WETA

On this day in 1972, Congress passed Title IX — the law banning s*x discrimination in education — and the woman most responsible for it was a part-time psychology instructor from Silver Spring.

Bernice Sandler had been teaching at the University of Maryland in the late 1960s when seven full-time positions opened in her department. Despite her qualifications and her existing role there, she wasn’t considered for any of them. When she asked why, a faculty member told her she "came on too strong for a woman." Other rejections followed, and Sandler began investigating.

She found that 57% of instructors in 15 UMD departments were women, but more than half of those departments had no female full professors, and none had female department heads. She dug into civil rights law, found a footnote in a 1968 executive order prohibiting s*x discrimination by federal contractors, and ran with it — filing an industry-wide complaint against higher education with the Department of Labor. Two years later, Congress passed Title IX.

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.

On this day in 1968, in the early morning hours, police moved through the National Mall with tear gas — clearing Resurrection City and bringing the Poor People’s Campaign to an end.

The makeshift city had stood for six weeks, home to thousands who had come to demand economic justice. It was Dr. Martin Luther King’s final campaign, announced months before his assassination, and the SCLC pressed ahead without him. More than 650 plywood huts lined the Mall, with dining halls, a medical tent, a nursery, and a city hall. Jesse Jackson served as mayor and the "city" even had its own zip code: 20013.

When the gas cleared, the residents were gone. But a song had rung out through the chaos: "We Shall Overcome."

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.

On this day in 1960, Arlington’s lunch counters agreed to serve all customers — ending weeks of student sit-ins that had quietly changed the landscape of civil rights in Northern Virginia.

It had started two weeks earlier, on June 9, when a biracial group of students from Howard University and other schools entered a People’s Drug Store on Lee Highway and requested service at the lunch counter. Both counters promptly closed, but the students didn’t move. They sat for hours, reading books and Bibles, until well after dark. The demonstrations spread to Woolworth’s and Landburgh’s in Shirlington, drawing the attention — and hostility — of American N**i Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who staged a counter-demonstration in Cherrydale.

On the morning of June 22, Woolworth’s announced it was desegregating its lunch counter, effective immediately. Drug Fair, People’s, Landburgh’s, and others followed that same day. Within days, nearly every chain drug store and department store in Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax had integrated their counters — most of them without the students ever visiting at all.

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.

On this day in 1937, blues legend Lead Belly arrived in Washington at the invitation of the Library of Congress — and within hours, the city had handed him the subject of one of the most damning songs ever written about it.

Lead Belly had come to record for folklorist Alan Lomax at the Library’s studio. He came to stay with Lomax at his apartment near the Capitol, but the landlady objected to the presence of a Black guest and threatened to call the police. Lead Belly and his wife Martha heard the argument from the top of the stairs before the group was turned out to find a hotel. By the time they found one, Lead Belly had already composed "Bourgeois Blues" — a biting 12-string blues indictment of Washington’s Jim Crow segregation that he recorded in 1939.

"Tell all the colored folks to listen to me / Don’t try to find you no home in Washington, D.C. / ’Cause it’s a bourgeois town."

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.

On this day 30 years ago, the Olympic flame spent the night at the White House.

The torch was on its way to Atlanta for the Summer Games, and when it came through Washington, President Clinton didn’t just wave it past. The flame was carried up Pennsylvania Avenue by an Army veteran recovering from landmine injuries — still in a cast, pushed in a wheelchair by his father — who passed it to Gallaudet University’s president, Dr. I. King Jordan, who carried it onto the South Lawn just before 10 p.m. Clinton and Vice President Gore lit a special cauldron that had been erected to house the flame overnight, and the crowd broke into applause as it jumped high enough to see over the White House lawn.

Earlier that day, the torch had stopped at both Gallaudet and Howard Universities on its way through the District. The Georgia State Patrol officers guarding the flame had to negotiate access to the White House grounds with the Secret Service — until agents realized that if the Georgia officers weren’t allowed in, they would have to learn how to maintain an international Olympic flame on short notice. WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.

Happy Juneteenth to our DMV community. Today honors the moment in 1865 when the last enslaved Americans finally received word of their freedom — a day of profound significance in American history, and one that resonates deeply here in Washington. Our region has its own chapter in this story: on April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing more than 3,100 enslaved people in the capital eight and a half months before the Emancipation Proclamation. WETA's Boundary Stones has the story of DC's emancipation history at the link in the comments below.

Happy birthday to Paul McCartney, who turns 84 today. Here’s a local angle to Beatlemania you might not know.

In December 1963, Capitol Records had essentially given up on the Beatles in America — they’d put off releasing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” until after the holidays, figuring the group didn’t have much of a market. Then a ninth-grader in Silver Spring named Marsha Albert watched a CBS News report about this new British band, heard a few bars of “She Loves You,” and couldn’t get it out of her head. She wrote a letter to WWDC, the only station her “crummy little radio” could pick up, and asked if they could get hold of one of their records.

Disc jockey Carroll James tracked down a British pressing through a BOAC flight attendant. He called Marsha and invited her to come to the studio and introduce the song herself. When WWDC played “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on December 17, 1963, the switchboard lit up immediately. Capitol rushed the single to release the day after Christmas, pressing a million copies instead of the 200,000 they’d planned. By the time the Beatles landed at JFK on February 7, 1964, Beatlemania was already in motion — and their first concert stop was Washington, D.C., where John, Paul, George, and Ringo sat down with Carroll James and, learning what Marsha had done, turned to her and said: “Thank you, Marsha.”

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.

District Docs is a new WETA showcase of independent, nonfiction films from creators living and working right here in the D.C., Maryland and Virginia region, streaming free on YouTube every Thursday at 8pm.

Premiering TONIGHT: Kil and the Kids — In Southeast D.C., a mentor named Kil supports kids coping with gun violence in this Emmy-winning short film. When another teen is robbed at gunpoint, Kil helps him process the trauma through art and expression, revealing how showing up can transform pain into resilience. Presented with thanks to Community Voice Lab at American University.

Streaming link is in the comments.