Adams Morgan Day Deep History Tour

Join Eddie Becker for a lively walk through the hidden history of Adams Morgan, then head straight into the Adams Morgan Day festivities.

This eye-opening tour goes beyond nightlife and real estate to explore Indigenous communities, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, redlining, gentrification, and the struggles for freedom that shaped the neighborhood. We’ll also look at Adams Morgan’s role as a home for revolutions and liberation movements from Central America, Chile, and Eritrea.

Eddie Becker is a documentarian and investigative archivist who has spent decades uncovering hidden histories and chronicling activism, resistance, and neighborhood change.

The tour lasts about 1.5 hours at an easy walking pace and covers roughly three-quarters of a mile.

Location: Adams Morgan Plaza, in front of the Jubilee Housing building at the southwest corner of 18th St. and Columbia Rd. NW. The walk ends near where we began.

Tour ends at Adams Morgan’s Most Beloved Work of Art, https://boundarystones.weta.org/node/4400

This mural was painted during the condominium-conversion wave that reshaped Adams Morgan in the 1970s and early 1980s. Much of the neighborhood’s early-twentieth-century housing had long been affordable rental apartments for working-class Black, white, and Latino residents. As buildings were sold for conversion, tenants faced eviction and displacement.

The Adams-Morgan Organization, or AMO, organized tenants to fight back. It pressed for residents to buy their buildings collectively—often as cooperatives—rather than lose them to speculation and conventional condo conversion.

AMO also fought redlining. When Perpetual Savings applied to open an Adams Morgan branch, AMO challenged it before the Federal Home Loan Bank Board for failing to serve low- and moderate-income residents. AMO did not block the branch, but won commitments for high-percentage home-purchase and cooperative loans, housing counseling, bilingual service, and community review of loan denials.

The principle was that community deposits and public banking privileges should reinvest in local residents—not finance their displacement. AMO’s struggle formed part of the national anti-redlining movement that led to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, requiring federally insured lenders to help meet the credit needs of their entire communities.federalreservehistory+1

Locally, this organizing helped build support for D.C.’s 1980 Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, giving tenants a chance to purchase their building when an owner sells.