Barbara Pope
2025 Black History Month: Unsung Heroes
Georgetown, DC
This Black History Month, the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project honors the unsung hero Barbara E. Pope (1854-1908) who waged an against-all-odds battle for racial equality.
Born and raised in the Georgetown community of Washington, DC, a documented Middle Passage port of entry, her formerly enslaved parents, Hannah and Alfred Pope, instilled in their ten children a strong sense of justice. In 1848, on the schooner, The Pearl, her father was one of 77 men, women, and children who participated in the largest attempted escape from enslavement in U.S. history.
Ms. Pope began teaching at age 16 and was an advocate for reforming the Colored Schools of Washington. She also was a celebrated writer of short stories, exploring themes of race, gender, and class. Impressed by her work, W.E.B. DuBois, a curator for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair and later one of the founders of the Niagara Movement (forerunner to the NAACP), included four of Ms. Pope’s stories in “The Exhibit of American Negroes.”
In 1906, Ms. Pope refused to vacate a whites-only car on a train from DC to VA. After being threatened, pulled off the train, detained for hours, arrested, found guilty and fined, she took her case to the Supreme Court of Virginia, challenging the Separate Car Law. The Court decided that Virginia's Jim Crow law did not apply to interstate passengers and overturned the earlier guilty verdict, exonerating Ms. Pope. With the support of the Niagara Movement, a civil suit against the Southern Railway Company was filed on her behalf, demanding $25,000 in damages. The jury voted in Ms. Pope’s favor but only awarded her 1 penny.
Within a year, she was found hanging from a tree in a secluded area of Georgetown. The DC coroner declared her death a suicide. Those who knew Ms. Pope or had read her fiery editorials refused to accept that determination which required no investigation. They argued that a 5’ tall woman without a ladder could not hang herself from a huge tree and questioned why she would pin a portion of the court transcript to her dress. A thorn in the side of segregationists, Ms. Pope had been silenced, paying the ultimate price for her dogged pursuit of justice. This challenge to Jim Crow occurred 49 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
On February 2, 2025, The National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution presented a Certificate of Award for Women in American History to Barbara E. Pope.
Source
Barbara Pope Was a Civil Rights Activist Who Refused to Give Up Her Seat on a Segregated Train - Teen Vogue By Rob DeHart - February 3, 2025