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On a train to Mississippi in 1922, Anna Arnold Hedgeman first faced overt racism as jarring as the rumbling of the rails. From St. Paul to Chicago, she rode in the dining car open to both Black and white passengers. But when the train reached Cairo, Ill., the conductor moved her to the colored car behind the locomotive. I was shocked by all the ugliness that is the South the Jim Crowism and segregation, she told Twin Cities audiences in 1950. And after working as executive director of a YWCA in Springfield, Ohio, she found the Midwest was not much better. Born in Iowa in 1899, Anna Arnold moved to Anoka as a child, the oldest of six in the city s lone Black family. In 1922, after becoming Hamline University s first African American graduate, she launched a career as a civil rights and women s rights crusader working in the Truman administration, busting racial barriers in the New York mayor s Cabinet, playing a key role in the 1963 March on Washington and helping ....