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For over a century, the Willard Hotel has been the gathering place and site of innumerable behind-the-scenes networking among the powerful and famous (and often rich) in Washington.Note its proximity to the White House and other physical centers of power,

Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit A First Step for Racial Equality in the Circuit Court of Washington In 1843, when Nancy Hillman, the only surviving heir of Georgetown's most prominent free black man, tried to collect on money he was owed for 20 years, she faced two obstacles in the Circuit Court. The D.C. Judge Who Bedeviled President Lincoln In the midst of the Civil War, one D.C. judge so irritated Abraham Lincoln that the President ordered his salary withheld and armed soldiers were sent to his home. As if that wasn't enough, the court on which the judge sat, the principal court that had served the District since the inception of its judicial system, was abolished -- primarily to get rid of the judge. An Early Civil Rights Victory in a D.C. Court In 1821 - long before the civil rights movement - a free black man living in Washington won an historic victory for racial justice in a court of the District of Columbia. The Dark Days of the Black Codes Fourteen-year-old Nancy Jones was scared. She had been stopped by a policeman while walking down a Washington, D.C. street, and he had asked to see her papers. Nancy had good cause to be afraid. She was an African American, and it was 1835. And she did not have the papers. The policeman immediately arrested her as a runaway slave. Yet, Nancy was not a slave and never had been one.