Elizabeth Gilmore

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Elizabeth Harden Gilmore was a business leader and civil rights advocate. She was the first woman to be licensed as an assistant funeral director in Kanawha County, West Virginia on October 28, 1938, and as a funeral director on November 12, 1940. She opened the Harden and Harden Funeral Home in 1947. She pioneered efforts to integrate West Virginia's schools, housing, and public accommodations and to pass civil rights legislation enforcing such integration. In the early 1950s, before the Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating school desegregation, Gilmore formed a women's club which opened Charleston's first integrated day care center. At about the same time, she succeeded in getting her black Girl Scouts of the USA troop admitted to Camp Anne Bailey near the mountain town of Lewisburg. The two Girl Scouts that she sponsored to integrate Camp Anne Bailey were Deloris Foster and Linda Stillwell. Read more

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