Holmes County is a county in the U.S. state of Mississippi; its western border is formed by the Yazoo River and the eastern border by the Big Black River. The western part of the county is within the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. As of the 2020 census, the population was 17,000. Its county seat is Lexington. The county is named in honor of David Holmes, territorial governor and the first governor of the state of Mississippi and later United States Senator for Mississippi. Holmes County native, Edmond Favor Noel, was an attorney and state politician, elected as governor of Mississippi, serving from 1908 to 1912.
Whitney Moore Young Jr. was an American civil rights leader. Trained as a social worker, he spent most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States and turning the National Urban League from a relatively passive civil rights organization into one that aggressively worked for equitable access to socioeconomic opportunity for the historically disenfranchised. Young was influential in the United States federal government's War on Poverty in the 1960s.
Paul Laurence DunbarHigh School (PLD/PLDHS), also known as Dunbar High School, is a public high school located at 1600 Man o' War Boulevard on the southwest side of Lexington, Kentucky, United States. The school is one of six high schools in the Fayette County Public Schools district.
Anne McCarty Braden was an American civil rights activist, journalist, and educator dedicated to the cause of racial equality. She and her husband bought a suburban house for an African American couple during Jim Crow. White neighbors burned crosses and bombed the house. During McCarthyism, Anne was charged with sedition. She wrote and organized for the southern civil rights movement before violations became national news. Anne was among nation's most outspoken white anti-racist activists, organizing across racial divides in environmental, women's, and anti-nuclear movements.
Gloria Richardson Dandridge was an American civil rights activist best known as the leader of the Cambridge movement, a civil rights action in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Recognized as a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, she was one of the signatories to "The Treaty of Cambridge", signed in July 1963 with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and state and local officials. It was an effort at reconciliation and commitment to change after a riot the month before.
Madeline (Madge) McDowell Breckinridge was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky. She married Desha Breckinridge, editor of the Lexington Herald, which advocated women's rights, and she lived to see the women of Kentucky vote for the first time in the presidential election of 1920. She also initiated progressive reforms for compulsory school attendance and child labor. She founded many civic organizations, notably the Kentucky Association for the Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculosis, an affliction from which she had personally suffered. She led efforts to implement model schools for children and adults, parks and recreation facilities, and manual training programs.
Georgia Davis Powers was an American politician who served for 21 years as a state senator in the Kentucky Senate. In 1967, she was the first person of color elected to the senate. During her term, she was "regarded as the leading advocate for blacks, women, children, the poor, and the handicapped," and was the chair of the Health and Welfare committee from 1970 to 1976 and the Labor and Industry committee from 1978 to 1988.
Clara Shepard Luper was a civic leader, schoolteacher, and pioneering leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. She is best known for her leadership role in the 1958 Oklahoma City sit-in movement, as she, her young son and daughter, and numerous young members of the NAACP Youth Council successfully conducted carefully planned nonviolent sit-in protests of downtown drugstore lunch-counters, which overturned their policies of segregation. The success of this sit-in would result in Luper becoming a leader of various sit-ins throughout Oklahoma City between 1958 and 1964. The Clara Luper Corridor is a streetscape and civic beautification project from the Oklahoma Capitol area east to northeast Oklahoma City. In 1972, Clara Luper was an Oklahoma candidate for election to the United States Senate. When asked by the press if she, a black woman, could represent white people, she responded: “Of course, I can represent white people, black people, red people, yellow people, brown people, and polka dot people. You see, I have lived long enough to know that people are people.”
Bernard Lafayette, Jr. is an American civil rights activist and organizer, who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He played a leading role in early organizing of the Selma Voting Rights Movement; was a member of the Nashville Student Movement; and worked closely throughout the 1960s movements with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the American Friends Service Committee.
Abby Lindsey Marlatt, Ph.D. was a social justice activist and a teacher scholar committed to civic engagement. While a professor at the University of Kentucky (UK) in Lexington, Kentucky, she became the center of controversy at UK in the mid-1960s over anti-war protests and whether the university could censor her in her role as a public intellectual. She was honored for her work by many academic, professional and community organizations including the National Conference for Community and Justice, and she was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 2001.
NAACP in Kentucky is very active with branches all over the state, largest being in Louisville and Lexington. The Kentucky State Conference of NAACP continues today to fight against injustices and for the equality of all people.
Julia Britton Hooks, known as the "Angel of Beale Street," was a musician and educator whose work with youth, the elderly, and the indigent was highly respected in her family's home state of Kentucky and in Memphis, Tennessee, where she lived with her second husband, Charles F. Hooks. She was a charter member of the Memphis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and her example served as an inspiration for her grandson, Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992. Julia was also a leader for African-American women and active in the civil rights movement.
Audrey Louise Grevious became one of the central leaders in the local civil rights movement in Lexington and the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Douglass School in Lexington, Kentucky, US, was both a primary and secondary Fayette County Public Schools from 1929 to 1971. Douglass School operated solely for African American students. The building that once housed Douglass School, located at 465 Price Road, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in Fayette County in 1998.
Viola Denisa Rowe Gross from Danville, Kentucky, was a teacher, businesswoman, clubwoman and author. She served on many local, state and national organizations and associations in support of African American civil rights and human rights in general. She and her husband Dr. Rodney Gross Jr. were partners at Gross Veterinary Clinic, which opened in Grayson, Kentucky in 1962. They were the first African-Americans to hold professional degrees in Carter County, Kentucky.
Helen Fisher Frye, educator and active churchwoman, was a local leader for civil rights in her hometown of Danville, Kentucky, serving as the president of the Danville chapter of the NAACP. She was the first African American to enroll at Centre College and the first African American woman to receive a Master of Arts in Library Science from the University of Kentucky in 1960.
The Mayfield Ten were ten African-American students in Graves County, Kentucky who chose to integrate the white high school in Mayfield, Kentucky in 1956.
Hocutt v. Wilson, N.C. Super. Ct. (1933) (unreported), was the first attempt to desegregate higher education in the United States. It was initiated by two African American lawyers from Durham, North Carolina, Conrad O. Pearson and Cecil McCoy, with the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The case was ultimately dismissed for lack of standing, but it served as a test case for challenging the "separate but equal" doctrine in education and was a precursor to Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Doris Yvonne Wilkinson is an American sociologist from Lexington, Kentucky, who was an instigator of racial integration at the University of Kentucky as the first African American to graduate from the University of Kentucky in 1958 as an undergraduate student. At the University of Kentucky, she was the director for the African American Heritage in the Department of Sociology. And in 1969 Wilkinson was the first African-American woman to become a full-time faculty member at University of Kentucky when she joined the Department of Sociology.
