How Adams Morgan Got Its Name

While people today consider Adams Morgan — belovedly nicknamed AdMo — a Northwest neighborhood stalwart, it actually didn’t get its full name all that long ago.

The area, which evolved from an upper-middle class neighborhood in the 18th and 19th centuries, was simply referred to by its cross streets, 18th and Columbia Street NW.

It wasn’t until the 1950s — in the wake of the Brown v. Board of education ruling — that people began using Adams Morgan to describe the area adjacent to the much older Dupont and Kalorama neighborhoods. This is because the area had two segregated elementary schools; the all-white John Quincy Adams School, and all-Black Thomas P. Morgan School.

In preparation for the school integration, Florence Cornell, the principal of Adams, and Bernice Brown, the principal of Morgan, partnered to create the Adams-Morgan Better Neighborhood Conference. The conference's work was crucial to making the schools’ desegregation quick and peaceful.

Other organizing groups in the area started using Adams-Morgan to describe their neighborhood groups and the name stuck. The hyphen was eventually dropped around 2000, making it the Adams Morgan we know and love today.