Civil Rights

San Francisco, CA

This commemorative work at San Francisco State University marks the student strike that began on November 6, 1968, when the Third World Liberation Front and Black Student Union shut down the campus in the longest student strike in U.S. history. Their demands helped create the nation's first College of Ethnic Studies. Dedicated forty years later in 2009 under President Robert A. Corrigan, the piece invites viewers to 'connect the dots' between that struggle and the present.

Slocum, TX

On July 29, 1910, armed white men began hunting and killing African Americans across the countryside near Slocum in East Texas, firing first on a group along Sadler's Creek and continuing through the day and night. At least eight Black men were officially recorded murdered, though many believed the toll far higher, and terrified families fled the area for good. Grand jury indictments of white men followed within weeks, but the cases were moved and never prosecuted, and the events faded from public memory until a 2011 legislative resolution acknowledged them.

Waco, TX

In May 1916, a teenaged African American farmhand named Jesse Washington was accused of murdering a white woman in the farming community of Robinson, near Waco. After a four-minute jury deliberation, a mob seized him from the courthouse and, before a cheering crowd of thousands, beat, mutilated, hanged, and burned him to death in one of the most notorious lynchings in American history. The NAACP sent investigator Elisabeth Freeman, and W.E.B. Du Bois published her findings and the crowd's own photographs in The Crisis, branding the atrocity "The Waco Horror."

Dallas, TX

As Jim Crow tightened its grip after Reconstruction, the threat and reality of lynching enforced the racial order even in cities. On March 3, 1910, a mob stormed the Dallas County courthouse, seized 60-year-old Allen Brooks from a pretrial hearing, threw him from a second-floor window, and dragged him down Main Street to hang him near the Elks Arch before a crowd estimated at 5,000. Though many called for a grand jury, no one was ever held accountable.

Chicago, IL

This plaque marks the origin of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, which erupted after a Black teenager rafting on Lake Michigan drifted across an unspoken racial boundary at a segregated beach and was struck by rocks and drowned. The violence that followed left dozens dead and hundreds injured over nearly a week, part of the nationwide 'Red Summer' of racial unrest. The Martin Luther King Jr. quotation frames the tragedy within the longer struggle for racial justice.

Corpus Christi, TX

In June 1966, some 700 melon pickers in Starr County struck for wages that met the federal minimum and for humane conditions, aided by organizer Eugene Nelson and local reformers Margil Sanchez and Lucio Galvan. Meeting resistance, they set out on a 380-mile march from Rio Grande City to Austin, gathering food, lodging, and supporters town by town—including a rally of more than 800 in Corpus Christi. The march culminated on Labor Day with over 10,000 people at the state capitol.

El Paso, TX

Texas Western College in El Paso — now UTEP — was the first college in a southern state to integrate, and under coach Don Haskins it recruited Black players when many southern schools still refused to. In the 1965-66 season the Miners went 23-1, battled through overtime thrillers in the NCAA tournament, and in the title game started five African American players against an all-white Kentucky team, winning 72-65. Haskins simply said he was playing his best players.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

On November 17, 1967, thousands of Philadelphia students walked out of their schools and gathered at the Board of Education building to demand an education that reflected their own histories. The peaceful demonstration met police violence, but it stands as one of the earliest and largest youth-led actions in the national ethnic studies movement. Decades later, in 2005, the students' vision was realized when Philadelphia became the first U.S. district to require African American studies.

Roanoke, VA

In 1928, this address in Roanoke's historically Black Gainsboro neighborhood became home to the city's first African-American YMCA, with L.A. Lee serving as its director. During the era of segregation, Black communities built their own parallel institutions—churches, schools, and YMCAs—to provide the recreation, fellowship, and personal development that white-run facilities denied them. This branch offered young Black men a place for athletics, education, and Christian community at a time when such spaces were otherwise closed to them.

