Civil Rights

Friona, TX

Schooling in Friona began in 1908 in a one-room frame building where Roxie Witherspoon taught 18 pupils, growing through brick schoolhouses and rural consolidations over the following decades. In September 1954—months after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling—Superintendent Dalton Caffey quietly enrolled the three African American sons of the Robert Walker family in the town's only school, making Friona the first town in Texas to integrate. He informed the school board afterward, and the transition went smoothly.

Blairsville, PA · est. 2004

In April 1858, with the Fugitive Slave Act empowering federal marshals and Southern slave-catchers to reach deep into the free states, the people of Blairsville acted. They rescued a man named Newman from arrest, and local Black abolitionist Lewis Johnson—a conductor on the Underground Railroad—sheltered him. Indiana County had long been an important station on the secret routes north.

Waco, TX

Opened in 1956, G. W. Carver High School educated some 500 African American children of the La Vega district and honored the famed scientist and educator George Washington Carver. Its students excelled, and in 1967 its award-winning marching band traveled to Montreal's Expo '67 and carried home the grand prize as champion American high school band. The school closed in 1970 when federal courts ordered integration, then lived on as a community center, special-education site, and finally a neighborhood school.

Galveston, TX

Italian immigrant San Giacinto 'Cinto' Gaido opened a sandwich shop at Seawall and 23rd Street in 1911, and by 1920 it had become Galveston's first year-round seafront restaurant, famous for the fresh seafood his customers wanted. His son Mike and daughter-in-law Kewpie, both civic leaders, carried it on, and in 1962 Gaido's became one of Galveston's first restaurants to integrate. Generations of the family still run the business today.

Corpus Christi, TX

Rising near downtown Corpus Christi in 1950, this streamline moderne building was the creation of Rafael Galvan, the city's first Hispanic police officer turned businessman, who added a 9,000-square-foot second-floor ballroom to showcase his children's orchestra. Over the decade that followed the hall welcomed touring big-band and jazz greats alongside conjunto and swing acts, becoming a rare stage where Hispanic performers could reach audiences that segregated clubs often kept them from. Still a working venue, it endures as a landmark of Mexican American musical life on the Gulf Coast.

Town of Amherst, NY

This memorial in Amherst, New York, honors Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi (1869–1948), the Indian independence leader who pioneered satyagraha, a philosophy of nonviolent resistance that toppled British colonial rule. Dedicated on 2 October 2020 — the 151st anniversary of his birth, observed worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence — the marker carries one of his most famous exhortations to personal and social transformation. Gandhi statues and memorials across the United States reflect his profound influence on American reform movements.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

Beginning on July 4, 1965, activists gathered each year at Independence Hall in orderly, dress-coded pickets demanding equality for gay and lesbian Americans — among the earliest sustained public demonstrations of their kind. These "Annual Reminders" ran through 1969, the same year as New York's Stonewall uprising, and helped turn a small campaign into a national civil rights movement soon marked by the first Pride parades. The choice of Independence Hall pointedly claimed the nation's founding ideals.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2000

Genevieve Blatt broke barrier after barrier in 20th-century Pennsylvania politics, becoming the first woman elected to statewide office as Secretary of Internal Affairs and the first woman a major party nominated for a U.S. Senate seat in the state. Elected to the Commonwealth Court in 1973, she authored the 1975 opinion that opened school sports to girls on equal terms. She made her home at 115 North Street in Harrisburg for a quarter century.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2026

George B. Vashon, who grew up near this Pittsburgh site, was a lawyer, poet, educator, and abolitionist who broke barriers throughout his life. In 1844 he became Oberlin College's first Black graduate and its valedictorian; denied admission to the Pennsylvania bar because of his race, he became the first Black lawyer in New York in 1848. He went on to help found and teach at Howard University and to serve as president of Avery College.

Radnor Township, PA · est. 2018

George H. Earle III, born and raised in Radnor, served as governor of Pennsylvania from 1935 to 1939 and led a state-level answer to the Depression known as the "Little New Deal." His administration created more than 200,000 jobs, launched the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, and enacted labor, civil rights, and unemployment-compensation laws. A decorated veteran of both World Wars, Earle later served Franklin Roosevelt as American minister to Austria and then Bulgaria on the eve of the Second World War.

