The Pentagon Has Twice the Bathrooms Needed

During the massive wartime construction of the Pentagon in the early 1940s, its location in Arlington, Virginia, presented a significant legal and moral challenge. At the time, Virginia's Jim Crow laws mandated strict racial segregation in all public facilities, including workplaces. Following the letter of the law, the building's architects designed and constructed separate sets of bathrooms on every floor, one for white employees and one for Black employees, effectively doubling the number of restrooms required for its large workforce.

This plan, however, met with quiet but firm resistance from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1941, he had signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in the national defense industry. Applying this principle to the new headquarters of the War Department, Roosevelt personally intervened to ensure the Pentagon would not be a segregated space. He ordered that the "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs never be installed.

As a result, the Pentagon became an anomaly from its opening day in 1943. It was a building in the heart of segregated Virginia whose bathrooms were, by federal decree, integrated. This small but significant act of desegregation predated the official end of segregation in the armed forces by five years. The building's surplus of restrooms remains to this day, a unique architectural quirk and a physical reminder of a discriminatory law that was successfully challenged and overcome.