New York, NY

The New York City Fire Department — long known as "New York's Bravest" — lost 343 of its members on September 11, 2001, the single greatest loss of life any American fire department has ever suffered in one day. Standing in Lower Manhattan within sight of the former World Trade Center site, this memorial honors both those firefighters who died rushing toward the towers and the department that shoulders the same duty today. The pairing of "those who fell" and "those who carry on" captures how the FDNY absorbed catastrophic loss yet never stopped answering the call.

Slippery Rock Township, PA

On the morning of September 11, 2001, coordinated terrorist attacks struck the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon outside Washington, and a field in rural Pennsylvania, in the deadliest such assault ever carried out on American soil. In the years that followed, communities across the country — including small townships far from the crash sites — raised monuments like this one so that neighbors could gather, remember, and grieve together. For Pennsylvanians the day carried a particular closeness, as one of the hijacked airliners came down in the state's own countryside.

Stroudsburg, PA · est. 2007

A. Mitchell Palmer built his career in Stroudsburg, where he practiced law before serving in Congress and, from 1919 to 1921, as U.S. Attorney General. His name became fixed to the "Palmer Raids," the sweeping arrests of suspected radicals, anarchists, and immigrants during the postwar "Red Scare" that gripped the nation after World War I. A 1920 contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, Palmer embodied both the anxieties and the civil-liberties controversies of his era.

Abilene, TX

Abilene's first public school for African American children opened in 1890 as a one-room building with a single teacher and twenty-two students. Over the decades it grew and moved repeatedly—holding its first graduation, of one student, at Macedonia Baptist Church in 1923 and rising to a ten-room brick campus by 1936. Renamed for historian Carter G. Woodson in 1951, the school served until 1968, when integration finally came to the Abilene district.

Whitemarsh Township, PA · est. 2000

By the 1850s the Corson family's Whitemarsh homestead — a station on the Underground Railroad since long before — had become a center of antislavery activism. In 1856 George and Martha Maulsby Corson opened a meeting hall above their carriage shed where leading abolitionist orators addressed crowds of up to 200. Decades later the hall found a second life as the studio of Thomas Hovenden, whose painting "Last Moments of John Brown" became one of the era's iconic images of the abolitionist cause.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1985

Abraham L. Pennock lived at Hoodland, a house built by his father-in-law in 1823, until his death in 1868. A leader in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, he lent his energy to abolition alongside the causes of woman suffrage and temperance. Reform-minded visitors, including the poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, passed through his doors.

Houston, TX

Beginning in 1910, developer Alfred A. Wright platted the subdivisions that became Acres Homes, drawing Black families with cheap land, low taxes, and freedom from building restrictions. Lacking city utilities, the community built itself — churches, schools, Masonic halls, businesses, and even the South's first Black-owned bus line. By the 1950s it was celebrated as one of the largest all-Black communities in the United States, retaining its identity even after Houston annexed it in the 1960s and 70s.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

For more than eight decades, Black baseball thrived in Philadelphia, from the Pythians and Excelsiors of 1867 to the great professional clubs of the twentieth century. The Philadelphia Giants claimed early championships, the Hilldale club won the 1925 Colored World Series, and the Philadelphia Stars competed in the Negro National League. These teams built a proud institution while the major leagues remained closed to Black players.

Belton, TX

Public education for Black students in Belton dates to 1882, when Mrs. Aleck McGee was hired "to teach the colored school." In 1890 Fisk University graduate Thomas Breckenridge Harris became the first instructor of the African American high school, and in 1936 a new building rose on this site for students of all grades, named T. W. Harris in his honor. The last class graduated in 1966, and Belton's schools integrated the following year.

Gonzales, TX

Education for Black residents of Gonzales began in the 1870s in the home of Myrtle Moses Mathis and grew more formal in the 1890s within a two-story community building. About 1914 a brick schoolhouse rose on donated land, and in 1922 it was named George Edwards High School, serving some 300 students and eight teachers by 1940. The school closed in 1964 as districts desegregated under the federal Civil Rights Act.

