AUPresses 2022 Optional Walking Tours
Join AUPresses for a selection of Walking Tours celebrating DC’s historic neighborhoods, diverse communities, and unique role in the history of civil rights. Tours will take place on Sunday, June 19 at 9:00am-10:30am. Tours have limited capacities and are for AUPresses members only.
Art and Soul of Black Broadway
(limit: 10 participants; cost $40)
Discover the musical heritage of U Street—aka Black Broadway—from jazz to hip hop to punk to go-go. Walk the streets and back alleys and learn how murals, theatres, music venues, and memorials embrace the history of this amazing neighborhood. Along the way, we’ll listen to a diverse playlist that will match up with the murals and venues.
The Rise of DC’s Black Intelligentsia: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson Tour of LeDroit Park
(limit: 40 participants; cost $40)
Meet two remarkable writers who lived in Washington, DC, in the late 1890s to the early 1900s. Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African American poet to become nationally known. His wife, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was also an accomplished writer of poetry, fiction, and journalism. Both writers were in the first generation removed from slavery. This tour tells the story of their accomplishments, their unhappy marriage, and his early death. It also provides context for their lives in DC among the African American intelligentsia who were drawn to LeDroit Park and the surrounding Shaw neighborhood in the years from Reconstruction through WWI. Stops include the site of the Dunbars’ two DC homes, as well as the homes of eminent neighbors: Robert and Mary Church Terrell, Christian and Sara Fleetwood, James E. Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper. (Please note: this tour includes a frank discussion of domestic violence.)
African American Architects: Embracing Culture and Building Urban Communities in DC
(limit: 40 participants; cost $40)
AUPresses 2022 meets adjacent to DC’s Shaw neighborhood—historically the cultural, educational, and religious heart of greater Black Washington. Your guide is an architect who served as witness to and participant in the redevelopment of this essential neighborhood. Highlights include: the United House of Prayer, significant buildings on the campus of Howard University, and Black Broadway, as well as a number of structures of interest that were Black communal undertakings and designed by Black architects.
Women Who Changed America
(limit: 25 participants; cost $40)
For generations, women living and working in DC have defied expectations and surmounted discrimination to increase equality, freedom, and prosperity for their fellow citizens. “Angel of the Battlefield” Clara Barton inspired a world-wide humanitarian movement. Dorothy Height devoted forty years to supporting African American women and girls. Frances Perkins not only became the first woman to serve as a cabinet secretary, she was the principal architect of FDR’s New Deal. See the sites where they and others made their marks and follow history along Pennsylvania Avenue, where thousands of suffragists first marched for equality in 1913.
Walt Whitman—A Poet and His City
(limit: 25 participants; cost $40)
Walt Whitman, America’s poet, lived and worked in Washington, DC, during the crucible years of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Recount his work as a frequent visitor to the war’s sick and wounded at the site of a former Union hospital. Whitman composed heartfelt elegies to President Abraham Lincoln, which come to life at Ford’s Theatre, site of the 16th president’s assassination. These and other locations associated with Whitman comprise a journey through the past in downtown DC during which we will encounter the poet’s many friends (and one special lover) and be reminded of how fresh Whitman’s literary voice still sounds thanks to readings from his poetry and prose.
Civil War to Civil Rights: DC’s Downtown Heritage Trail
(no limit; no cost)
If you prefer something more self-paced (or if your favored tour already has sold out!) explore DC’s civil rights history informally with AUPresses colleagues on this self-guided tour. AUPresses will provide information (maps, podcast download instructions) to help you follow the signs on this Cultural Tourism DC Neighborhood Heritage Trail. You’ll have the option of exploring either Downtown, Pennsylvania Avenue, or Capitol Hill right from our conference hotel. The trail includes key moments in local and national African American history. It’s important that you select this option in order to receive the details you need to make the most of the limited time available.