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Children from Lincoln Park attended the Rockville Colored Elementary School, part of the separate system of free public education for black students. In 1936, the Rockville Colored Elementary School was the setting for an historical event. Teacher-principal William B. Gibbs, Jr. volunteered as a litigant to challenge Montgomery County’s practice of paying black teachers half the salary of white teachers with equal qualifications.
Mr. Gibbs earned $612 annually, compared with an average white teacher’s salary of $1,362. Attorneys for the Maryland Teachers’ Association, the black teacher’s organization, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), among them Thurgood Marshall, filed suit in circuit court. Several property owners in Haiti, a Rockville neighborhood, pledged their houses as collateral, should it be needed. They also helped to found the Montgomery County Chapter of the NAACP at Jerusalem Church.
In 1937, the school board settled out of court. The following year, black teachers received a pay raise equal to 50 percent of the discrepancy, and, beginning in 1938, all teachers were on the same salary scale. The victory was gained at a cost, however. Mr. Gibbs was fired on a technicality regarding his principal’s certificate, and he never taught in Maryland again.
In the summer of 1979, Mr. Gibbs returned to Rockville where he was honored for his part in the fight for equal rights for African Americans. At the Lincoln Park Community Center, he received multiple awards from the Montgomery County School Board, the Human Relations Commissions of both the city of Rockville and Montgomery County, the Black Coalition, the NAACP, the Black Educators' Association, the Progressive Citizens' Association, and the Merry Makers Club. (See The Montgomery Journal, 8/1/1979, p. A1.)
An incident in the autumn of 1959 became a rallying point for equality. One evening, Mary Williams and her two young daughters sat down at the new HiBoy restaurant on North Washington Street and Frederick Avenue (Route 355). They had walked there from their home in Lincoln Park after receiving a flyer from the eatery, but Williams – the new president of the Montgomery County Branch of the NAACP – was denied service in the dining room.
Failing to come to terms with HiBoy's attorney, the NAACP took a cue from the boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama. By December, activists distributed five thousand flyers in Rockville asking people to "stay away from the HiBoy and tell the management why." Church leaders organized written protests against HiBoy's racist policy, and George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi party, based in Virginia, staged a counterprotest at HiBoy.
On July 10, 1960, twenty-five people were arrested as they staged a sit-in protesting segregation at the HiBoy. Rockville's Mayor Alexander J. Greene stated that, although the city lacked authority to "require desegregation in public eating establishments, personally I think it is wrong to advertise a restaurant or any business for use of the general public and then turn away a part of that public when it comes to be served."
In other anti-segregation demonstrations in the county at this time, protesters picketed Glen Echo Amusement Park's denial of entry to blacks, and Edward Johnson, a Lincoln Park businessman, was arrested when he insisted on being served at the Tastee Diner on East Montgomery Avenue.
The HiBoy sit-in was one moment in a movement spreading across America. Not
long after, four black college students refused to leave a lunch counter in
Greensboro, North Carolina.