Storey County, NV

In the boomtown of Virginia City, free-born entrepreneur William A.G. Brown ran the Boston Saloon from 1866 to 1875, serving the town's small but vibrant African American community fine meals and the best cuts of meat — details archaeologists later confirmed digging through the site. Though rarely more than a hundred African Americans lived in the city, they worked as laborers, barbers, business owners, and a respected physician, and by the 1870s their children attended integrated schools. The great fire of 1875 destroyed the building soon after Brown sold it.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

In 1794, fifteen men and three women broke away from St. George's Church, under the leadership of the pioneering Black preacher Harry Hosier, to found African Zoar here. Through the turbulent decades that followed, the congregation became active in the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom-seekers in a city that was a crucial northern crossing point. Zoar moved to 12th and Melon Streets in 1883 and endures as United Methodism's oldest Black congregation.

Provincetown, MA

Provincetown, long a haven for artists and a vibrant LGBTQ community at the tip of Cape Cod, was struck hard by the AIDS epidemic that swept the nation beginning in the 1980s. This quiet memorial answers that loss with a single word — "remembering" — carved on two of its faces, and a dedication and poetry on the others. It stands as a place to mourn, to reflect, and to keep faith with those the epidemic took.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Alain Leroy Locke was born here in 1886 and became one of the most influential interpreters of the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of Black art and letters in the 1920s. A Harvard graduate and the first African American Rhodes Scholar, he taught for decades at Howard University while championing Black writers, artists, and musicians. His editing and criticism helped define the movement he called the flourishing of the 'New Negro.'

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

A prominent figure in Philadelphia's Jewish community, Albert Greenfield built one of the East Coast's great business empires in the first half of the twentieth century, spanning department stores, real estate, hotels, and banks. His wealth made him a power broker in city and national politics, where he championed reform. He also lent his standing to causes beyond commerce, backing equality for African Americans and interfaith understanding between Catholics and Jews.

City of Ithaca, NY · est. 2020

In this Ithaca house, Alex Haley was born on August 11, 1921. He would go on to write 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' and the landmark 1976 saga 'Roots,' which traced his own family back to slavery and reshaped how Americans confronted that history. The marker commemorates the birthplace of one of the nation's most influential writers.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

In 1845 and 1848, women who worked the cotton factories of Allegheny City walked off the job to protest brutal twelve-hour workdays, taking a stand in one of early America's first waves of industrial labor action. Their protests helped push Pennsylvania to pass an 1848 law capping the workday at ten hours and barring children under twelve from cotton and textile mills. These were among the earliest organized efforts by American working women to demand humane conditions.

New York, NY

Allen Ginsberg lived at this address from 1958 to 1961, in the years just after his poem "Howl" (1956) exploded onto the American scene and helped ignite the Beat Generation. Here in apartment #16 he wrote "Kaddish" (1961), a raw and mournful elegy for his mother Naomi. An internationally acclaimed poet, he later joined the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Alice, TX

Born in Alice in 1898 and orphaned young, Alonso S. Perales rose through stenography and law to become a U.S. diplomat serving on thirteen missions across Latin America and a pioneering Mexican American civil rights leader. In 1927 he began organizing citizens of Mexican origin, and his efforts culminated in the 1929 founding of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which he championed through hundreds of essays, speeches, and three books. He died in 1960, and a San Antonio elementary school was later named in his honor.

Rogers, TX

Born in the small Bell County community of Rogers in 1931, Alvin Ailey grew up steeped in the church services, music, and movement of rural Black Texas before his family moved to Los Angeles in 1942. Mentored by modern-dance teacher Lester Horton, he took over Horton's company after his death in 1953 and carried it to New York. His 1958 masterpiece Blues Suite and the 1960 ballet Revelations drew on those Texas roots to celebrate African American tradition, struggle, and joy on the concert stage.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999

Founded in Philadelphia in 1917, the American Friends Service Committee grew out of the Quaker conviction that faith should be expressed through practical, nonviolent service. From wartime relief to worldwide humanitarian aid, the AFSC's work earned it a share of the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends.

Beeville, TX

This American Legion post honors Charles H. Lytle, Beeville's first African American serviceman killed in World War II, who died when the USS Ommaney Bay went down near the Philippines in 1945. Chartered in 1946 for Black veterans in the Jim Crow era, the post became a vital community hub — hosting the segregated proms that African American graduates were barred from attending at the local white high school.

