Funkstown – Since 1868, West End’s Historic Thaddeus Stevens School

By Frank Leone

Stevens School (1050 21st Street, N.W.), built in 1868, is one of the city's oldest schools. Named for Pennsylvania Congressman and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, it was the first DC public school to provide facilities for African Americans that were close to comparable to those provided for white students. Its alumni include Washington Post columnist/editor Colbert King,  Dr. Charles R. Drew, historian Rayford W. Logan, singer Roberta Flack, TV personality Ralph “Petey” Greene, and Amy Carter (the last offspring of a president to attend a DC public school). Now surrounded by office buildings, the school has been modernized and since 2017 has operated as DC’s only stand-alone preschool Stevens Early Learning Center, focusing on educating approximately 90 young learners, from newborns to five year-olds from all wards of the city.

Stevens School - Built in 1868, with wings added in 1885 and partially rebuilt and enlarged between 1895 and 1896; the design of the three story and basement brick building has not varied in any significant manner since 1896. (F. Leone, April 2021)

In 1868, the school’s West End site was an African American neighborhood. The alley behind Stevens (“Stevens Court”) was filled with the makeshift housing of the disadvantaged well into the twentieth century. Students came from Foggy Bottom’s Snow's Court as well as from more prosperous homes. In  the early twentieth century the Stevens’ neighborhood also included such businesses as Western Market, Chestnut Farms Dairy, ice houses, coal yards, and wood yards.

Engraving of Stevens School Building, 1870. (Annual Report of the Superintendent of Colored Schools at Washington and Georgetown,1871-72. Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives)

Emancipation in 1862 and the abolition of slavery in 1865 added large numbers of freed African Americans to DC’s existing free population. DC built Stevens School to accommodate this influx of students in a racially segregated city. The building had twelve school rooms and a large assembly hall that served as a community meeting place, although it was overcrowded with more than 900 students in the 1880s. It continued in its nurturing role for both students and neighborhood throughout the long period of racial discrimination prior to desegregation of the public schools in 1954. In the 1950s and 1960s, high rise office building development displaced many long-time neighborhood residents and Stevens’ enrollment dropped from more 400 students in the early 1950s to approximately 200 in the early 1970s. Stevens was in danger of being closed when an innovative extended day program was introduced, reaching out to care for the children of its new office-worker neighborhood before and after school. The sounds of its children at the current playground brighten up the commercial neighborhood and remind one of its residential past.

Thaddeus Stevens, photograph by Matthew Brady (Library of Congress). Tommy Lee Jones portrayed Stevens in the Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln (2012).

The school’s trustees dedicated it “to the late Honorable Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the earnest champion of free and equal school privileges for all classes and conditions of the children of men.”  Stevens (1793-1868) served in the Pennsylvania legislature in the 1830s, playing a leading role in the establishment of the state’s public school system. Elected to Congress from Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1848, he quickly became a leader of federal anti-slavery forces. After the Civil War, Stevens played the primary role in ushering through Reconstruction via the 13th (abolishing slavery) and 14th (guaranteeing due process of law) constitutional amendments. He also advocated (unsuccessfully) for confiscation and reallocation of Confederate lands. When he died in 1868, he became the third person to lie in state lay in the Capitol rotunda (after Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln). He chose to be buried in an integrated cemetery in Lancaster, “to illustrate in my death the principles which I have advocated through a long life - - the equality of man before his Creator."

For much more on DC schools history, visit the DC History Center exhibit – “Class Action: The Fight for Black Education in the Nation’s Capital” opening in June 2025!

Sources:  Stevens Early Learning Center; DC Preservation League, DC Historic Sites, Thaddeus Stevens School; National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Thaddeus Stevens School, 2001; National Park Service, Thaddeus Stevens School; Colbert King, “Carter’s True Respect for D.C.,” Washington Post, Jan. 1, 2025;Tracy Schorn, “Why America Is Just Now Learning to Love Thaddeus Stevens, the ‘Best-Hated Man’ in U.S. History,” Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 2023; FBA History Project.