MEMPHIS, TENN.- On Tuesday, March 20, 1960, seven African American students from LeMoyne-Owen College entered the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery to view the Mid-South Art Exhibit. An additional six students waited outside. At the time, Black Memphians could legally visit the museum on Thursdays only. All thirteen students were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and loitering, while those who entered the museum were also charged with breach of the peace. The efforts, made by these students and many others, to integrate Memphis were successful and on December 2, 1960, the Memphis Park Commission announced that the museum, zoo, and Overton Park were desegregated.

Fifty-five years later—on Wednesday, March 11, 2015—two of those students, Mattie M. Daniels and Darnell Thomas Lassiter, returned to what is now known as the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art to view the exhibitions This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement and Artists/Activists: Marcellous Lovelace, Frank D. Robinson, and Siphne Silve, and a selection of African American art on view from the museum’s permanent collection.

Lassiter traveled from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Daniels made the trip from Chicago to join other LeMoyne-Owen alumni and Civil Rights Movement activists to see a display on view at the Brooks which features their college yearbooks, newspaper clippings describing their efforts, and a newspaper photograph of police escorting demonstrators from the museum.

Chief Curator Marina Pacini and other museum staffers were deeply moved upon meeting Daniels, Lassiter, and their fellow activists, including Dorothy Stiles Katoe, Allen Stiles, and Grace Austin Meacham.

This week, the museum is sending lifetime memberships as a statement of gratitude to the surviving activists—Daniels, Lassiter, Katoe, Styles, Meacham, Virginia Sue Owens Hudson, Steve Taylor, Jo Iris Smith, and Ronald Anderson—who risked their careers to integrate the Brooks and other Memphis institutions in 1960.