Americus, GA

Opened in 1923 and funded largely by Dr. W.S. Prather, the Americus Colored Hospital was one of the earliest hospitals in southwest Georgia devoted to the care of African Americans. In an era when segregation barred Black physicians, nurses, and pharmacists from most Southern hospitals, it opened its practice to doctors of all races. Despite chronic financial troubles it served the community until Sumter Regional Hospital was built under the Hill-Burton Act in 1953.

Angleton, TX

In 1892 two residents donated a town block for schools, and citizens raised two hundred dollars for a frame building that doubled as Angleton's meeting house. The district incorporated in 1897, and its brick schools were twice destroyed by the great coastal storms of 1900 and 1909, each time rebuilt larger. Angleton touted its schools to attract settlers and repeatedly enlarged the district; separate schools for African American and Hispanic students operated until integration was achieved in the 1960s.

Boston, MA

Anna DeFronzo (1907–1998) was a community organizer and neighborhood advocate in East Boston, remembered here as a "Mother, Activist, Community Leader." She helped lead the group known as the "Maverick Street Mothers," a grassroots force during the turbulent East Boston of the late 1960s and 1970s. Working-class women like DeFronzo turned everyday neighborhood concerns into organized civic action.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

Anna Elizabeth Dickinson rose from Philadelphia to become one of the most electrifying public speakers of the Civil War era, championing the rights of women, African Americans, and working people. At just 21 she became the first woman to address the U.S. Congress, delivering a speech attended by President Lincoln himself. In an age when women were rarely permitted a public platform, her voice carried into the halls of national power.

Town of Middletown, NY

In the 1840s, tenant farmers across the Hudson Valley and Catskills rose up against the manor system — a semi-feudal arrangement that bound them to pay perpetual rents to a handful of wealthy landlords. A flag raised through a hole in this nearby boulder was among the signals that called farmers to action during the Anti-Rent War. Their long resistance eventually pressured New York to reform its old land-tenure laws.

Round Rock, TX

This Williamson County graveyard is tied to the family of pioneer Baptist preacher Freeman Smalley and to the nearby Anti-Slaveholding Union Baptist Church — a congregation whose very name declared its opposition to slavery in antebellum Texas. Though the oldest surviving stone dates to 1853, Freeman Smalley, Jr., is believed to have been the first buried here in 1849, and the land was formally deeded to the church's trustees in 1854.

Buda, TX

Antioch Colony was a farming community formed after the Civil War by formerly enslaved African Americans who found it hard to buy land in freedom. Beginning in 1870, Anglo businessman Joseph Rowley sold parcels along Onion Creek to former slaves, sometimes writing restrictions into the deeds that may have been meant to protect the new owners from losing their property. Residents Elias and Clarisa Bunton donated land for a school and church in 1874, and the colony sustained Baptist and Methodist churches, a Masonic lodge, and an Eastern Star chapter until families drifted away by the 1950s; descendants have since returned to reclaim ancestral land.

Ames, IA

This building honors Archie A. and Nancy C. Martin, remembered in Ames as pioneers whose belief in education and diversity was, in a mayor's words, ahead of its time. The Martins are celebrated for opening their home to Black students who were barred from campus housing, making their household a haven during the era of segregated college life in the Midwest.

Houston, TX

In 1866, freedman William Burley came to Harrisburg to minister to newly emancipated African Americans, buying land along Brays Bayou for a home and a church that became the Methodist Episcopal Church of Harrisburg. The Freedmen's Bureau sponsored a community school on the grounds until 1870, an early Black public school for the area, and the congregation grew into a focal point of Black community life. Through renamings that reflected its history, it became Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church, and its members included Civil War veteran Wilson Burley of the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry and Tom Blue, once enslaved by Sam Houston.

Atlanta, TX

Public education in Atlanta, Texas dates to 1874, and for generations separate schools served Anglo and African American children. This building rose in 1936 as a school for white students, funded by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, and grew with additions as enrollment climbed. Integrated in 1970 and closed as a school in 1974, it was later saved from demolition by concerned citizens who bought it in 2001.

