Frankie Muse Freeman was a civil rights attorney, and the first woman to be appointed to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
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Her birth name was Marie Frankie Muse, and she was born on November 24, 1916, in Danville, Virginia. Her parents, Maude Beatrice Smith Muse and William Brown Muse, came from college-educated families. Among her relatives were Charles Sumner Muse, Edward Muse, and Clarence Muse, the acclaimed writer and actor. As a child, she attended Westmoreland School, where she studied music, especially the piano.
Two years later, she opened her law office in the Jefferson Bank Building and immediately began her long participation in the Civil Rights Movement. In the NAACP’s Brewton v. the Board of Education of St. Louis in 1949, Freeman, Sidney Redmond, Robert Witherspoon, and Henry Espy were the attorneys who argued that case to victory. In 1954, the same year of Brown v. the Board of Education, she was the lead attorney for the landmark NAACP case, Davis et al v. the St.
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