My dissertation traces the black freedom movement in the District of Columbia from the Cold War through the 1978 mayoral election of black activist Marion Barry.  Through an examination of symbolic moments in American political and social history— including the Cold War fight to overturn the capital’s Jim Crow laws, the 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign, President Richard Nixon’s law and order crusade, the city’s first municipal elections in 1974, and the 1976 Bicentennial Celebration—I argue that national political discourses shaped and were shaped by racial struggles in the nation’s capital.