Halfway to Freedom is a social, political, intellectual, and cultural history of African Americans in Washington, DC, looking at the role that race, gender, color, culture, class, and power have played in the city and its relationship with the federal government, the nation, and the world.

For more than two hundred years, the history and culture of the District of Columbia have been in great part shaped by its Black residents. Several Black men were elected to political positions citywide only a handful of years after the end of the Civil War, and while the years after Reconstruction saw the region plagued with segregation and racial violence, the capital’s Black population continued to grow at all economic levels. Washington became the first major US city with a majority Black population in 1957, a status it held for almost seventy years as gentrification has led to the decline of Black political and economic power in DC in the twenty-first century. 
 
Halfway to Freedom is a social, political, intellectual, and cultural history of African Americans in Washington, DC; it explores the role that race, gender, color, class, and power have played in the city and its relationship with the federal government. Maurice Jackson explores the material conditions that shaped life for African Americans, free and enslaved, from the earliest moments of the District’s history to more contemporary times of organization and activism. Through an array of archival materials, especially firsthand accounts of Black residents in the area, Jackson critiques how and why DC exists as a haven within the Black American imaginary given the realities of conflict its Black residents have faced and continue to face today. In doing so, he highlights and honors the gains they have earned through the concerted struggles of labor organizations, women’s movements, sports, music, art, legal activism, and more.

Maurice Jackson is Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is the author of Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience and Let This Voice Be Heard. He is coeditor of DC Jazz: African Americans and the Haitian Revolution; and Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754–1808.

“Washington, DC is one of the preeminent capitals of Black America, and here, in one place, is its breathtaking backstory, as brilliantly conceived and written by Georgetown’s own Maurice Jackson, a distinguished scholar who knows this history in his bones. He situates his tale within the broader social, cultural, political currents of the times and, as important, explains the unique space DC occupies as a metropolis on the local, federal, and world stage. Halfway to Freedom is destined to become the canonical text on Washington, DC.”
-- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University

List of Abbreviations  ix
Foreword / Lonnie G. Bunch III  xv
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction: Washington, DC, Is the City Where . . .  1
1. Fighting for Freedom in the “Temple of Liberty”  7
2. “Men of Color, to Arms!”: Black Washington During the Civil War  47
3. Emancipate, Enfranchise, Educate  73
4. “Far from Being a Paradise of Colored People”  109
5. A Red Summer and a “New Negro”: The Rise of Black Militancy  151
6. Struggling for the Double V at Home and Abroad  191
7. “And This in the Capital City, Too”  237
8. Poverty and Chaos in America, War in Vietnam, Riots on Fourteenth Street  283
9. “Black Labs of the Heart”  323
10. “All Labor Has Dignity”  355
11. “It’s the Striving Man, It’s What I Want”  377
12. The Quest for Statehood  421
Epilogue. A Washington Dilemma: What Happens to the Soul of the City?  443
Appendix A: Washington, DC, Timeline  459
Appendix B: Washington, DC, Census Data, 1900–2020  479
Notes  481
Selected Bibliography  667
Index