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In the roaring days of the Appalachian coalfields and the era of racial segregation, an African-American woman braved it all in Southern West Virginia.
Yet, it sounded as if for a laugh when Memphis Tennessee Garrison looked back on the era and said: "They used to keep us off the ball field, but now they can't have a game without us."
She helped open the gate at the ball field, so to speak, and at other public places shut to black Americans in West Virginia and elsewhere.
Garrison was a McDowell County schoolteacher, a community mediator and organizer of the West Virginia Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP took root in the state in 1918 and grew in the national movement of opening doors and breaking down racial barriers.
She tells of...