New Bern, NC

Born into slavery in 1852, George H. White became a lawyer and served in the North Carolina legislature in 1881 and 1885 before winning election to the U.S. Congress, where he served from 1897 to 1901. He was the last African American to serve in Congress before the full weight of Jim Crow disenfranchisement took hold. His home still stands two blocks from this marker.

Tarboro, NC

George H. White represented North Carolina's majority-Black "Second District" in the U.S. House from 1897 to 1901, a seat carved out during Reconstruction that sent several Black congressmen to Washington. When White left office, no Black Southerner would sit in Congress again for 72 years, as disfranchisement and Jim Crow closed the door. He lived two blocks east of this spot.

York Township, PA · est. 2021

George M. Leader rose from a York County poultry farm to the Pennsylvania governorship, serving from 1955 to 1959 after a term in the state senate. His administration pushed a wave of mid-century reforms — expanding state aid to schools, modernizing civil service, growing the park system, and improving care in state psychiatric hospitals. He also helped establish a state fair-employment council and an industrial development authority to spur jobs. After leaving office, Leader built a second career founding nursing and retirement communities across the state.

Houston, TX

Raised in Houston's Fifth Ward and trained as a pharmacist, Mickey Leland won a Texas House seat at 27 and championed civil rights, voting rights, and affordable health care. A 1973 trip to famine-stricken Tanzania reshaped his mission, and after succeeding Barbara Jordan in Congress in 1978 he founded a House committee on world hunger and secured hundreds of millions in famine relief. He died in a 1989 plane crash on a relief mission to refugee camps in Ethiopia.

Austin, TX

Austin's public library opened in a room over a downtown store in February 1926, then moved into this frame building near Wooldridge Park. In 1933, when a permanent main library was completed, the original building was relocated here to answer the Black community's request for a library of its own. Brick-veneered and named for the Black educator and scientist George Washington Carver, and directed by Hattie Henson from 1933 to 1943, it became the very first branch in the Austin library system.

Baytown, TX

This site tells the story of Black education in Baytown, beginning in 1921 with the Goose Creek School for Coloreds, whose classes met partly in Mt. Rose Baptist Church. Renamed in 1940 for the scientist and educator George Washington Carver and accredited as a four-year high school in 1941, Carver became one of the state's top segregated schools, winning nine state band titles and eight athletic championships in the Prairie View Interscholastic League. The high school closed in 1967 as desegregation ended the era of separate Black schools, but the Carver name still anchors education in the community.

Edna, TX

First graduating a class in 1912 as the Edna Colored School, this institution educated Black children in Jackson County through the long decades of segregation. Even after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional, Edna's schools stayed divided under a "two-race" system until the mid-1960s, and the district was not fully integrated until 1967. Renamed for George Washington Carver, the school remained a valued anchor of the community and today survives as a nonprofit community center.

Groveton, TX

As Groveton grew around the railroad and its timber industry in the 1880s, its African American families built their own schools despite chronic underfunding. In 1900 the Trinity County Lumber Company sold land for a wood-frame school in the Black neighborhood, which served until 1955; by 1956 the growing school was named for botanist and inventor George Washington Carver. Principal T. L. Mathis led the school from 1956 to 1965, tirelessly advocating for its students, while the community itself funded sports, a marching band, and other activities. After integration in 1965, the building became Groveton Junior High.

Huntsville, TX

An Alabama native who came to Texas in 1831, George Washington Grant built a sprawling enterprise of stagecoaches, sawmills, and nearly 10,000 acres around Huntsville, and helped found Sam Houston Normal Institute and served as sheriff and county judge during Reconstruction. Though he had held people in slavery before the war, after Emancipation he sold and donated land to freedmen and, with the Quakers and the Freedmen's Bureau, created the community he called Harmony Settlement—better known as Grant's Colony—complete with farmhouses, a cotton gin, and a school open to children of any race.

Jefferson, TX

George Webster Smith, a New York–born Union veteran, settled in Jefferson after the Civil War and became an ardent Republican, sitting on the board that disenfranchised former Confederates and serving as a delegate to the 1868 Constitutional Convention. After a shooting dispute in 1868, he was jailed in the city calaboose under a promise of protection—only to be dragged out and assassinated with two freedmen by some seventy disguised men, many tied to the Knights of the Rising Sun. The outrage brought martial law, and of twenty-three men tried, three were convicted of murder.

