Edna Griffin; Champion of Civil Rights

Edna Griffin, 90, an Iowa civil rights pioneer best known for her efforts to integrate a lunch counter in Des Moines. Born in Lexington, Ky., Griffin received a teaching degree from Fisk University in Nashville. She settled in Des Moines with her husband, Stanley Griffin, a doctor. In July 1948, Griffin, her baby daughter Phyllis and two other African Americans ordered ice cream cones at the Katz Drug Store in Des Moines but were refused service because they were black. It was the first time that Griffin had experienced such discrimination directly. “It was as if you were suddenly not a citizen, not a member of the community,” she told a reporter for the Des Moines Register years later. This incident, which came seven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Ala., sparked picketing of the establishment, civil lawsuits and a successful lawsuit against the owner of the drugstore for violating the state’s 1884 statute against discrimination in public accommodations. Griffin received just $1 in compensation in the civil suit. Griffin went on to found a chapter of the Iowa Congress of Racial Equality and organized Iowans to attend the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington. In the 1980s, she was arrested with a group of Quakers in Nebraska while demonstrating against nuclear arms. She was the only grandmother in the group. Last Saturday, she was inducted into Iowa’s African-American Hall of Fame. “It was not hard for me to stand up,” she said years later of her fight against racism. “I felt if things didn’t change, the world would come to an end.” On Tuesday at a nursing home in Des Moines.