In 1961, the Aberdeen Diner existed in the south western edge of Aberdeen, along Route 40 near a creek and where a 7-11 store currently stands. When Freedom Riders came through Aberdeen, they stopped at the diner. They were met by the owner reading…

The Sportsman Grill was listed on the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) brochure used as guide for Freedom Riders for the 1961 Route 40 Freedom Ride. The Aberdeen restaurant was on the list of "Restaurants Still Segregated". This meant that the…

In 1951, the K-12 Central Consolidated School opened in an area called Hickory outside Bel Air, Maryland to serve black students from the central and northern regions of Harford County, Maryland. All the students and teachers in the school were…

In the wake of the April 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and resulting national turmoil, two women in Harford County – one black, one white- decided more needed to be done to bridge the local racial divide. Both women were…

In the early 1950s, the Harford County Board of Education opened two K-12 schools to separately educate the county’s African American children. These two schools would take students from the numerous black-only elementary schools dotting the county…

For the first half of the twentieth century, movie theaters around Harford County were segregated by race, as was common throughout the South. There were three main movie theatres in Harford County: in Bel Air, Aberdeen, and Havre de Grace. Each of…

Throughout most of the 1960s, Cambridge, Maryland was a hotbed of civil rights activity and turbulence. Beginning in 1962, students from Morgan State University and other places had gone down to the small city on the state’s eastern shore to sit in…

In December 1959, United States Army Reserve Captain Brennie Hackley had a housing issue. Captain Hackley held a Ph.D. in chemistry and worked in the chemistry division of the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Center (ECC), a satellite of the Aberdeen…

The actions of parents and students to force desegregation of American schools are a famous story of the civil rights era. The Brown vs. Board of Education case (1954), for example or the desegregation of high schools in Little Rock, Arkansas were…

In 1958, George S. Pettit had a problem. Pettit was a scientist who worked for the U.S. Army based at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. The Pettit family had recently moved to Aberdeen from Baltimore County and included 8th grader Alvin…