With the Might of Angels (24 page)

On July 25, 1960, black employees of the Greensboro Woolworth’s were the first to be served at the store’s lunch counter. The entire Woolworth’s chain was desegregated the next day.

The tension at a lunch counter in Portsmouth, Virginia, is nearly visible in the minutes before a fight broke out between white students and black youths who sought service at this previously segregated cafeteria.

Protesters march for civil rights on August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, a landmark demonstration of the Civil Rights Movement.

Thurgood Marshall walks out of the Supreme Court building.

Jackie Robinson, American baseball player and hero of the Civil Rights Movement.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in his office in Atlanta, Georgia, where a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi hangs. Gandhi’s discipline of nonviolent protest inspired King and his followers.

Rosa Parks, who is sometimes known as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” touched off the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in December 1955, after she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger.

Mary McLeod Bethune with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The two were close friends.

Claudette Colvin was the first person of color to protest bus segregation, refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of fifteen. She was taken off the bus and arrested by two police officers.

Ruby Bridges was the first black child to integrate a previously all-white elementary school, when she attended the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the age of six.

A map of the continental United States showing the legality of school segregation state by state, before the Supreme Court’s ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary was an educator who founded Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida. This college began as an all-black grade school. Legend says that Mary earned money to keep the school going by baking and selling sweet potato pies. Mary worked to get President Franklin D. Roosevelt elected. The president appointed her as a member of his Black Cabinet. In this role, Mary advised the president on the concerns of African Americans.

Harry F. Byrd
Byrd was elected the fiftieth governor of Virginia. He later became a U.S. senator, who exercised his political power to oppose school integration. Byrd’s Massive Resistance program worked to maintain segregation in schools throughout Virginia, forcing them to close by withdrawing funds. Though Byrd had many followers, his Massive Resistance did not last.

Claudette Colvin
In 1955, Claudette was fifteen years old. She was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery, Alabama, where she lived. Like many residents of Montgomery, Claudette rode segregated city buses. On March 2, 1955, Claudette refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white person. This courageous act occurred nine months before Rosa Parks took the same brave action by also refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.

George E. C. Hayes
George Edward Chalmers Hayes was a Washington, D.C., lawyer who was a leader in arguing
Bolling v. Sharpe,
a case similar to
Brown v. Board of Education.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the foremost civil rights leaders of all time. A clergyman and social activist, King became known throughout the world for his beliefs and teachings of nonviolence in the face of America’s turbulent racial segregation of the 1950s and 1960s. King is perhaps best remembered for his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, King
was the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial inequality.

Thurgood Marshall
Marshall was an attorney who started his career working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He later argued before the Supreme Court on the
Brown v. Board of Education
case. This experience prepared Marshall to become the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.

James M. Nabrit
Nabrit was a leading civil rights lawyer who worked with George E. C. Hayes on the
Bolling v. Sharpe
case. Nabrit also served as an attorney on several cases for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Jackie Robinson
Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson was the first black player in Major League Baseball in modern history. Jackie broke baseball’s invisible “color line” in 1947 when he first appeared as a player for the Brooklyn Dodgers. For sixty years before Jackie debuted with the Dodgers, black baseball players could only play for
the Negro Leagues. Thanks to Jackie, racial segregation in professional baseball came to an end.

Thomas B. Stanley
Stanley served as governor of Virginia from 1954–1958, during the height of the school integration controversy. Shortly after the
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling, Stanley encouraged the people of Virginia to accept integration. But he was soon swayed by Virginia’s strong segregationists’ beliefs, and by the powerful strategies set forth by Harry F. Byrd’s Massive Resistance program.