In Louisville, Fourth Street was the city’s primary corridor of restaurants, department stores, and theaters, yet through the 1950s most white-owned downtown establishments excluded African Americans or treated them differently as customers by denying them the chance to try on clothes, sit at lunch counters, or enter movie theaters. By winter 1961, small-scale demonstrations and efforts to win legislation opening all such facilities had failed. Inspired by protest activity sweeping the South in the 1960s, African American teenagers became the foot soldiers of the struggle against discrimination in public accommodations in Louisville. Mass demonstrations in spring 1961, along with a voter registration drive and a campaign to unseat an unsympathetic mayor and elect a new board of aldermen, ultimately led to passage of the public accommodations ordinance, the first such law in the South. The businesses where demonstrations were held included Walgreens Drugstore, Stewart’s Dry Goods, Kaufman-Straus, Blue Boar Cafeterias, the Kentucky Theater, the Mary Anderson Theater, the Penthouse/United Artist Theater, the Rialto Theater, the Brown Hotel, and the Brown Theater, and this campaign became one of Louisville’s greatest achievements in the civil rights movement.