The Black civil rights leader who sued to be called “Miss”

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2026

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

It’s Alabama, 1963. A black woman stands before a judge, but she refuses to acknowledge his questions until he addresses her by the same honorific given to white women: “Miss.” That woman's name is Mary Hamilton. Her case eventually reached the Supreme Court and changed the courts, and eventually broader culture, for good. We’re revisiting the largely forgotten story of Miss Mary Hamilton, a Freedom Rider who struck a blow against a pervasive form of disrespect.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Just the heads up, y'all.
0:01.9	This episode contains some salty language means. It's going to be some cussing, as well as discussions of violence and sexual assault. What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And y'all, it's Women's History Month. So we thought it made sense for us to revisit one piece of forgotten women's history.
0:20.9	I guess all of our history. Come on, y'all.
0:22.7	It's about gender and race and a push for seemingly very, very small acknowledgement of womanhood.
0:28.4	Or I guess I should say, against a denial of womanhood?
0:32.0	It was about the right for black women to be called Miss and addressed as adults.
0:37.2	And that fight would directly, like in the same house directly,
0:40.7	inspire another effort that was happening in white feminist spaces, the Ms.
0:45.0	movement.
0:46.3	Back in 2017, me and my former co-host, Shereen Marceau Marraji, sat down and chop it up with
0:51.3	our colleague, Camilla Dominovskysky about this bananas and mostly unknown story.
0:57.6	All right, here's Shereen.
1:01.4	It's June, 1963.
1:04.4	A 28-year-old woman stands defiantly before a judge in an Alabama courtroom.
1:10.4	She's black.
1:11.7	The judge is white.
1:13.4	That 28-year-old woman, her name is Mary Hamilton.
1:17.0	She's a civil rights activist traveling around the South,
1:19.5	registering voters and organizing protest.
1:22.1	And there's this other fight she takes up almost by accident,
1:24.6	the fight to be called Miss Hamilton, as in M-I-S.
1:34.7	Today we're going to hear about a little known case that went all the way to the Supreme Court,
	...

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