Goldsboro, NC

Gertrude Weil (1879–1971) of Goldsboro was a tireless reformer who campaigned for extending the vote to women, achieved nationally in 1920, and remained active in labor, racial-justice, and Jewish causes throughout her long life. She brought the energy of Progressive reform to eastern North Carolina for decades. Her home once stood at this site.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2011

When Giovanni's Room opened in Philadelphia in 1973, being openly gay could still cost a person their job, home, or safety. The bookstore became far more than a place to buy books — it was a gathering spot, a source of hard-to-find resources, and a refuge for a community just beginning to organize. As one of the nation's oldest LGBT bookstores, it stood at the dawn of the modern movement for gay and lesbian civil rights.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Stephen Girard's 1831 will founded a school for poor white orphan boys, and for more than a century that racial restriction stood. Beginning in the 1930s, attorney Raymond Pace Alexander challenged it, and lawyer Cecil B. Moore later carried the fight into the federal courts. A 1968 ruling finally opened Girard College to students of all races, making its walls a landmark of the modern civil rights struggle.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

Gloria Casarez began as a grassroots organizer in Philadelphia, fighting for economic justice, welfare rights, and affordable housing before becoming a leading voice for LGBTQ+ equality. She directed the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative, building nationally recognized programs for men of color and transgender people. Appointed the city's first director of LGBT Affairs, she helped Philadelphia adopt some of the strongest LGBT protections in the country.

Houston, TX

Founded by the Rev. Samuel Grantham—who first preached in his own backyard—Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church was formally established in 1872 in Houston's Fourth Ward, its early members including formerly enslaved people. It grew into one of the city's leading Black institutions and a crucible of civil rights: pastor Albert Anderson Lucas led the local NAACP, member Dr. Lonnie Smith was the plaintiff in the landmark Smith v. Allwright, and Barbara Jordan worshipped here. Its influence reached far beyond the sanctuary walls.

Austin, TX

James "Farmer Jim" Ferguson won the Texas governorship in 1914 on rural-reform promises but was impeached and removed from office in 1917 amid charges of misusing state funds, and later barred from holding state office. So in 1924 his wife Miriam ran in his place, and "Ma" Ferguson became the first woman elected governor of Texas, campaigning on "Two Governors for the Price of One." She defeated a Ku Klux Klan-backed candidate and backed an anti-mask law that broke the Klan's power.

Cuero, TX

Grace Episcopal Church was organized in Cuero in 1874, first worshiping in a chapel floated in from Port Lavaca before building the present Gothic clapboard church in 1889. Its walnut interior and cedar-shingled roof have sheltered a remarkable roll of clergy—among them Hudson Stuck, a champion of child-labor reform who led the first ascent of Mount McKinley, and Everett H. Jones, later a bishop of West Texas. It remains a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Houston, TX

Amid the "golden age" of African American fraternal societies, the Order of Calanthe took shape in 1883 as a women's auxiliary of the Colored Knights of Pythias, offering Black women sick benefits, life insurance, and a rare arena of self-governance. Organized in Texas by 1898 and headquartered in Houston, the Grand Court grew into one of the most successful female-led fraternal insurers in the country, managing millions of dollars, making mortgage loans to Black residents, and joining the local NAACP's fight for voting and civil rights. In 1948 its members raised a state headquarters on Dowling Street, a modern building owned and run by Black women when that was almost unheard of.

Paducah, KY

Alben W. Barkley, the genial Kentuckian known as "The Veep," began his public life as McCracken County Attorney and rose to become one of the most influential figures in mid-century American government. He served decades in Congress, led the Senate Democrats for thirteen years under Franklin Roosevelt, and was Vice President under Harry Truman from 1949 to 1953. He collapsed and died in 1956 while giving a speech, having just declared he would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than sit among the mighty.

