In the Jim Crow era, black travelers in the United States often had a difficult time finding hotels that would allow them to stay, or restaurants and other facilities that would allow them to purchase goods and services. Racist practices dominated…

Read's was a popular chain of drug stores/luncheonettes in the 20th century with approximately 39 outlets around Baltimore, scattered around central Maryland; It was the Walgreens of its day, with lunch spots. Like many establishments of a…

The current Roye-Williams Elementary School began it's building life as a segregated, all-black school serving the Havre de Grace/Aberdeen area of Harford county. In 1953, Harford County Public Schools opened the K-12 Havre de Grace…

The Bayou is a well-known restaurant in Havre de Grace, Maryland on Route 40. It opened in 1949 and continued to operate in 2021. In early December 1961, the CORE leadership found out that some of the restaurants on Route 40 were in fact still…

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…

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…