Working for the Race

Working for the Race. Midcity at the Crossroads. , Carter G. Woodson, the "Father of Black History," worked and lived at 1538 Ninth Street from 1922 until 1950. The son of formerly enslaved people, Woodson earned a Ph.D. from Harvard and became an acclaimed scholar, educator, and advocate. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro (now African American) Life and History and the Associated Publishers, and organized Negro History Week (later Black History Month). He wrote The Mid-Education of the American Negro, the landmark textbook The Negro in Our History, and other groundbreaking works at a time when African American history and culture were largely not taught in schools. Because he often walked carrying stacks of books, local schoolchildren dubbed him "Bookman.", Poet Langston Hughes briefly worked here for Woodson. Many of Hughes's poems captured local working-class African American life. In The Big Sea (1940), he wrote: "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street.", The house at 817 Q Street was once the Washington headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Founded in 1925 by A. Philip Randolph at a time when most labor unions refused to admit Black workers, the IBSCP was the nation's first and eventually largest Black trade union. Some 12,000 members , porters, attendants, and maids , all worked for the Pullman Palace Car Co. serving train travelers. In 1925 Pullman was the nation's largest employer of African Americans. The IBSCP's journal The Messenger crusaded for civil rights. In 1938 female relatives of union members founded the International Ladies' Auxiliary., Much of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was planned at 817 Q Street by Randolph, along with civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.