Florence Howe and I moved back East from Chicago in the spring of 1967. She took up her tenured position at Goucher College and I moved into a new educational venture: as associate director of the Morgan Community School. Fortunately, one of the families involved with the school project offered us their top-floor bedroom while we looked for an apartment. Alice Jackson, who had been a student at the 1964 freedom school that Florence had organized at the Blair Street AME church in Jackson, had come North with us at the end of summer 1965 to continue her high school education at a good school and ultimately to attend college. Now she joined Florence in searching for a place for all of us to live.

The two followed a variety of leads, but without success. We were puzzled. It never occurred to us that people, seeing Alice, who is black, with Florence would assume that she and I were a “mixed” couple. We expressed our bewilderment to one of the friends with whom we were staying. Looking at them, she said, “they are probably seeing you as a ‘mixed couple.’ You’d best not go together.” That proved to be sage advice. Florence alone soon found a lovely flat on Biltmore Street, a block into Adams-Morgan from the Calvert Street Bridge and a quick walk to the Morgan Community School. It had one bedroom and an indoor sleeping porch, which was Alice’s when she was with us. When the windows were open and the breeze blew in the right direction, we could hear the sea lions barking at the Washington Zoo. At the end of the tumultuous 1967–68 year, when we left Washington for Baltimore, closer to Florence’s job at Goucher, we showed the apartment to a man who would become its new tenant. He was a police reporter for the Washington Post named Carl Bernstein.

Adams-Morgan, later to become DC’s hip neighborhood, was in 1967 racially diverse—sort of. White, upper-middle-class professionals lived west of 18th Street and across Rock Creek, while blacks, mainly poor, lived east of 18th Street. Further east, the neighborhood was haunted by drugs and violence.