Dallas, TX

Rooted in the mid-1800s and rising with Oak Cliff's Tenth Street Historic District, Greater El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church became a spiritual and civic anchor for Dallas freedpeople after Emancipation. Congregants dug the basement by hand and mule team, worshipping there until noted Black architect William Sidney Pittman completed the sanctuary in 1926. Under Rev. William L. Dickson the church ran a day nursery for working mothers and served as a place to counsel calm during years of racial violence.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1913 and named for A.M.E. Bishop Thomas M. D. Ward, this is the oldest congregation in Houston's Acres Homes community. It began in the home of Rev. John T. Williams, rebuilt after a 1934 fire, and raised its lasting sanctuary in 1955. Under ministers like Rev. Ollie Lewis Dawson—an NAACP activist who made the church a meeting place for civic affairs—it became a hub of community life, its trustees even winning the naming of nearby streets for historically Black colleges.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2007

Built in 1956 amid the woods of Pennypack Park, Greenbelt Knoll was the first racially integrated housing development in Philadelphia — and a model for the nation at a time when housing discrimination was the norm. Developer Morris Milgram, a committed civil rights advocate, gathered noted architects, among them Louis Kahn, to design Modernist homes that blended into the natural landscape. Its first residents were themselves a statement, including Milgram, U.S. Rep. Robert N.C. Nix, and the Rev. Leon Sullivan.

Coy City, TX

In June 1901 a mistranslated question about a horse trade near here erupted into gunfire, leaving Sheriff "Brack" Morris dead and Gregorio Cortez fleeing across South Texas in one of the era's most famous manhunts. Captured ten days later, Cortez was acquitted in Morris's death on grounds of self-defense but convicted of killing a second sheriff, drawing a life sentence before a governor's conditional pardon freed him in 1913. To many Tejanos he became a folk hero, his flight and defiance immortalized in "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez."

Houston, TX

As word of Emancipation spread through Texas in 1865, freed African Americans built Freedmen's Town near Buffalo Bayou in Houston's Fourth Ward. With help from the Freedmen's Bureau and missionaries, the community founded the Gregory Institute in 1870—the city's first purpose-built school for Black children—which joined the public system in 1876 and gained its first Black principal a year later. Rebuilt in brick in 1926, the Gregory School educated generations until 1980 and now anchors an African American library.

Groesbeck, TX

Groesbeck was founded in 1871 and opened Groesbeck College months later; by 1881 trustees had bought land for the education of African American children, and in 1886 the county turned the former college property into the town's first free public school. Voters incorporated for school purposes in 1890, creating the Groesbeck Independent School District, which by 1892 ran separate buildings for white and Black students. Over the following decades rural schools consolidated into the district, integration was completed by 1969, and traditions from the Goat mascot to the ex-students association took root.

San Angelo, TX

Like most Texas towns, San Angelo ran "separate but equal" schools, and by 1906 its overcrowded Mexican American school had deteriorated badly. Parents fought back—hiring lawyers in 1910 and boycotting the schools from 1911 to 1915—before a cooperative effort with reformer Ginevra Wood Carson produced a modern brick building in 1923 that became Guadalupe Elementary. Through the Depression, community members like Josefa Camunez kept students fed, and WPA funds later built a kitchen, until integration in 1955 led to the school's closing in 1959.

Annapolis, MD

Set in Annapolis, Maryland's historic capital, this memorial inscribes the opening words of the First Amendment — the guarantee of religious freedom, free speech, a free press, and the right to peaceably assemble, ratified as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791. The monument honors those who defend those freedoms and stands as a public affirmation of the press's role in American democracy.

Marshall, TX

Henry Bertram Pemberton, born in 1867, became the first college graduate of Wiley College in Marshall and devoted his life to Black education in a segregated Texas. Named principal of the Colored School in 1894 and given permission but no money for a new building, he borrowed on his own credit to raise a two-story schoolhouse that his community repaid. Over decades he expanded Marshall's Black schools, recruited qualified teachers, and helped charter the local NAACP; in 1940 thousands of petitioners had the high school he founded renamed in his honor.

