Working for the Race
. , the “Father of Black History,” worked and lived at Ninth Street from until .The son of formerly enslaved people, Woodson received a Ph.D.from Harvard,and became an acclaimed scholar,educator,and advo- cate. 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 Mis-Education of the American Negro , the landmark textbook The Negro in Our History , and other important works.Because he often walked through Shaw carrying stacks of books, local schoolchildren dubbed Woodson “Bookman.” Poet Langston Hughes briefly worked here for Woodson,and many of his poems of street life were inspired by the neighborhood.In The Big Sea ( ),he wrote:“I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street.” The house at Q Street was once the Washington headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.Founded in by A. Philip Randolph,the IBSCP was the nation’s first and largest black trade union.Some , members — highly skilled porters,attendants,and maids — all worked for the Pullman Palace Car Company,then the nation’s largest employer of African Americans. The IBSCP published The Messenger ,battling dis- crimination practiced by most American labor unions. In female relatives of union members founded the International Ladies' Auxiliary. Much of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was planned at Q Street.
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