“[T]he first temple dedicated to the sovereignty of the people.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1812


African Americans have been part of the Capitol’s history from the time Benjamin Banneker, the son of a former slave, joined the team led by Andrew Ellicott to survey the new federal district in 1791.  The area, which the city commissioners named “The City of Washington in the District of Columbia,” was composed of farms, plantations, a few villages, the small tobacco port of Georgetown, Maryland, and the larger port of Alexandria, Virginia.

The survey enabled Peter L’Enfant, the man chosen to design the city, to map the streets and select the sites for the major government buildings.  For the Capitol’s location, L’Enfant chose the area’s highest elevation. Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson believed that just as the Constitution was written to “secure the Blessings of Liberty,” the Capitol would be a “temple dedicated to the sovereignty of the people.”

Benjamin Banneker understood the inequity of a Temple of Liberty in a land of slavery. In a 1791 letter to Jefferson, he asked the author of the Declaration of Independence how he could believe that “all men are created equal” when he and other Founding Fathers enslaved “by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.”