Fort Worth, TX

Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1842 and emancipated in 1865, Hagar Tucker became Fort Worth's first African American policeman when he was appointed a "special policeman" in 1873. He was among the first Black residents of the county to register to vote, yet the era's limits were stark: paid separately from white officers, he could patrol only Black neighborhoods and served only a short time. He later worked other jobs and lived with his wife Amy and their three daughters.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Founded in the 1950s by Dawud Hakim, this Philadelphia shop was the city's first Black-owned bookstore devoted to Black history and authors—a place where readers could find their own story on the shelves. Through the 1960s it became a gathering point for civil rights organizing and Black activism. That prominence also drew the eye of the FBI, which surveilled Hakim's along with other Black bookstores of the era.

Dallas, TX

For the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, architect George Dahl remade Fair Park into a modern fairground, and among its roughly 50 buildings one was devoted to Black achievement: the Hall of Negro Life. Funded through the tireless lobbying of leaders like Antonio Maceo Smith and managed by Jesse O. Thomas of the National Urban League, its 14,000 square feet held nearly 400 exhibits on education, arts, health, agriculture, and business, drawing 400,000 visitors. When the fair ended, it was one of only two buildings torn down.

Hallettsville, TX

Schooling in Hallettsville reaches back to the Alma Male and Female Institute of 1852, built on land donated by town founder Margaret Hallett, with the Masonic lodge later lending space for church and school alike. A public graded school took shape in 1877, and by 1907 voters made the district independent of the county system. Through fire, rebuilding, and expansion the schools endured, and in 1966 they were integrated, with the former Stevens-Mayo School for Black students becoming a junior high.

Dallas, TX

Ten miles north of downtown Dallas, Hamilton Park grew from the White Rock Farming Settlement into the city's first African American suburban development. It answered a housing crisis created by racial violence in South Dallas and the displacement of Black residents for Love Field, with land bought in 1953 through a Hoblitzelle Foundation loan arranged by an interracial civic association. Named for Dr. Richard Theodore Hamilton, the planned community opened in 1954 around a central school and, by 1961, held 741 homes served by churches, a shopping center, and a park.

Atlanta, GA

In April 1968, after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, his body was brought home to Atlanta, the city of his birth and his ministry. This marker recalls Hanley's Bell Street Funeral Home, where—amid a grieving nation—his family and community tended to him before his funeral. Tens of thousands would fill Atlanta's streets to mourn the fallen leader of the civil rights movement.

Altoona, PA · est. 1994

Harold L. Ickes grew up in Altoona before rising to become one of the most consequential figures of the New Deal, serving as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior from 1933 to 1946. He oversaw a vast public-works program that built dams, roads, and public buildings across Depression-era America, all while championing conservation of the nation's natural resources. Blunt and combative, he was also an early and forceful advocate for civil rights within the federal government.

Edenton, NC

Born into slavery around 1813 in Edenton, Harriet Jacobs endured years of abuse before escaping north, where she became a writer and abolitionist. Her 1861 memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, gave a rare first-person account of enslavement from a woman's point of view and became one of the era's most important slave narratives. She drew on her early life in this Chowan County town for the book.

Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 1987

When it opened in 1851, this was Pennsylvania's first state mental hospital—a direct result of the tireless campaigning of Dorothea Lynde Dix. Traveling the country to expose the cruel neglect of the mentally ill, Dix pressed legislatures to build humane public asylums, and Pennsylvania answered by placing this one on the wooded hills above Harrisburg.

Town of Huntington, NY

This tribute stands in Huntington, the Long Island town Harry Chapin called home and helped define through his music and activism. A storytelling folk-rock singer-songwriter of the 1970s, Chapin turned hit songs into a platform for fighting hunger, staging countless benefit concerts and co-founding organizations to feed the poor before his life was cut short in a 1981 crash on the nearby Long Island Expressway. The lines quoted here distill the conviction that drove him: that a single life, well spent, might measurably change the world.

Charlotte, NC

Harry Golden, who lived a block from here, published the Carolina Israelite from 1944 to 1968, mixing humor with pointed commentary on Southern life. A Jewish immigrant turned Charlotte journalist, he became a nationally read voice for civil rights, satirizing segregation with wit rather than fury. His bestselling books carried his gentle-but-biting arguments to millions.

Erie, PA · est. 2019

Born in Erie, Harry T. Burleigh rose to become one of the most influential figures in American music. A gifted baritone and composer, he studied under Antonín Dvořák and set the verse of poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes to song. Above all, Burleigh transformed the spirituals of the enslaved into concert art, championing them as America's only truly original music.

