Washington, D.C.

Marilyn Mapp is managing editor of the Voices of Civil Rights project. In that role, she led a team of writers and television producers to Farmville, Virginia, to document the stories of people affected by the closing of public schools there from 1959 to 1964 to avoid court-ordered desegregation. As a kindergartener, she helped desegregate a suburban St. Louis elementary school. Her thinking on race and the Civil Rights Movement was further informed by annual visits to her parents' hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi. There, during the waning days of the Jim Crow era, she experienced segregation but refused to drink from "colored" water fountains. A graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, she has worked as a reporter and/or editor for BET Interactive, the Baltimore Sun, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. She was a contributor to Marylanders of the Century (Baltimore Sun, 1999).

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