[citation needed] In 1867, the Freedmen's Bureau (officially the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) bought a 375-acre farm from Julia Barry, a white landowner and recent owner of enslaved people, enabling the transformation of Barry's Farm into a thriving, independent community of formerly enslaved and free-born African Americans.

[4][5] The Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, had asked Black migrants squatting in temporary structures at Meridian Hill, what might help them to become self-supporting.

[7] Barry Farm was initially a large homestead, stretching all the way to 13th Street on the east, Poplar Point on the West, and the present-day Morris Road SE on the north.

The 1940s construction of a Suitland Parkway, originally a military highway from Bolling Field to Camp Springs, MD, further isolated the neighborhood between busy traffic arteries, required the demolition of nearly 100 houses, and displaced more than 600 residents.

Only a few old frame houses, mostly along Wade Road just at the edge of the thicket that separates Barry Farm from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, resemble those of the original Freedman's community.

In the summer of 1949, Barry Farm-Hillsdale youth—Richard Robinson, Carl Contee, Richard Cook, Clarence "Dusty" Prue, Everett and Eugene "Mann" McKenzie, Toussaint Pierce, James Chester Jennings Jr, and Otis, Thomas and Bill Anderson—tried to enter the Anacostia Pool without success and continued to try over several days.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that segregated public education was inherently unequal, violated the Equal Protection Clause and the right to due process, and therefore was unconstitutional.

The Band of Angels, a tenants' council made up of women and led by Stevens Road residents Lillian Wright and Etta Mae Horn, was one such group.

Two reasons have been suggested: 1) the community's "inability "to pay for municipal services" through the collection of real estate taxes" and 2) these government agencies' desire to clear downtown Washington, DC, of African Americans and move them to Barry Farm-Hillsdale and Marshall Heights.

[22] The Barry Farm Tenants and Allies Association successfully won a historic landmark designation for five public housing buildings that were home to well-known activists.