SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) — There are champions—then there is Mercedes Wright Arnold— someone who has been fighting for justice all her life. We asked her, “Why did you get involved in the movement?”

“If you ask that question to almost any Black person, quote Negro as we were then, from my generation, they will tell you at least one if not more incidences of bigotry and hatred that they personally experienced,” Arnold said. 

From wade-ins at Tybee, to lunch counter sit-ins, to department store boycotts— Arnold challenged anything to change the status quo.

She worked with giants like W.W. Law, Hosea Williams, and even Medgar Evers.

“I was his assistant at the time of his assassination,” Arnold said. “The national office asked me to come to Mississippi to assist them in tightening their boycott and to work with voter registration.” She continued, “That was after our success in Savannah. Because you know we desegregated the lunch counters there even before anywhere else. And Dr. King said we were the most integrated city—or desegregated—in the south.  And that was because of our work. And of course, it was two-pronged.”

“It was through the boycott. It was 99 and 9 tenths effective because we worked day and night to make it so. And our voter registration effort,” she said. 

But she wasn’t just a participant. She was a planner— one of the few women allowed in the inner circles of the then male-dominated leadership at the Savannah branch NAACP. They called her the ‘sweetheart’ of the movement— a bit of a misnomer considering her fierce passion to bring about change and the fact that she was the Vice Chair of the NAACP boycott committee.

“As we picketed City Hall,  Lee Mingledorf who was mayor, decided that we were not citizens and not entitled to our First Amendment Right to peaceful protests and began to arrest us. So, we have a rich history of fighting back. And when I say fighting, I mean with our knowledge, our wisdom, our strength, and we said we had two weapons that were the most powerful. It was the ballot and the buck.”

She was also a driving force for both local and national voter registration— gaining recognition from president Lyndon B Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 then President Barack Obama in 2014.

She even loaned her talents to another pioneer, Shirley Chisholm, when she ran for president in 1972.

Relentless in her advocacy, her course shifted in the 80s from civil rights to HIV/AIDS when her two sons succumbed to the disease.

“Both of my sons and my daughter—but especially do I want to say my sons were educated, employed, owned real estate. And one of the pieces of real estate owned by my eldest son –Daniel Walden Wright, III– was a row house in Washington, DC that he worked hard for and purchased.  He had the architectural renderings done in preparation for the restoration of the home he lived in when he became affected by AIDS. As had his brother the year before.”

Arnold continued, “With my heartbreak, and my almost total collapse of what was going on with quote, ‘being gay’ and AIDS in the 1980s, I had to find a way to fight back. So, I decided that I would turn Danny’s house in Washington—Bruce had his home here in Atlanta–  Danny’s house in Washington would become a respite for people who were suffering from AIDS.”

Following the loss of her sons, she decided to expand her reach internationally. So, she joined the Peace Corps— a then new initiative implemented by President John F. Kennedy— to change the world.

For the past several years, Conyers, Georgia has been her home. But Savannah is where she was raised— growing up on West Bolton Street— in a neighborhood that is now extinct due to urban renewal.

Today, she’s downsizing. Every inch of her space now boxed and bubble-wrapped— to be donated to local museums. Many of her awards, books, news clippings, letters, and ledgers, will go to the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum for preservation and display. The same place where a panel depicts her never-ending struggle for equality for all.

Months shy of her 90th birthday, Ms. Arnold is working on her memoir. The title has yet to be determined.