Elizabeth Harden Gilmore

Who was Elizabeth Harden Gilmore?

Elizabeth Harden Gilmore was a business leader and civil rights advocate.

She pioneered efforts to integrate West Virginia's schools, housing, and public accommodations and to pass civil rights legislation enforcing such integration. In the early 1950s, before the Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating school desegregation, Gilmore formed a women's club which opened Charleston's first integrated day care center. At about the same time, she succeeded in getting her black Girl Scouts of the USA troop admitted to Camp Anne Bailey near the mountain town of Lewisburg. After co-founding the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1958, she led CORE in a successful one-year-long sit-in campaign at a local department store called The Diamond.

In the 1960s, Gilmore served on the Kanawha Valley Council of Human Relations, where she participated in forums on racial differences and where she helped black renters, displaced by a new interstate highway, find housing. Her successful push to amend the 1961 state civil rights law won her a seat on the powerful higher-education Board of Regents. Gilmore was the first African American to receive such an honor.