clearest contradictions of black and white in America,” Stokely Carmichael said in 1968. That quote is displayed front and center on historian George Derek Musgrove’s sweeping interactive web page, which details the history of the Black Power movement in DC.
Musgrove, a co-author of
, and a history professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, argues that the Black Power movement wasn’t just a force in DC politics. It was
the force for four decades. From the Civil Rights movement to DC’s first years of Home Rule to the resurgence of activism in the 1980s and 1990s, these activists were instrumental in shaping the District as we know it today.