Ohio Humanities
When Virginia Harewood was marching along the streets of Hillsboro, Ohio, at age 8, she didn’t realize her steps were making her a part of history.
Harewood, now 77, was among the 19 women and 37 children who marched a mile across the southwest Ohio town to the white-only Webster Elementary School every day from September 1954 to April 1956. They had hopes of influencing the school board to integrate the city’s elementary schools.
The town’s school board was one of many across the nation that stalled on integration following the May 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in schools.
The marching—and the subsequent court case five of the mothers launched against the school board—represents an early role for Ohio in the civil rights movement that’s not widely known, according to Melvin Barnes, Jr., a program officer at Ohio Humanities, a Columbus-based nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“They’re on the forefront of the understanding of the traditional civil rights movement,” Barnes said of the Hillsboro marchers. “You don’t have to look to the South to see how this movement is shaping up. … Some of the first events were in our own backyard in Ohio.”
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