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Seventy-two years ago, on August 2, 1952, Sarah Louise Keys (Evans) a Washington NC resident, stepped off a Trailways bus coming from Roanoke Rapids, NC to the Union Bus Station at the corner of Second and Respess Streets in downtown Washington. When her feet touched the ground getting off the bus, she left indelible footprints of courage in Washington’s and the nation’s history, as it was the conception of a fight for civil rights.

She had boarded the bus in Fort Dix New Jersey enroute to Washington. In Roanoke Rapids NC, five states from where she started her trip south, she was arrested after refusing to surrender her seat to a white Marine and moving to the back of the bus when told to do so. She joined an elite club of civil rights leaders whose fight against injustice have left powerful legacies in this town.

Washington has had many residents who stepped up to the plate in an unjust game of fighting for civil rights.

When my mother graduated from the Washington Colored School at Bridge Street in 1939, her graduating class met one of our country’s noted Congressman and civil rights leaders in his day, Congressman Arthur Wergs Mitchell, who was invited here by the school’s principal, Professor Peter Simon Jones. Professor Jones in his own right was a strong advocate for civil rights.

Professor Jones invited the African American congressman here for a dedication of the school’s newest annex, the Vocational Education Building. The building had been erected by high school’s male vocational trade students. Professor Jones felt Congressman Mitchell’s appearance and speech to the school students would greatly enhance the achievement of erecting the vocational education building. It was built during school hours as part of the student’s vocational trade work and was recognized as the finest of its kind in the state.

The acreage encompassing the school campus from Bridge and Seventh to Ninth Street on the east, and Seventh and Pierce on the west to Ninth Street received the name ‘Congressman Square.’ Professor Jones named it this as he and Congressman Mitchell had walked around the perimeter of the school grounds before Mitchell’s speech. The speech, well attended by the Washington community, was given three weeks before my mother’s class graduation.

Congressman Mitchell was born in 1883 in Roanoke, Alabama and later lived in Illinois. He was a civil rights activist. He served in the capacity of Representative of the Chicago Illinois First Congressional District, and from 1935-1943, he was the only African American in Congress.

A strong supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (a public relief program) he became the first African American to be elected to the United States 74th Congress and became part of the New Deal Coalition.

Congressman Mitchell served several terms. After he was elected a fourth and final time in 1938, he immediately introduced a bill to ban discrimination on interstate trains.

He filed a lawsuit in 1937 against the Illinois Central Island Railroad and Pullman Train Company after he was forced from his seat in a first-class section of a train. He was forced to move in the ‘colored second-class seating section.’

Mitchell cited a law enacted in 1887 called the Interstate Commerce Act which stated all passengers on trains were to be given fair and equal treatment. He fought his discrimination lawsuit through the Supreme Court for years, until it’s resolution in 1955 when the Interstate Commerce Commission agreed with him and banned segregation on Interstate Railroad Transportation.

Ironically, that was the same year, 1955, that segregation was banned on Interstate buses, a ruling handed down by the Interstate Commerce Commission in Sarah Keys Evans favor.

Mitchell also went on to create an Industrial Commission to help African American businesses and a Commission on Negro Affairs. He died in 1968.

Leesa Jones is a Washington native and the co-curator of the Washington Waterfront Underground Railroad Museum.