Opinion

Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the day I found Susan Schaeffler, then 31 years old, working in an Anacostia church basement where she was about to open a public charter middle school for mostly impoverished students. She and her…

For more than 50 years, Washington, D.C., was “Chocolate City” — the nation’s first major majority-Black city, a center for Black arts and culture and a hub of Black political power. But that title has officially been erased, new 2020…

D.C. has long been cast as a homogenous haven of progressive values, a trope quickly refuted the moment you observe any of D.C.’s 40 advisory neighborhood commissions convene.

Could a car-free Rock Creek Park become D.C.'s version of New York’s Central Park? Yes — or an even better version. At 1,754 acres, Rock Creek is more than twice the size of Central Park’s 843 acres. But even with its smaller footprint,…

I could not afford to pay my rent for five months last year. Money didn’t come in from side jobs when I was counting on it. So, thanks to the federal ban on evictions, I was able to keep living in my apartment until my lease was up in…

Among the latest stomach-turning examples of police violence is a video clip of a D.C. officer pummeling a man as officers struggled to make an arrest Sunday. The misconduct is over the top, brazen, gratuitous. It could serve as a tutorial…

I learned a great deal from an important new book from Georgetown University Press called “Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, D.C.” But the biggest impression came from a page with hardly…

At the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, equity in arts funding has been the subject of sometimes bitter debate for more than a year. But the 18-member commission hasn’t given up. The racial reckoning over support for, say, D.C.…

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s clash with the D.C. Council over police hiring revealed more than differences in approach to violence. It also laid bare Bowser’s diminishing clout with city lawmakers and, by extension, raises questions about her…

In response to a slight uptick in local cases, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced that the city would reinstate indoor mask mandates even for the vaccinated.

I don’t know when I began to realize that birds were something marvelous and otherworldly. It might have been when I first saw a pileated woodpecker swoop to an 80-foot tulip poplar tree in my backyard when I was 7 or 8 years old,…

This month I will have an anniversary that is no cause for celebration. Three years ago, I was hit by a car while crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, in the crosswalk, with the walk light. A woman who thought answering her phone was…

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser appears to have written a check that the D.C. Council won’t cash.

Venorica Tucker laughs when asked when she hopes to retire.

As I settled in Wednesday evening to review D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s (D) much-ballyhooed Public Safety Update, I received a Fourth District police alert regarding a robbery committed around 11 p.m. in Ward 4 by two men armed with…

Nyiah Courtney’s family is going through horrifying anguish right now, and our hearts ache. Six-year-old Nyiah was killed walking home in mid-July in her Congress Heights neighborhood. She had a right to live a long, peaceful life. This…

Any delusion that our city’s gun violence afflicts only certain (poor) neighborhoods has to have been erased by the past several weeks.

Truth is truth, even in D.C.