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…

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…