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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.

Southwest Washington, D.C., is a defined neighborhood even without a proper name; the quadrant has a clear border southwest of the U.S. Capitol Building, nestled along the oldest waterfront in the city. Its physical delineations have defined it as a community for more than 250 years, beginning in the mid-1700s with emerging farms. By the mid-1800s, a thriving urban, residential, and commercial neighborhood was supported by the waterfront where Washingtonians bought seafood and produce right off the boats. In the 1920s and 1930s, an aging housing stock and an overcrowded city led to an increase of African Americans and Jewish immigrants who became self-sufficient within their own communities. However, political pressures and radical urban planning concepts in the 1950s led to the large-scale razing of most of SW, creating a new community with what was then innovative apartment and cooperative living constructed with such unusual building materials as aluminum.