Elizabeth Clark-Lewis is the Emerita Director of Public History at Howard. In 2022, she received a PhD Honoris Causa from Howard, where she served as the former Director of Graduate Studies. Professor Clark-Lewis served twice as the National President of the Association of Black Women Historians, served on the Board of the Organization of American Historians and the National Council on Public History, and is one of the founders of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Association. Her books include Friendship: An Oral History of the New Annapolitans [Co-author] (2025); Hip Hop @ Howard: A Public History Symposium (2024); Keep It Locked: 106 Tributes To AJ Calloway (2014);  Synergy: Public History At Howard University (2011); Emerging Voices and Paradigms in Black Women's Scholarship [Co-author]  (2008); First Freed: Emancipation in the District of Columbia (2002); Living In,  Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, DC [Brown Best Book Award] (1996); and, Northern Virginia Community College: An Oral History [Co-author] (1987). She co-produced the PBS documentary Freedom Bags – Black Women and Migration to Washington, DC, winner of the Oscar Micheaux Award from the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. She earned a BA and MA from Howard University and a PhD from the University of Maryland.

Women and Activism in Washington, DC is an examination of how selected local, grassroots organizations were founded, sustained, and transformed by women. As women entered small and large institutional arenas, they succeeded in gaining access to the government and non-governmental organizations in the nation's capital. This study will explore how women, with many different historical, organizational, strategic, and practical issues, engendered change in the District of Columbia. The forces arrayed against them, their practical activist experiences, and shared understanding of the autonomous movements they led became a source of leadership theory, power, and vision. This research reveals that Washington, DC, women were clear-eyed realists and passionate activists in local, regional, and national communities, focusing on redefining work, family, civil rights, and community development strategies while enriching neighborhood-based historical narratives. The analyses will use private papers, public archival data, and oral histories to probe the extraordinary diversity, connect the activism, chronicle the dramatic changes, and elucidate the far-reaching agenda of District of Columbia women who reshaped their communities and their social worlds over the last 130 years.