National Park Service African American Civil Rights Network
The National Park Service added the Barry Farm Dwellings to its African American Civil Rights Network. The African American Civil Rights Network encompasses properties, facilities, and interpretive programs, all of which present a comprehensive narrative of the people, places, and events associated with African American Civil Rights movement in the United States.
The DC Legacy Project nominated the landmark on the basis of the community’s civil rights activism in the 1950s-60s. Organizing by Barry Farm residents led to Bolling v. Sharpe, a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education that required the desegregation of Washington, D.C. public schools. Barry Farm residents Etta Horn and Lillian Wright organized a tenants’ council with the support of President Johnson’s War on Poverty program.
Other properties in the national network include Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta, Georgia.
