The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just about famous leaders; it also thrived on the courage of everyday people.
Neighbors organized carpools to boycott segregated buses. Students braved angry mobs to integrate lunch counters. Churchgoers marched and sang, facing down police dogs and fire hoses.
Through countless acts of defiance and resilience, these ordinary individuals formed the backbone of the struggle. From activists who faced violence in the 1960s to today’s educators and museum curators who are keeping the history alive, the Civil Rights Movement is filled with people — and those people have stories.
Many of the movement’s early foot soldiers are now well into their golden years and can look back on decades of both tragedy and triumph. Others are younger and keep the vision alive for future generations. From community organizers to museum curators, here are the stories of five people crucial to the movement.
William Harris
Greensboro, North Carolina
Will Harris is a professor from the University of Pennsylvania and principal scholar at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
“Our center is in the landmark F.W. Woolworth building, where the sit-ins began,” said Harris. “On February 1, 1960, four freshman students from North Carolina A&T State College sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. By the end of the year, some 70,000 people had been involved in sit-ins. And on July 25th of 1960, that first lunch counter was finally desegregated. Charleston was relatively moderate for a Southern city, and our sit-ins were not violent. That was not the case in many cities.”
The center was founded 50 years later on February 1, 2010, and was recently designated a national historic landmark.
“That’s the highest designation of a historic property in the United States,” said Harris, “and the requirement for eligibility to be nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status, which we are seeking.”
Leona Tate
New Orleans
On November 14, 1960, three 6-year-old Black girls, escorted by federal marshals, walked up the steps of the previously all-white McDonogh 19 Elementary School in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost (along with Ruby Bridges at nearby William Frantz Elementary School) were not aware, that at the same time, they were also walking into Civil Rights history.
“We didn’t really understand what was going on,” said Tate. “I understood that I was going to a new school. I didn’t understand why.”
“I went through the entire 12 years in white schools,” recalled Tate. “As we changed schools, the schools were integrated — integration progressed as we progressed the grades. It didn’t open up to all grades until we reached 10th grade.” Tate went on to business school in San Antonio, and “from there it was many years that I didn’t even talk about what I had done.”
The three-story brick school was closed in 2004 and further damaged by Hurricane Katrina the following year. Surveying the post-storm destruction with her father, Tate learned that only one school would be reopening in the Lower Ninth Ward. “I thought, ‘Why not this one? It looks fine.’”
That was not to be, but the three McDonogh alumnae did not give up.
“We were very sentimental about [the school],” said Tate. “I knew if I allowed them to tear it down, that our history would be lost. So we got it put on the National Historic Register.”
Today, the former school building is the Tate, Etienne and Prevost (TEP) Interpretive Center, the first dedicated facility in the state telling the story of civil rights in Louisiana.
“We do tours daily, and [visitors] come in through the building just as the three of us entered it,” Tate said. “They’re able to visit the first-grade classroom, and most of the time, I’m there to answer questions.”
Hezekiah Watkins
Jackson, Mississippi
Hezekiah Watkins was 13 years old and not listening to his mother when he — accidentally — became the youngest person arrested as a Freedom Rider. “At 13, I was not a Freedom Rider,” said Watkins. “I would just say a little Black boy trying to navigate his way through the city of Jackson.”
Watkins had fallen asleep on that day and awakened to news of the Freedom Riders in Alabama. He and a friend began paying attention and asking questions that their elders did not want to answer. When the activists came to Jackson a month or two later, Watkins and his friend played sick, skipped church and headed to the action.
“Even at that point, neither one of us wanted to be a Freedom Rider,” he said. “We just wanted to maybe go to the bus station and say ‘hi’ or whatever. My friend, as a joke, pushed me inside the station.”
Watson was arrested and placed at Parchman State Prison until word of his arrest reached Washington, D.C. After misleading President John F. Kennedy about minors being held at Parchman, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett sent Watson back to Jackson.
“The police called my mother and told her to come down,” he recounted. “She thought she was identifying my remains. When she saw me, she collapsed. And when we got home, she beat me with a switch.”
Watkins does not elaborate about his experiences in Parchman, where he was held for 13 days. But his accidental incarceration spurred a lifelong commitment to activism, and he was arrested 108 more times — the most of any Freedom Rider. Now 77, he serves as a docent at Jackson’s Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and travels extensively, speaking to schools, civic groups and churches.
Cecil Williams
Orangeburg, South Carolina
South Carolina wasn’t just the cradle of the Civil War. From its secession from the Union in 1860 (the first Southern state to secede) to the first shots fired during the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861, it was the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement as well. President Harry Truman issued an executive order to desegregate the armed forces following the beating and blinding of Isaac Woodard, a decorated and uniformed Black soldier in Batesburg, South Carolina, in 1944. And a year before Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, South Carolinian Sarah Mae Flemming became the public face of the fight to desegregate transportation in South Carolina. A U.S. Appellate Court ruled that the principles decided in the 1954 Brown v. Board decision applied to transportation, which meant bus segregation was unconstitutional.
Now 87, then-18-year-old Cecil Williams was a correspondent for Jet and Ebony magazines, taking half a million photos and collecting artifacts while covering the fight for racial justice. After decades of searching for a permanent home for the collection, Williams, his wife and sister “pulled together” to found South Carolina’s first civil rights museum.
“We knew that museums cost millions of dollars,” said Williams. “But at this late stage in our lives we knew that if this was going to happen, we were going to have to do it ourselves.”
The museum’s current exhibit contains 350 of Williams’ works.
facebook.com/cecilwilliamsmuseum
Quantia Fletcher
Little Rock, Arkansas
The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center (MTCC) in Little Rock, Arkansas, is the state’s leading repository of Black history and culture. It’s helmed by the dynamic Quantia “Key” Fletcher, who has played supporting roles in the organization since 2007 and became executive director in 2021.
The center, which opened in 2008, is named in honor of the Mosaic Templars, a fraternal and philanthropic organization. Originally established in 1882 to provide insurance for Black families in Little Rock, the Templars quickly expanded their services to include a building and loan association, a publishing company, a business college, a nursing school and a hospital. Today’s center stands at the corner of Ninth Street and Broadway on the site of the organization’s national headquarters in what was once a bustling Black-owned business district.
Fletcher, a New Orleans native, joined the U.S. Army and studied journalism at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. But it was while working as a forest ranger one summer at the Cane River Creole National Historic Site where she came into her power as a storyteller, a label she still treasures today.
“I became smitten,” she said. “I was infatuated with getting to talk to people about what I wanted to talk to them about — and they actually came to see me. Stories had predominantly only focused on ‘the big house’ and the families that lived there. I got a chance to tell the story of the enslaved communities there that worked the land and worked the plantation, and even these families that existed long after slavery was over because they were tenant farmers and sharecroppers on the land. It’s where I caught the bug.
“Any liberties that have been granted to any one group of people that have been denied to others — no matter how small — is important. And the story deserves to be told; not told in a vacuum, but in a moving way that really helps us capture the true spirit, so that people understand that from birth to the grave, civil rights are things that have impacted all of us.”
