The oral history project will focus on the 1968 riots and 2020 BLM protests. The resulting monologues will be archived in the D.C. Public Library and hit the stage in spring 2023.

It’s hard to look down H Street NE and imagine that it was ever a bustling corridor. But along with Fourteenth Street NW and Seventh Street NW, it represented the center of the District’s African American commercial presence in the years during which the U.S. struggled to overcome the legacy of state-sponsored segregation. It was the events of April 4, 1968 that decimated all three of those streets and the African American businesses that anchored…