Introduction …3

Banneker, Benjamin … 3

Douglas, Frederick … 4, 5

Ellington, Duke … 6, 7

Howard University … 8

King, Martin Luther, Jr. … 8

Bibliography … 9

The History of Blacks in Washington, DC is as old as the city itself. On every corner of the City, there is evidence of the contribution of Blacks if we know where to look. The City was built with the help of black slave rented labor. The area around the Capitol Building was filled with tents for the blacks that had come from neighboring Maryland and Virginia plantations. On top of the Capitol Building is the statue "Freedom" which was cast in Bladensburg, Maryland with the efforts of slave labor.

This study highlights some prominence figures and institutions in the nation’s Capital history. Their roles in the nation’s Capitol history were significant enough to change the course of the history of the African Americans in the U.S.

Mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs, inventor, and writer, one of the first important black American intellectuals. A free black, who owned a farm near Baltimore, Banneker was largely self-educated in astronomy by watching the stars and in mathematics by reading borrowed textbooks. In 1761, he attracted attention by building a wooden clock that kept precise time. Encouraged in his studies by a Maryland industrialist, Joseph Ellicott, he began astronomical calculations about 1773, accurately

Predicted a solar eclipse in 1789, and published annually from 1791 to 1802 the Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris. Appointed to the District of Columbia Commission by President George Washington in 1790, he worked with Andrew Ellicott and others in surveying Washington, D.C.

As an essayist and pamphleteer, Banneker opposed slavery and war. He sent a copy of his first almanac to Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. secretary of state, along with a letter asking Jefferson's aid in bringing about better conditions for American blacks. Banneker's almanacs were acclaimed by European scientists to whom Jefferson made them known.

His original name is Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey black American who was one of the most eminent human-rights leaders of the 19th century. His oratorical and literary brilliance thrust him into the forefront of the U.S. Abolition movement, and he became the first black citizen to hold high rank in the U.S. government.

Separated as an infant from his slave mother (he never knew his white father), Frederick lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at the age of eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld, whose wife defied state law by teaching the boy to read. However, Auld declared that learning would make him unfit for slavery, and Frederick was forced to continue his education surreptitiously with the aid of schoolboys in the street. Upon the death of his master, he was returned to the plantation as a field hand at 16. Later, he was hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker. He tried to escape with three others in 1833, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Mass., where he worked as a laborer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his name to Douglas. At a Nantucket, Mass., antislavery convention in 1841, Douglas was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. Naturally eloquent, he was unexpectedly catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. From then on, despite insult, and violent personal attack, Douglas never flagged in his devotion to the Abolitionist cause.

To counter skeptics, who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglas felt impelled to write his autobiography in 1845, revised and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglas. Douglas' account became a classic in American literature as well as a primary source about slavery from the bondsman's viewpoint. To avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, Douglas left on a two-year speaking tour of Great

Britain and Ireland. Abroad, Douglas helped to win many new friends for the Abolition Movement and to cement the bonds of humanitarian reform between the continents.

Douglas returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglas’s Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 at Rochester, N.Y. The Abolition leader William Lloyd Garrison disagreed with the need for a separate, black-oriented press, and the two men broke over this issue as well as over Douglas' support of political action to supplement moral suasion.

During the Civil War (1861-65), he became a consultant to Pres. Abraham Lincoln, advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. Throughout Reconstruction (1865-77), he fought for full civil rights for freedmen and vigorously supported the women's rights movement. After Reconstruction, Douglas served as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission (1871), and in the District of Columbia he was marshal (1877-81) and recorder of deeds (1881-86); finally, he was appointed U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti (1889-91). Douglas was born Feb. 7, 1817, Tuckahoe, Md., and died Feb. 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.

His full name is Edward Kennedy Ellington. American composer, bandleader, and pianist who is among the most significant figures in jazz history and, along with Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman, was one of the founders of big-band jazz, which led to the swing era.

