The Capital City Murders: Black Women and Serial Murder in Interwar Era Washington, DC.

This article examines a series of racially and gender-motivated murders in Washington, DC, during the interwar era through the early 1940s, focusing on the vulnerability of Black women to serial murder, police brutality, and municipal neglect amid entrenched racial segregation and socioeconomic inequalities. It details the crimes attributed to Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe, a Black man who confessed to killing multiple Black and white women, highlighting how law enforcement and mainstream media largely ignored Black victims while responding vigorously to white victims’ murders. The article also explores the broader context of systemic racism, police complicity, and community responses, including Black women’s self-protection efforts and activism against state neglect. It situates these events within ongoing struggles for Black women’s safety and citizenship in the nation’s capital, noting parallels to later serial killings and continued institutional failures to protect Black women.