Civil Rights

Forney, TX

Born in 1866 near Terrell to parents who had been enslaved, William Madison "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald rose through the segregated schools of his day with a reputation as the sharpest student in the county, graduating in 1884 and becoming principal of Forney's African American high school. He built a formidable second career in politics as a leader of the Republican "Black and Tan" faction, in business, and as grand secretary of Texas' African American Masons for nearly half a century. Moving to Fort Worth in 1906, he became one of the state's most influential Black civic leaders before his death in 1950.

Oakhurst, TX

Bill Kelley, a Virginia-born overseer who came to Texas by 1851 and served in the 25th Texas Cavalry, C.S.A., built a family and a nearly 700-acre farm with Dinah Rush, a woman born enslaved in Alabama in 1848. Because state and federal law barred their union, Dinah could never marry the father of her ten children or carry his name, yet the couple built an enduring household until her death in 1884. Their descendants went on to become leaders in business, law, medicine and education.

Goliad, TX

In segregated 1930s Goliad, Mexican American children were confined to a cramped one-room school that ended at seventh grade, while the high school admitted only white students. Backed by his principal Frank Wallace and the newly formed Goliad chapter of LULAC, the Carbajal family carried their fight to the Texas Board of Education, which finally ordered the school to admit William. After three days waiting on the schoolhouse steps he was let in, and in 1935 he became the first Mexican American to graduate from Goliad High School.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

From his Philadelphia home, William Still worked as a key agent of the Underground Railroad, guiding fugitives from slavery toward freedom and carefully recording their names and stories so that separated families might one day reunite. A prosperous coal merchant, he used his standing and resources to advance Black civil rights, helping found the city's first Black YMCA. His meticulous accounts, later published, remain one of the most important firsthand records of the Underground Railroad.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

William Strong built a distinguished legal career from this corner of Reading, where his home and law office once stood. He rose from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served through the 1870s during the turbulent Reconstruction years, and in 1877 sat on the Electoral Commission that resolved the disputed Hayes–Tilden presidential election. He died in 1895, one of the era's most respected jurists.

Raleigh, NC

William W. Holden, a powerful newspaper editor, was appointed provisional governor of North Carolina in 1865 and elected to the office in 1868 during Reconstruction. His campaign against the Ku Klux Klan led to his impeachment and removal in 1871, the first of a U.S. governor. His home once stood on this site.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

William Whipper, born around 1804, was a founder of the American Moral Reform Society and edited its journal in 1838-39, advocating self-improvement and equality. A committed Underground Railroad agent, he used his lumber business in Columbia, Pennsylvania, to help hundreds of freedom seekers passing through between 1847 and 1860. A prosperous Black businessman, he later made his home in this city.

New Kensington, PA

A New Kensington native, Willie Thrower broke a color line in 1953 when he became the first African American to play quarterback in the modern National Football League, appearing in two games for the Chicago Bears—having already been the first Black quarterback in the Big Ten as a member of Michigan State's 1952 national championship team. He first starred on the gridiron here, quarterbacking New Kensington High School to WPIAL titles from 1946 to 1948. His pro career took him to Canada before ending at just twenty-seven.

Travis County, TX

Across the rural South and Southwest, Black communities educated their children in separate, unequal schoolhouses through the long decades of Jim Crow. A "Negro school" like this one in Travis County was often built and sustained by the very families it served, because the state provided so little to Black education. Small and plain, such buildings were nonetheless engines of literacy, faith, and community for African American families shut out of white classrooms.

New York, NY

On Staten Island stood Willowbrook State School, a state institution that by the mid-20th century housed thousands of children and adults with developmental disabilities in severely overcrowded, neglectful conditions. In the early 1970s, journalists and advocates brought those conditions into public view, and the resulting outrage helped force sweeping reform in how the nation cares for people with disabilities. This marker sits along the 'Willowbrook Mile,' a memorial pathway on the former institution's grounds that guides visitors through the site's history and the movement it sparked.

Frankfort, KY

On December 26, 1915, the Women's Club Hospital Company, backed by community support, opened a hospital here and named it for Winnie A. Scott, a local teacher who helped found it. In the segregated era it was the only Frankfort hospital serving African Americans, filling that role until King's Daughters Hospital desegregated in 1959.

