User:Lrschneider/Mary Hamilton

Mary Lucille Hamilton (1935 – 2002) was a civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She is most well known for the United States Supreme Court case Hamilton v. Alabama (1964) in which the court unanimously ruled that calling a black person by his or her first name in a formal context was a form of discrimination.

Early Life and Education
Hamilton was born to Robert Emerson DeCarlo and Elizabeth Winston Hamilton. 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 Masters degree in English at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

Hamilton v. Alabama (1964)
Hamilton v. Alabama, 376 U.S. 650 (1964), is a U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court held 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 formal context was "a form of racial discrimination".

Later Life and Death
In 1964 Hamilton left to marry Walter Young, a dentist, and returned to hometown in Denver, Colorado. That marriage ended in divorce.

Hamilton started work as an English Teacher at Sleepy Hollow High School in 1971 until she retired in 1990.

She died on November 13, 2002 after a seven-year battle against 4th-stage ovarian cancer.