The Downtown Civil Rights Movement Markers Project was the vision of J. Blaine Hudson, former dean of the University of Louisville College of Arts and Sciences. Dean Hudson’s vision was to preserve the history, heritage and contributions of African Americans to Louisville’s rich history. Fourth Street was Louisville’s primary corridor of restaurants, department stores and theaters. Through the 1950s, most white-owned establishments downtown excluded African Americans or treated them differently as customers—for example, denying them the opportunity to try on clothes, to sit at lunch counters and to enter movie theaters. By winter 1961, small-scale demonstrations and efforts to secure legislation opening all such facilities had failed. The stirrings of protest activity that swept the South in the 1960s inspired African American teenagers who became the “foot soldiers” of the struggle against discrimination in public accommodations in Louisville. Mass student demonstrations in spring 1961, a voter registration drive and a campaign to unseat an unsympathetic mayor and elect a new board of aldermen ultimately led to the passage of the public accommodations ordinance – the first such law in the South. Today, many businesses that were picketed in the demonstrations have closed, relocated or been torn down. In the absence of a physical presence, these markers will preserve the history of the civil rights movement and tell the little-known story of one of Louisville’s greatest achievements.