Civil Rights

Hampton University, whose campus includes the spot where President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was first read to slaves on the Peninsula, played a major role in advancing civil rights nearly a century later. As the school grew from a training institute for former slaves to a college, the movement on campus developed gradually. Shortly after becoming Hampton Institute's first African American president in 1949, Alonzo G. Moron urged teachers to inspire students to stand up for their rights and became an important national voice for full racial equality. After the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling outlawing segregated schools, he said that lawyers had made it possible and educators would have to make it successful. Throughout the 1950s, major civil rights figures including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and Langston Hughes spoke to students, and Rosa Parks briefly worked on campus. Political science and history clubs hosted discussions of the Back-to-Africa movement, the Nation of Islam, and civil disobedience. In early 1960, within days of the first lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., Hampton students became the first in Virginia to follow with sit-ins at downtown stores and then organized marches through city streets and boycotts of businesses that refused to serve them, helping bring down a number of these barriers within six months.

Hampton, Virginia · United States