The Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia was saddened to learn of the passing of civil rights activist J. Charles Jones on December 27, 2019. In 1966, Mr. Jones led a four-day, 64-mile march around the Beltway to protest housing segregation near capital-area military installations. That protest, along with his staging of sit-ins at the Pentagon, helped spur Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967 to ban military personnel from living in segregated housing near Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

Outside the Beltway, Mr. Jones’s activism put him at the center of many storied events of the Civil Rights Movement. For more information on his contributions to civil rights, see the obituaries published in the New York Times and Washington Post.  Our thoughts are with Mr. Jones’s friends and family.