Brad Snyder

At eighty-six years old she started sitting in at segregated lunch counters in Washington DC. Three years later she had desegregated every restaurant in the capital of the United States. Mary Church Terrell. She was born during the Civil War to formerly enslaved parents, and by the 1890s was one of the most prominent Black women in America — a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, a founding member of the NAACP. Then in 1949, at eighty-six, she found something in the law library. Washington had passed laws in 1872 and 1873 making it illegal for restaurants to refuse "any respectable, well-behaved person" on account of race. The laws had never been repealed. They had simply been left out of the city code and forgotten for seventy-five years. She decided to enforce them. She walked into Thompson's Restaurant with three companions in February 1950, was refused, and sued. While the case ground through the courts she ran the campaign herself: picketing in the winter at eighty-seven and eighty-eight years old, leading boycotts, standing outside stores with a placard. In June 1953 the Supreme Court ruled the lost laws were still valid. Washington's restaurants desegregated. She died the following year at ninety. She found a dead law in a book, picked it up, and used it to open a city. Nobody had looked for seventy-five years.