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 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…

Usually when Americans remember the Freedom Rides, they think of buses that traversed the deep South in the early 1960s to protest racism at bus depots and lunch counters and the like. The Freedom Riders' demonstrated that, in many southern states,…

In 1955, Stephen Moore III was an African American 4th grader attending the segregated, Black-only Central Consolidated School in Hickory, outside Bel Air, Maryland. He lived in the town of Bel Air just a few blocks from his neighborhood school, the…