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The Lesser-Known Sites of the Civil Rights Movement

Louisville Downtown Civil Rights Markers

Louisville, Kentucky

On May 14, 1963, Louisville, Kentucky, became the first city south of the Mason-Dixon line to pass a public accommodations ordinan granting equal access to all people, regardless of race. But it didn’t happen without two years of civil rights demonstrations demanding it.

Most of the 11 Louisville Downtown Civil Rights Markers can be found along South Fourth Street and highlight sites of mass sit-ins, stand-ins and other protests that started in earnest in spring 1961. The demonstrations led to the arrests of hundreds of protestors but also led to several stores overturning their segregation policies, as well as a voter registration drive and a campaign to elect new city officials, who then passed the public accommodations ordinance.

The seeds were sewn on November 27, 1958, when Iris King, the mayor of Kingston, Jamaica, and her group of delegates stopped at Walgreens Drugstore for a cup of coffee after touring the business district. The store refused to serve her and the black members of her delegation.

“It really was a source of embarrassment,” said Clest Lanier, senior program coordinator and community liaison for engagement programs with the University of Louisville.

The incident sparked a boycott, and local high school students protested in front of the store. A week later, Walgreens quietly overturned its segregation policy.

Other downtown businesses, however, weren’t so welcoming of change. At Blue Boar Cafeteria’s downtown locations, merchant policemen and customers instigated violence against protesters. At Stewart’s Department Store, the “bulwark of segregation,” black customers weren’t allowed to try on clothes, use the washrooms or eat in the restaurants. Despite numerous demonstrations, it was only after the ordinance passed that Stewart’s restaurants started serving black patrons, which “was considered a major feat,” Lanier said.

Although many of the original locations have changed uses or been demolished, visitors can still step inside the Brown Theatre as well as the former Stewart’s building, now an Embassy Suites hotel.

www.gotolouisville.com

Robert Russa Moton Museum

Farmville, Virginia

On April 23, 1951, Barbara Rose Johns led a student body walkout to protest overcrowding and inferior conditions at Robert Russa Moton High School, the all-black high school in Virginia’s Prince Edward County.

When the school opened in 1939 in Farmville, it was built to house 180 students. By the late 1940s, enrollment had grown to more than 450 students, many of whom were being taught in leaking tarpaper shacks with no insulation, said museum managing director Cameron Patterson.

Johns and her planning team gathered the student body in the auditorium, where Johns stood on stage and led students out of the school and into history. Today, visitors to the Robert Russa Moton Museum start in that same auditorium, where they watch a video called “Strike,” a re-creation of the student-led strike that includes interviews from people who were present that day, including Johns’ sister.

Then, “as the students in the video march out, we’re marching into” the next exhibit gallery, Patterson said.

In the museum’s five remaining galleries, visitors learn about the subsequent NAACP lawsuit against the county that later became one of five cases folded into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that made segregation unlawful.

Visitors also learn about Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” period that followed the ruling, when Prince Edward County closed all public schools for five years — and created a private academy for well-off white students — rather than comply with a court order to desegregate.

“Grasping that a locality would close its schools for a five-year period is something that resonates powerfully with visitors,” Patterson said.

www.motonmuseum.org

Rachel Carter

Rachel Carter worked as a newspaper reporter for eight years and spent two years as an online news editor before launching her freelance career. She now writes for national meetings magazines and travel trade publications.