West Chester, PA · est. 2003

Four years after the landmark Seneca Falls gathering in New York, the movement for women's rights reached Pennsylvania. In June 1852, West Chester hosted the state's first Woman's Rights Convention, where delegates adopted resolutions calling for women's legal, educational, and vocational equality. It carried the reform energy of the antebellum era into a new state and a new generation of organizers.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 2024

On this Lower Merion estate lived a remarkable line of women who pushed against the hard limits placed on their sex in 19th-century America. Dr. Hannah Longshore became one of the first women to practice medicine in Pennsylvania at a time when medical schools barred women outright, and her sister Dr. Jane Myers followed the same difficult path. Hannah's daughter, Lucretia Mott Longshore Blankenburg, carried the family's reforming spirit into the suffrage movement and Philadelphia's municipal politics. Together they linked the causes of medicine, abolition, and votes for women across three generations.

Dallas, TX

Dallas stood at the center of the Texas suffrage movement from its earliest days. In 1893 the Texas Equal Rights Association formed at the city's Windsor Hotel, and two decades later the Dallas Equal Suffrage Association carried the fight into the twentieth century under Margaret Bell Houston Kaufman, a granddaughter of Sam Houston. Dallas County activists gathered thousands of petition signatures and registered over 16,000 women to vote in the 1918 primary, helping propel Texas toward ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Austin, TX

Along the west bank of Shoal Creek, on what was once frontier Austin's natural edge, formerly enslaved people made a home after the Civil War, building one of the African American settlements of West Austin. As domestic workers, carpenters, drivers, and laborers, its residents shaped the life of the city even while surrounded by wealthier Anglo neighbors in an era of hardening racial lines. After Austin's 1928 master plan pushed Black residents toward a district east of East Avenue, Mexican and Mexican American families took up the houses along the creek, and the community persisted into the 1970s.

Austin, TX

When Edwin Waller laid out Austin as the Republic of Texas capital in 1839, he set aside four public squares; three of the city's first churches, including two early African American congregations, rose around this one. For decades it sat unimproved until Mayor A.P. Wooldridge championed a cleanup and a bandstand in 1909. From that stage came voices ranging from Booker T. Washington and suffragist Minnie Fisher Cunningham to a young Lyndon Johnson launching his first Senate run, while 1960s civil rights marches and counterculture gatherings—including the debut of Austin's armadillo icon—kept the square at the center of civic life.

Chandler, TX

The Yarborough family made this Chandler house their home in 1903, the year Ralph Webster Yarborough was born here — the future U.S. senator from Texas. His father, Charles R. Yarborough, served as justice of the peace and performed countless marriages under this roof, and it was here in 1959 that he administered the Senate oath of office to his son. The elder Yarborough died in the house in 1964 at the age of 100, after three generations of the family had lived within its walls.

Beaumont, TX

Founded in 1911 with ten members and chartered in 1914, the Beaumont Young Women's Christian Association gave the oil-boom city's working women a place of their own, meeting in the Temperance Hall until they built their own building in 1918. That same year the teacher Frances Morris organized a club for the city's Black girls, which was chartered as a YWCA branch shortly after her death in 1933. The two long-separate branches finally merged in 1969.

Austin, TX

As Austin's Latino population grew in the 1930s, the school district and city planned a separate campus to relieve Metz Elementary, and in 1935 built a twelve-room brick schoolhouse funded entirely by federal Public Works Administration dollars. Dedicated in 1936—the centennial of Texas independence—it honored Lorenzo de Zavala, the only Mexican-born signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The school anchored a cluster of New Deal projects, including Santa Rita Courts, the nation's first federal public-housing development, built just to the east.

Fort Worth, TX

Founded in 1919, Zion Missionary Baptist Church became a cornerstone of the African American neighborhood of Lake Como in Fort Worth, raising its building in 1923. That same year the Rev. G.W. Burton began a pastorate lasting until 1966, followed by the Rev. J.W. Briscoe, Sr., through 1992—decades in which the church anchored the community's spiritual, civic, and economic life. It stood as a spiritual leader through the civil rights era and remains active today.