Roanoke County, VA

Atop Brush Mountain in Roanoke County stands a stone monument marking the spot where Audie Murphy, the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II, died in a plane crash in May 1971. A poor Texas farm boy who lied about his age to enlist, Murphy earned the Medal of Honor and dozens of other awards before becoming a Hollywood film star and country songwriter. The remote ridgeline memorial draws hikers and veterans who climb to pay their respects far from any battlefield.

Austin, TX

Established in 1882, this cemetery holds the graves of patients of the Austin State Hospital, one of Texas's earliest public institutions for the mentally ill. Many of those buried here were poor, unclaimed, or long forgotten, making the ground a quiet record of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century society cared for — and set apart — its most vulnerable. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Village of Bemus Point, NY

Bainbridge Colby (1869–1950) was an American statesman remembered here in the lakeside village of Bemus Point, where he kept a home on Chautauqua Lake. A founder of the Progressive "Bull Moose" Party, he later served as the last Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson from 1920 to 1921, helping guide American diplomacy in the difficult aftermath of World War I. This modest monument honors him with the simple epitaph "Faithful Public Servant."

Macon, GA

Opened in 1949, Ballard-Hudson was for decades the only high school in Macon serving African American students in grades nine through twelve. It joined two lineages: Ballard High, descended from the Lewis High School founded by the American Missionary Association in 1868, and the public, industrial Hudson High. Reorganized in 1970 as Georgia's public schools were finally integrated by federal order, the school counts among its graduates the soul giant Otis Redding and rock-and-roll pioneer Little Richard.

Houston, TX

Barbara Charline Jordan, born in Houston in 1936, rose through oratory contests at Wheatley High and Texas Southern to Boston University Law School. In 1966 she became the first African American woman elected to the Texas Senate, later its first Black president pro tempore, and then won a seat in Congress — where her eloquence during the 1974 Watergate hearings made her a national figure before she turned to teaching in Austin.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

From this Philadelphia address, Barbara Gittings helped build the modern movement for gay and lesbian rights in the decades after World War II. She edited The Ladder, an early and widely circulated lesbian magazine, and pushed libraries to stock LGBT literature. Her most consequential campaign helped persuade the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973.

West Chester, PA · est. 1995

Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester in 1912 and grew into one of the most brilliant strategists of the American civil rights movement. A lifelong pacifist schooled in nonviolence, he was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the massive demonstration where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. He later led the A. Philip Randolph Institute, linking the causes of civil rights and organized labor. Often pushed to the movement's margins because he was openly gay, Rustin worked tirelessly behind the scenes.

New Bern, NC

In 1787, in a case decided nearby, North Carolina judges Samuel Ashe, Samuel Spencer, and John Williams struck down a state law they found contrary to the state constitution. The ruling in Bayard v. Singleton is one of the earliest American precedents for judicial review—the power of courts to void unconstitutional legislation. It came just as the U.S. Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia.

Baytown, TX

Opened in 1923 by the Goose Creek school district, the Baytown Mexican School was the community's first place of learning for Mexican American children, first meeting in a company recreation hall and staffed by teenaged girls from the local high school. Its stated purpose was to move Spanish-speaking children into English, and teachers famously built lessons around a short word list that one instructor, Elizabeth Burrus, later expanded into a 400-word book featured in the Saturday Evening Post. Renamed for Lorenzo de Zavala in 1938, the school nurtured cultural touchstones like Antonio Banuelos's La Tipica all-girls orchestra before closing in 1969.

Linn, TX

On September 27, 1915, Tejano community leaders Jesus Bazán and his son-in-law Antonio Longoria, a Hidalgo County commissioner, rode to a Texas Ranger camp to report a horse theft. After a seemingly ordinary conversation with Captain Henry Ransom, the two men were followed and shot in the back as they rode away, their bodies left on the roadside until a neighbor buried them where they fell. No investigation followed, but the killings—amid widespread anti-Mexican violence—helped prompt the Texas Legislature's 1919 inquiry that reorganized state law enforcement.

