In 1964 China’s Mao Tse-Tung published his Little Red Book, Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali] won the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s $947,000,000 War on Poverty began. The North Vietnamese attacked two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, three missing civil rights workers were found buried in a Mississippi earth dam, and the bipartisan Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was signed. “The civil rights bill is the law of the land today,” The Alexandria Gazette wrote on July 3, 1964, “and civil rights groups immediately began testing whether the sweeping provisions against discrimination can break generations of racial barriers.” The 10 Virginia members of the House of Representatives voted against the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was President Johnson’s “challenge to all Americans to [voluntarily] transform the commands of our laws into the customs of our land.” In Virginia, despite ratification of the 24th Amendment, elements of the discriminatory 1902 election poll tax remained. With Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896—the US Supreme Court’s separate but equal doctrine—black newspaper editors like Alexandria’s Colored Republican Magnus L. Robinson denounced racial discrimination. Colored Republicans met “to devise means so the ‘Lily Whites’ of the South may not crowd [them] out…to petition [southern] negroes to unite [and] come back to first principles—human rights.” Plessy remained Jim Crow law until Brown v. Board of Education in1954. Until the mid-1930s enterprising Alexandria blacks traveled to the District of Columbia for high school: to attend either Armstrong or Dunbar High Schools. Samuel W. Tucker, born in 1913, bootlegged his Armstrong High School education. Yet a white only high school stood within sight of his Alexandria home. Samuel W. Tucker is a hero of both the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. His father, real estate agent Samuel A. Tucker…