9781422283318

the former Irma Olivia Swygert. He grew up in a highly segregated section of St. Louis, Missouri, a place, he once said, where “making it through life was a civil-rights ac- tivity in itself.” A bright and highly motivated student, Greene attended St. Louis’s Washington University, joining only the second class in school history to accept students of color. While there, he was active in the burgeoning civ- il rights movement and participated in several sit-ins—a form of nonviolent protest in which demonstrators occupy a racially segregated restaurant or bus station and refuse to leave until they are either served or the police come to arrest them.

Greene lived through a time when sit-ins like this one in 1968 were part of a growing Civil Rights Movement.

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Black Achievement in Science: Technology