Walter Washington

Walter Edward Washington was born on the fifteenth of April 1915 at Dawson, Georgia, the son of William Washington and Willie Mae Thornton Washington. The family migrated north to Jamestown, New York, when he was three. He was raised in Jamestown's small Black community and educated at the Jamestown public schools through high school. He took the bachelor's at Howard University in 1938 and the LL.B. at Howard Law School in 1948. He completed military service in the United States Army between his undergraduate and law-school years.

He joined the National Capital Housing Authority in Washington in 1941 as a junior aide. He spent the following twenty-five years at the Authority — rising through the ranks to housing assistant, deputy executive director, and in 1961 to executive director, becoming the first African American to head the Authority. He served as executive director from 1961 to 1966 and supervised the post-war public-housing programmes of the District during the most active period of federal urban housing investment.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed him in September 1966 to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia under the new mayor-commissioner reorganisation — making him on the thirteenth of September 1967 the appointed mayor of the District, the first African American mayor of any major American city in the twentieth century. The District had been governed since 1874 under the three-commissioner system without home rule; Johnson's reorganisation produced the single-mayor executive that Washington occupied for the following ten years.

He directed the District through the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) of April 1968 and the consequent rioting that destroyed substantial portions of the U Street and Fourteenth Street corridors. The orderly transition through the 1968 unrest — and the subsequent rebuilding — was the defining administrative achievement of his appointed mayoralty.

When the District Home Rule Act of 1973 produced the first elected District mayoralty in November 1974, he stood as a Democrat and won decisively. He served the elected mayoralty from January 1975 to January 1979 and lost the 1978 Democratic primary to Marion Barry (placed in this archive).

He died at Washington on the twenty-seventh of October 2003, at eighty-eight.

He is honored here as the first elected mayor of the District.