Baltimore, MD

In mid-twentieth-century Baltimore, tennis was still largely divided along racial lines, and Harvey J. Burns, Jr. (1923–1988) devoted himself to opening the game to Black players in his city. Working as a teacher, promoter, and mentor, he coached young people and helped them find a path into competitive tennis at a time when those doors did not open easily. This memorial marks the legacy of a local pioneer who used sport to widen opportunity.

San Francisco, CA

This plaza honors Harvey Milk, who in 1977 became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States when he won a seat on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. From his Castro Camera store he built a neighborhood movement, earning the nickname "the Mayor of Castro Street" and authoring the city's Gay Rights Ordinance while championing renters, seniors, and working people. His assassination alongside Mayor George Moscone in November 1978 brought 40,000 mourners into the streets in a candlelight march. The plaza was dedicated in his memory in 1985.

San Francisco, CA

Harvey Milk made history in November 1977 as the first openly gay person elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and one of the first in the nation. His camera store and campaign headquarters at 575 Castro Street, with his apartment upstairs, became a hub of activism for human rights, labor, environmental, and neighborhood causes. His work on behalf of all San Franciscans earned broad respect before his life was cut short in 1978.

Gatesville, TX

German immigrants of the Bethel Baptist Church founded this Coryell County graveyard in 1895 as the German Baptist Cemetery, with early records kept in German and plots sold for a dollar. In 1915 cemetery officials voted to open it to people of any nationality or skin color, an unusually inclusive stance for its time and place. As anti-German feeling rose during the world wars, the community shed its German names — the cemetery becoming "Hemmeline" and the church renamed Bethel Heights in 1940.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Henry L. Phillips traveled a remarkable spiritual path—baptized Catholic, raised Moravian, and ultimately ordained an Episcopal priest—before turning the Church of the Crucifixion into far more than a house of worship. Under his leadership it became a Black cultural center renowned for its social outreach in Philadelphia. He also helped found the American Negro Historical Society, an early effort to document and preserve African American history.

New York, NY

Henry Miller, raised in Brooklyn, became one of the most daring and controversial American authors of the twentieth century. His novels "Tropic of Cancer" (1934) and "Tropic of Capricorn" (1939) drew on his bohemian years in Paris and his life in New York, and were so frank that they remained banned in the United States until 1961. He lived at this address in 1924-25, before his expatriate breakthrough.

Tyler, TX

Born in Tyler in 1895, Henry Miller Morgan worked as a barber before confronting a Jim Crow system that licensed barbers while shutting African Americans out of the required schooling. In 1933 he opened a barber college for Black students, and within two decades it had branches from Houston and Dallas to Manhattan, at one point reportedly training a majority of the nation's Black barbers. Morgan also helped found professional associations and a local Democratic Progressive Voters League before his death in 1961.

El Paso, TX

Born into slavery in Georgia in 1856, Henry Ossian Flipper broke a color line at the nation's premier military school, becoming West Point's first African-American graduate in 1877. Commissioned into the 10th Cavalry — the celebrated Buffalo Soldiers — he served across the western frontier and engineered the drainage system at Fort Sill still known as "Flipper's Ditch." A racially motivated court-martial ended his Army career in 1882, but he rebuilt his life as a mining engineer, surveyor, and author across the Southwest, living a decade here in El Paso. Vindication came only long after his 1940 death, with an honorable discharge in 1976 and a full presidential pardon in 1999.

Oxford, NC

Born into slavery in 1857, Henry P. Cheatham rose to serve as a United States Congressman from North Carolina from 1889 to 1893, part of a brief flowering of Black political power after the Civil War. He later devoted decades to leading the Colored Orphanage of North Carolina until his death in 1935.

Edna, TX

A murder at Edna's Gato Negro Cafe in 1951 set in motion a case that reached the highest court in the land. When Pedro Hernandez was convicted by an all-Anglo jury, Mexican American attorneys Gustavo Garcia, Carlos Cadena, John Herrera, and James DeAnda argued that Jackson County's decades-long exclusion of people of Mexican descent from juries treated them as "a class apart." On May 3, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed, ruling that such discrimination violated the Fourteenth Amendment.