Stretch your legs and take a socially distanced walking tour of important people and events in our school's history of civil rights.
Middleton House
On the grassy hill between McMahon Hall and the Pryzbyla Center is where in 1803 Samuel Harrison Smith and his wife Margaret Bayard Smith built a manor house that would later serve as one of The Catholic University of America’s early campus buildings.Learn More Samuel Williams and the Black Organization of Students
While attending CUA in the early 1970s, Samuel Williams led the Black Organization of Students at the University (BOSA-CUA). Committed to the development of a Black studies program at the University, Williams and several other Black students staged sit-ins inside the University President’s office (then in Mullen Library) in August of 1970. Williams had been working with faculty and administration on an interdisciplinary major in Black Studies when he was tragically killed in a car accident. Today, the Sam Williams Memorial Award is given in his memory to a student who has contributed significantly to the activities of minority or international students, enhanced communication, and furthered understanding among culturally and ethnically diverse groups on campus and in the community.
Segregation and Desegregation at Catholic University
Former sociology professor and Catholic University historian C. Joseph Nuesse chronicled the history of segregation and desegregation in his 1997 article, “Segregation and Desegregation at the Catholic University of America,” in Washington History, Spring/Summer, 1997.
Donald Shirley
Donald Walbridge Shirley (1927-2013) was an American jazz composer and pianist. Shirley studied with Conrad Bernier and Thaddeus Jones at the University, receiving his bachelor's degree in music in 1953. During the 1960s, Shirley went on a number of concert tours, some in Southern states, with the hope that his performances might change some minds on views of African Americans. For his 1962 tour, he hired New York nightclub bouncer Tony “Lip” Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. Their story is dramatized in the Academy Award winning 2018 film Green Book (after the travel guide book for African American motorists navigating the segregated South at the time).
Civil Rights Activities
During the Congressional debate over civil rights legislation in 1964, members of the University community were compelled to involve themselves in related campus activities. Such activities included civil rights-themed religious services, the distribution of civil rights literature on campus, and student participation in rallies, such as those held by the D.C. Students for Civil Rights in downtown Washington, D.C. Caldwell Hall was the location of various civil rights-related activities.
Father Cyprian Davis
Father Cyprian Davis, born Clarence John Davis (1930-2015) in Washington, D.C., was a historian and archivist. A convert to Catholicism in his teenage years, Davis expressed an early interest in the priesthood. He joined the seminary of St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana, where he became a novice in 1950, and took the monastic name Cyprian in 1951. Ordained a priest on May 3, 1956, Davis became the first African American to join the monastic community of St. Meinrad.
Father Gilbert V. Hartke
When Father Hartke arrived at the University as a seminarian in 1936, the University was still in an exclusionist phase with regard to African American students. Yet, just as Father Hartke began writing and producing plays on campus in 1936, the University was reevaluating its policies on racial inclusion. Indeed, the entire city of Washington, D.C., including its theaters, was in a period of racial reckoning.
Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle
When the Archdiocese of Baltimore-Washington was split into the Washington and Baltimore Archdioceses in 1947, Patrick O’Boyle (1896-1987) became the first archbishop of the newly created Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., serving in the post from 1948-1973. Archbishop O’Boyle (he was made Cardinal in 1967) had as one of his first goals to end segregation within his diocese, including the school system. Starting with the city of Washington first, O’Boyle then expanded his desegregation policies to the southern counties of Maryland that were part of the archdiocese. It was not a rapid process, as O’Boyle moved deliberately and cautiously, aware of the tumult that could result from such moves, but change did occur, with the city’s parochial schools experiencing varying degrees of integration prior to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.
Fort Slemmer
On the Far North end of the University’s campus (behind Marist Hall), on a slight knoll now covered with trees stands the former site of Fort Slemmer, a Civil War Fort--one of 68 protecting Washington, D.C. from Confederate forces. Established on land seized by the government during the war, Fort Slemmer was built on the highest Hill of farmland owned by E.J. Middleton.
Euphemia Lofton Haynes
Euphemia Lofton Haynes (1890-1980) graduated valedictorian of M Street High School in 1907, from Miner Normal School in 1909, and Smith College in 1914. She earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics from CUA in 1943 with a dissertation titled Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondences. The degree gives her the distinction of being the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in the United States.
William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson
The year 1895 saw the inauguration of the two new schools to which lay students would be admitted, the School of Philosophy and the School of Social Sciences. Three African American male students from the District of Columbia were admitted to the new programs. One of these students, William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson, had earned his baccalaureate degree at Amherst College. He was the first student to be awarded the degree of Bachelor of Social Science on December 8, 1896.
Sr. Thea Bowman
Sister Thea Bowman (1937-1990) did her graduate work at the University, earning her Master’s in English in 1969 and her Doctorate in English and Literature in 1972. Her cause for canonization has been opened, and she is now designated a Servant of God. Sr. Bowman was born in Canton, Mississippi. At age nine, she decided she wanted to convert to Catholicism. At 15, she decided to join the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, entering the postulancy at the Order’s mother house in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Catholic Sisters College
National and local African American leaders called for the University to end their discriminatory practices toward Blacks in the 1930s. As Professor Shannen Dee Williams has recently recounted, two Black women from the Oblate Sisters of Providence religious order, an order founded to educate Black girls, were chosen to do so. Sister Mary of Good Counsel Baptiste and Sister Mary Consolata Gibson were chosen to integrate the Catholic Sisters College, which existed as part of the University to educate women religious in general. The sisters graduated in 1934, becoming the first Black graduates of the University in nearly two decades, and the first Black women graduates of the University.