As a federal enclave, Washington D.C. had long offered African-Americans greater opportunities for employment and less glaring discrimination. In 1919, black veterans returning home to D.C. were shocked to discover Jim Crow had set in, many could not go back to the jobs they held prior to the war or even enter to the same building they used to work in due to the color of their skin. Booker T. Washington described the situation: “(I) had never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”