American black civil rights activist whose case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Hamilton v. Alabama (1964), decided that an African-American woman was entitled to the same courteous forms of address customarily reserved solely to whites in the Southern United States, and that calling a black person by his or her first name in a legal proceeding was “a form of racial discrimination”.
She was a graduate of East Denver High School in Denver, Colorado in 1953 and she received her B.S. at Briarcliff College in Briarcliff Manor and her M.A.T. (Master of Arts in Teaching) in 1971 at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.
Hamilton, who grew up in Iowa and Colorado, wanted to be a nun and briefly taught parochial school in Los Angeles. After discovering socialism, she became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She participated in the Freedom Rides, and was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961, enduring “sweltering jails, [and] invasive and unnecessary vaginal exams, answering police and jail officers with “polite noncompliance”.
She continued to engage in non-violent protest and helped register voters, all the while being arrested frequently at protests, and rose to the position of “field secretary”, the only female field secretary at the time, only the third one in CORE’s history, and the first one to be allowed to work in the South. Eventually she became CORE’s Southern regional director.
The Hamilton v. Alabama (1964) case made national headlines and landed Hamilton on the cover of Jet magazine, but left her tired and in ill health.
In 1964 Hamilton left CORE to marry Walter Young, a dentist, and returned to her hometown in Denver, Colorado. That marriage ended in divorce, as did her subsequent marriage to Harold Wesley.
She subsequently worked as a union organizer for 1199, the Drug & Hospital Workers, and an educator in New York, earning an MAT from Manhattanville College in 1971 and going on to teach English at Sleepy Hollow High School until she retired in 1990.
Mary Hamilton died on 11 November 2002 at age 67 after a seven-year battle against 4th-stage ovarian cancer.
Link to Wikipedia biography