Sarah-Patton Boyle was one of Virginia’s most prominent white civil rights activists during the 1950s and 1960s and author of the widely acclaimed autobiography The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition (1962).
Barbara Rose Johns Powell conceived and executed a 1951 student walkout at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, precipitating one of five legal cases that would be consolidated into the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned segregated public schools.
Aline E. Black was a teacher known primarily as a principal in a civil rights court case on equal pay.
Mary White Ovington (1865–1951), a social worker and freelance writer, was a principal NAACP founder and officer for almost forty years.
Associate editor of The Guardian, a newspaper dedicated to civil rights.
As president of the Women’s Service Club, she spearheaded the WSC’s drive to allow African Americans to live in dormitories of local educational institutions.
Donated her townhouse to the Harriet Tubman Crusaders, an African-American branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Boston, as a residence for African-American women who were excluded from the city’s college dormitories and respectable rooming houses.
History teacher Clara Luper (1923–2011) and the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City that she advised initiated some of the first sit-ins in the civil rights movement, beginning in 1958.
Benjamin Roberts, an African American, sued the city of Boston in 1848 stating that his daughter Sarah Roberts was unlawfully refused entrance to five schools between her home and the Smith School.
Assistant editor of The Guardian, a newspaper dedicated to civil rights