Ellington studied piano from age seven and in his teens was influenced by ragtime pianists at 17, he began to play professionally. The following year he renounced the fine arts, toward which his parents had oriented him, to devote himself to jazz.

In about 1923, at the Kentucky Club in New York City, he led a small group that was later the core of his large band. In this period, the group contained Harry Carney, Sonny Greer, and, above all, Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton. Their tense or piercing sonorities constituted the essential element of the "jungle style" that asserted itself in pieces such as "Black and Tan Fantasy."

Almost without interruption from then until his death, Ellington led a band that was his Laboratory for composition, orchestration, and the unique blend of improvisation and Orchestration that he mastered with instrumentalists who spent most of their careers With him. He capitalized on the unique personal sounds of outstanding players such as trumpeter Cootie Williams, saxophonist Johnny Hodges, and bassist Jimmy Blanton, using each as a separate tone color and writing ensemble parts suited to each player rather than writing just for the tone quality traditionally identified with the instrument. More than 1,000 orchestrations were crafted by Ellington, including not only brief big-band pieces but ones for film scores, operas, ballets, Broadway shows, and church services, many involving symphony orchestra, choruses, and dancers. The Ellington tunes most frequently performed by others include "Satin Doll," "Sophisticated Lady," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," "Do Nothin' Til You Hear from Me," and "In a Sentimental Mood." His best-known longer works include Black, Brown, and Beige and Reminiscing in Tempo. Some pieces associated with Ellington were written by his musicians: pianist-arranger Billy Strayhorn wrote "Take the A' Train" and "Lush Life"; trombonist Juan Tizol wrote "Perdido" and "Caravan."

The piano style influenced Thelonious Monk, a leading modern-jazz composer-pianist, while Ellington's arranging concepts were assimilated by Gil Evans, Thad Jones, George Russell, Clare Fischer, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, and other significant modern composers. In part owing to the showcase Ellington provided for them, several of his musicians had strong impact on jazz styles for their particular instruments: Hodges' approach to alto saxophone ballad interpretation, Blanton's method of hornlike solo lines played pizzicato on bass, and Ben Webster's tenor saxophone

approach.

It is generally agreed that Ellington's masterpieces include a group of lesser-known works done between 1939 and 1942, which show a remarkably compatible matching of improvisations and prewritten passages: "Harlem Air Shaft," "Jack the Bear," "Concerto for Cootie," "Ko-ko," and "Cotton Tail." An autobiography, Music Is My Mistress appeared in 1973. Ellington was born April 29, 1899, Washington, D.C. He died May 24, 1974, New York City

Predominantly black university founded in 1867 and named for General Oliver Otis Howard, head of post-Civil War Freedmen's Bureau, who influenced Congress to appropriate funds for the school. The university is financially supported by the U.S. government but is privately controlled. Although Howard University has always been open to students of any race, color, or creed, it was founded with a special obligation

to provide advanced studies for blacks. Its library is the leading research library on black American history. The university has a college of liberal arts, a graduate school of arts and sciences, and schools or colleges of business and public administration, engineering, communications, human ecology, medicine, allied health services, dentistry, and law, among others. Although the student body at one time was virtually all black, white students began attending after World War II, especially in the graduate schools.

Many of Howard's graduates advanced to leadership positions in education, social reform, and government. Among the most prominent were the U.S. senator Edward William Brooke of Massachusetts; sociologist E. Franklin Frazier; playwright Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones); and the statesman Ralph Bunche, who established the school's political science department.

Eloquent black Baptist minister, who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement's success in ending the legal segregation of blacks in the South and other portions of the United States. King rose to national prominence through the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, promoting nonviolent

tactics such as the massive March on Washington (1963) to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. The U.S. Congress voted to observe a national holiday in his honor, beginning in 1986, on the third Monday in January. King was born Jan. 15, 1929, Atlanta, Ga. and died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tenn.

The Internet is the main source of the above information.