Why Is It Called Adams Morgan? Two Segregated Schools

Adams Morgan's name comes from two segregated elementary schools and the 1955 neighborhood group their principals started.

Show Notes

Adams Morgan isn't named for a president or a police chief. It's named for two elementary schools a block apart, one white and one Black, and the two principals who brought their neighbors together in 1955.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2022/03/16/named-adams-morgan/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

Adams and Morgan were real people. One was a president, and the other was a police chief. But the neighborhood isn't named after either of them. It's named after two elementary schools, about a block apart. One was white. One was Black. And in the spring of nineteen fifty-five, the principals of those two schools did something almost nobody in Washington was doing yet. They brought their neighbors together, in one room. So how did two segregated schools end up naming one of the best-known neighborhoods in the city? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. I lived in Adams Morgan in the early two thousands, so this one takes me back. We pulled it together from sixteen sources, from a nineteen thirty newspaper story about a brand-new school to a twenty twenty-six local news explainer. You can find them all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

Start at the corner of California and Champlain Streets, just above Eighteenth Street. That's where the Morgan School stood, and it was built for white children. It carried the name of Thomas Morgan, who'd run the Metropolitan Police in the late eighteen seventies and then helped govern the District as one of its three commissioners. By the late nineteen twenties, the white schools around there were packed. So the city built a new one, on a steep hill one block west, and named it for John Quincy Adams. The Evening Star called it one of the system's handsomest structures. It opened on a Monday morning in January of nineteen thirty, and the white children from Morgan moved up the hill to their new school. The Star spelled out what happened next, in the language of the day. The Morgan School will become a colored elementary school. The city added eight rooms and an assembly hall, and Morgan reopened for Black children. So now you've got two schools, about a block apart. One brand-new and white. One older, and Black. That's how it stayed for twenty-four years.

In May of nineteen fifty-four, the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown versus Board of Education. But here's the catch. Brown didn't reach Washington. It rested on the Fourteenth Amendment, which restricts the states. And the District isn't a state. So the Court decided a second case the same day, for Washington alone. A group of Black children had been turned away from a new white junior high in Anacostia. The Court said segregating the District's schools was, in its words, an arbitrary deprivation of their liberty. Washington didn't stall. That September, the District's schools opened integrated. And white families left. Fast. White enrollment fell about thirty percent in two years. By nineteen sixty-five, white students were about one in ten. On paper, Adams and Morgan were open to every kid in the neighborhood. In practice, the neighborhood was changing around them. And nobody had a plan.

The principal at Adams was a woman named Florence Cornell. She was born in South Dakota, came to Washington in nineteen eighteen, and had run the Adams School since nineteen thirty-four. By the mid-fifties, she was seeing problems in her classrooms that teaching alone couldn't fix. And a block away, the principal at Morgan, Bernice Brown, was seeing the same thing. Here's why getting their neighbors together was a big deal. The white residents had their own civic association. The Black residents had theirs. And the citywide federation those groups belonged to threatened to pull the white association's charter if it accepted Black members. So in May of nineteen fifty-five, the two principals started something new. Churches, businesses, parents, white and Black, all in one group. They named it after both schools. The Adams-Morgan Better Neighborhood Conference.

The conference got its big write-up in the Washington Post in October of nineteen fifty-six. Here's how the story opened. An unusual program, first of its kind in Washington, is being mapped to roll back deterioration in a Northwest neighborhood. The cooperative venture, cutting across racial lines, is an attempt to couple energy of residents, resources of the District government, and Federal funds into an attack on blight. And then, almost in passing, the Post explained the name. The group takes its name from the Adams and Morgan Elementary Schools. By then, Cornell was running the conference, and she told the paper exactly what she was after. We feel that this can be a very significant project for Washington, not only because of the aim of physical rehabilitation, but also the important matter of getting people to work together in a common cause. Getting people to work together. In nineteen fifty-six, in Washington, that was the hard part. And it worked. Within two years, the city had signed on to a full Adams-Morgan Demonstration Project.

Florence Cornell retired in June of nineteen fifty-nine, and the Post came to see her off. She'd watched a lot change from that principal's office. Back in the mid-thirties, one of her pupils at Adams was John Eisenhower. The future president's son. By nineteen fifty-nine, she said, some of her kids had never heard the simplest nursery rhymes. Never had their parents read to them, or take them anywhere. So she wasn't really retiring. She was going to work full time, as a volunteer, for the conference she'd started. Here's how she put it. I am merely shifting the emphasis of my work from the school to the community. Florence Cornell died in nineteen eighty-five, at ninety-two. By then the name of her little conference belonged to the whole neighborhood.

For decades, it was spelled with a hyphen. Adams, hyphen, Morgan. And the Washington Post held on to that hyphen until two thousand one. That June, a Post copy editor explained that the paper had been blitzed with e-mails from neighborhood activists. One letter came from a local historian, who argued it would be unfair to make Morgan a subsidiary of Adams, as a hyphen would do. The Post dropped it. But its own explanation saw the hyphen a little differently. The hyphen is a larger political statement than it is a grammatical one. For decades the hyphen has tied together the two names as well as the neighborhood's racial factions. Either way, Adams Morgan became two words.

The Adams building is still up on that hill, on Nineteenth Street. Since two thousand seven, it's been part of a bilingual school with the Oyster School. Which, it turns out, Florence Cornell also ran, at the same time, back in the fifties. The old Morgan building came down in the nineteen seventies. A new school and community center opened on that corner in nineteen seventy-seven, named for a local bishop, Marie Reed, who led the school's community board. When I lived there, I had a full one-bedroom near Seventeenth and Kalorama for a thousand bucks a month. The big building on the corner sat empty. It had been a roller rink. That's a story for another day. Back then, my beer run was the liquor store at Champlain and Kalorama. The clerk sat behind thick plexiglass, and the best I ever got there was an expired six-pack of Sam Adams. Small coincidence there. The Samuel Adams on that beer was a second cousin of John Quincy Adams's father. Same family as the man the school was named for. I had no idea back then that the name on every street sign around me came from two school principals who decided their neighbors should meet. Stand near Eighteenth and California on a school day afternoon, and you'll see kids heading home from Reed one way and from Adams the other. The two schools are still about a block apart. The schools never merged. The neighborhood did.

So that's where Adams Morgan got its name. Thanks for taking a walk up the hill with me. The old clippings and school photos are on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org. And if you'd like the next story as soon as it's out, make sure you're subscribed to Ghosts of DC, wherever you listen to podcasts. Finding the story behind a name like this one, that's why Ghosts of DC exists. This has been Ghosts of DC.