Welcome to "The Half Had Not Been Told Me" Digital Tour of Lafayette Square.
Lafayette Square, a neighborhood in downtown Washington, DC, is most often associated with the President of the United States and the White House, which occupies the southern side of the Square. This digital tour and web archive focuses on a different aspect of the Square's history—the stories of African Americans living and working in this landscape throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
The digital tour will allow you to explore stories associated with selected buildings on the Square, such as Daniel Webster's House, where Paul Jennings participated in a plan to free more than 70 African Americans enslaved in the city, or the Belasco Theatre, where the first African American opera star Lillian Evanti performed for a desegregated audience in 1932.
The web archive gives you access to a carefully selected group of documents, images, maps, and other primary sources that will enrich your understanding of these events, people, and issues. By exploring the African American history of Lafayette Square, you can begin to reveal a partially obscured treasure and discover "the half had not been told me," just as Frederick Douglass did when he encountered the Freedman's Bank on the Square. You can use this as a model to explore your own community's history and to think about how the stories of Lafayette Square, often called America's front yard, relate to what has happened in places across the nation.
The "Half Had Not Been Told Me" Web site can be used by teachers to expand their content knowledge, as part of guided activities in the classroom, or for student research. It is designed for students in Grade 4 and above and is best viewed on Mozilla Firefox.
