Dr. Alfred O. Taylor, Jr., a local leader who chronicled the history of his beloved Green Valley community and served as a fatherly mentor to many in civic life, died last week at age 91.
“So much of the strength, pride and community spirit of Green Valley today is built on the foundation he helped lay through a lifetime of dedicated service and steady leadership,” the Green Valley Civic Association said in a statement upon his death.
More than a dozen leaders from Green Valley’s Mount Zion Baptist Church traveled to Pittsburgh last week to dedicate a gravestone honoring the congregation’s first pastor.
For the past 123 years, the Rev. Robert Simon Laws’ remains had rested in an unmarked grave at historic Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh. After learning of the lack of a gravestone, Mount Zion decided to do something about it.
A local Juneteenth celebration drew calls to honor the past while working toward a better tomorrow.
The three-hour community festival — now in its third year and cosponsored by Challenging Racism and Arlington Public Schools — attracted a crowd of several hundred people to Wakefield High School on Friday.
Ceremonies honoring two local pioneering Black physicians took place on Saturday afternoon with both descendants and civic leaders in attendance.
A commemorative plaque honoring Dr. Harold Johnson and Dr. Edward Morton was unveiled at a new pocket park located on the grounds of VHC Health at 19th Street N. and N. Edison Street.
The treatment of those enslaved by Bazil and Elizabeth Hall on their 330-acre Arlington farm in the 1850s was known to be excessively cruel even by the brutal standards of the era.
Last Saturday (May 30), eight of those who lived in bondage on the farm were honored with the latest “stumbling stones” placed through the Memorializing the Enslaved of Arlington initiative.
The true story of a local enslaved woman’s legal fight to earn her freedom was brought to life in a series of performances this spring.
The name “Julia Roberts” is connected in most people’s minds with the successful Hollywood actress. But an earlier Julia Roberts played a seminal, but until now largely overlooked, role in local, state and national history.
A local initiative is ensuring the experiences of Black Arlingtonians are among those highlighted as the nation marks its 250th birthday.
Local community leader Wilma Jones used the Arlington Historical Society’s HistoryFest on Saturday to spotlight “Arlington History from the Black Side.”
The original creator of a Hall’s Hill mural depicting the neighborhood’s Black history is returning to repaint the artwork, after McDonald’s demolished it last fall.
D.C. artist Roderick Turner will replace the mural on a paneled structure, which will be attached to poles at 4834 Langston Blvd facing the Langston-Brown Community Center, Wilma Jones, president of the John M. Langston Citizens Association, told ARLnow.
A local artist’s exhibit examining the impacts of gentrification in historically Black neighborhoods is on display at the Arlington Historical Museum.
The exhibition, titled “A Different Look from a Different View,” explores local Black residents’ challenges coming to grips with changing realities in once tight-knit communities in places like Halls Hill, Green Valley and D.C. neighborhoods including Adams Morgan, Logan Circle and Navy Yard.
Arlington’s annual Feel the Heritage Festival is returning this weekend, bringing dozens of vendors, performers and history displays in celebration of Black History Month.
The 31st annual festival, taking place from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday at the Charles Drew Community Center (3500 23rd Street S.), celebrates the national theme of this Black History Month, “A Century of Black History Commemoration.”
The Black Heritage Museum of Arlington honors a history spotlighted by iconic figures like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth but clouded with decades of discrimination and ongoing displacement.
Tracing Black Arlington communities’ roots back to the construction of Arlington House in the early 1800s, following them up through the establishment of vibrant communities in the aftermath of the Civil War, and tracking residents’ ongoing contributions and struggles with affordability, the museum at 3045 Columbia Pike offers a portal into an often overlooked history.
William Newman Jr., who served as Arlington’s first Black County Board member and as chief judge of the county’s circuit court, has died.
Newman died at his home yesterday (Tuesday), leaving an enduring legacy that some consider one of the most consequential in Arlington’s recent history. As word has spread, tributes have poured in.