Abington Township, PA · est. 2018

Long before abolition became a mass movement, Benjamin Lay—a Quaker, a dwarf, and a man of ferocious conviction—was denouncing slavery in colonial Pennsylvania. He staged dramatic public protests, boycotted everything made by enslaved labor, and wrote a blistering pamphlet against Quaker slaveholders that got him disowned by his own meeting. He lived simply, reportedly in a cave, and his moral witness helped push Quakers to become the first religious body in America to renounce slavery within their ranks by 1776.

West Saint Clair Township, PA · est. 2006

In the tense years before and during the Civil War, the Walker Homestead in Bedford County served as a vital station on the Underground Railroad, perilously close to the Maryland line and the reach of slave catchers. Benjamin Walker, Abner Walker, Sr., and George Harbaugh worked hand in hand with African American conductors John Fiddler, Elisa Rouse, and Joseph Crawley, guiding hundreds of freedom seekers from the Pennsylvania border across the mountains and northward toward liberty.

Spartanburg County, SC

This monument gathers the two most famous American voices of the Cold War into a single stone. In June 1963, standing in a city freshly split by concrete and barbed wire, John F. Kennedy told a vast West Berlin crowd 'Ich bin ein Berliner' — I am a Berliner — pledging the free world's solidarity with a walled-in people. Twenty-four years later Ronald Reagan returned to the divided city and, before the Brandenburg Gate, challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall.' The barrier fell in November 1989, and this Spartanburg County memorial preserves those words far from the streets where they were spoken.

Tredyffrin Township, PA · est. 2020

In 1932 the Tredyffrin and Easttown school districts began segregating their elementary schools, sending Black children to separate classrooms. Local Black families and their allies gathered at Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church and organized a boycott, keeping their children out of school for more than 300 days rather than accept the order. The pressure worked: officials rescinded segregation, and by 1934 the children returned to integrated schools — a victory that helped spur Pennsylvania's 1935 Equal Rights Bill.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1935 as Houston Garden Baptist Church, this congregation took root in the Houston Gardens neighborhood that the federal government helped create through Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration. Renamed Bethany Baptist in 1946, it was the only one of four white congregations in its Baptist association to survive the demographic shift of the mid-20th century without merging or foreclosing. In 1971 it welcomed the Rev. Curley Edward Carr as its first African American head pastor, becoming a model of peaceful institutional integration.

Austin, TX

Bethany Cemetery was established in the late 1800s after burial space for African Americans in Austin's Oakwood Cemetery ran out, its oldest recorded grave that of an infant, Hellen Moore, in 1879. C. W. Jones bought the land in 1892, and the Bethany Cemetery Company—formed in 1893 by William Holland, Henderson Rollins, Allen Bradley, and William M. Tears—cared for it for decades. A community association took up its upkeep in 1976, and the graveyard still serves the area today.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1995

Founded in 1808 as the African Church and chartered a decade later, Pittsburgh's Bethel A.M.E. congregation became far more than a place of worship. It opened the area's first school for Black children in 1831 and, in 1841, hosted a statewide civil rights convention where free African Americans organized for their rights. As the community grew, the congregation moved to Wylie Avenue and later Webster Avenue, carrying its long tradition of faith and activism with it.

Reading, PA · est. 1996

Built in 1837 by free African Americans, Bethel A.M.E. is the oldest Black church building in Berks County, raised by a congregation that had gathered since 1822. In the tense decades before the Civil War, it served as a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers escaping bondage in the South. Rebuilt in 1867 and remodeled in 1889, the building anchored Reading's Black community until the congregation moved to Windsor Street in 1974.

Carlisle, PA · est. 2009

Founded around 1820, Bethel A.M.E. was among the first African American congregations west of the Susquehanna, taking root as free Black communities built their own institutions in the early republic. The church became a station on the Underground Railroad, and its members included abolitionists John Peck and John B. Vashon, while national A.M.E. leaders like Bishop Daniel Payne were tied to its life. Here faith and the freedom struggle were inseparable.