Elizabeth Mason Harden Gilmore was a trailblazing figure, a distinguished entrepreneur, and a significant civil rights leader. She was the first black woman to serve as a licensed funeral director in Virginia. Together with her husband, Silas Elihue Harden, she co-founded Harden-Harden Funeral Services in Kanawha County, West Virginia, where they lived and worked. By 1988, the house, now known as the Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House, was recognized as a civil rights history center and placed on the National Historic Register.
Elizabeth Mason Harden was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on August 11, 1910. After losing her mother before the age of one, she was raised by her maternal grandmother, who was from England, and her maternal grandfather, who was from Spain. Elizabeth was educated at public schools in West Virginia, including Highland Garnet High School in Charleston, West Virginia State College, and Bethune-Cookman College in Florida.
In 1946, Silas Harden died. Three years later Hardin married Virgil Melvin Gilmore, then a Charleston city councilman. During the 1950s, she founded an all-black Girl Scouts chapter, and they became the first black girls’ troop to integrate Camp Anne Bailey, the national Girl Scouts camp near Lewisburg, West Virginia. Gilmore also formed a women’s club that opened Charleston’s first integrated daycare center.
On August 11, 1958, Gilmore co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter in Charleston, West Virginia. This was the first CORE chapter in the state to practice direct action and openly challenge racism through sit-ins, boycotts, and picketing of all-white Charleston cafés as well as Woolworth, Kresge, and Newberry five-and-ten-cent stores.
Gilmore and Cynthia Burks conducted an almost two-year sit-in demonstration at the lunch counter of Diamond Department Store, a leading whites-only department store in the Kanawha Valley. This demonstration resulted in the store integrating its lunch counter on May 3, 1960. Gilmore also helped CORE members in Bluefield, West Virginia, picket the local YWCA and YMCAs.
By 1961, Gilmore was the only woman and the only Black American to serve as vice president and later president of the all-white male West Virginia University Board of Regents. In this role, she helped supervise eight universities and colleges across the state. She also served on the Kanawha Valley Council of Human Relations and was the only woman on the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce where she helped enact policy on housing and transportation issues, particularly for numerous displaced black communities.
Gilmore and her husband, Virgil had one daughter, Betty Gilmore. On April 8, 1986, Elizabeth Mason Harden Gilmore died at the age of 77. She is buried in Spring Hill Cemetery in Charleston, West Virginia.
In 2003, Virginia Gov. Bob Wise announced the selection of Mrs. Elizabeth Mason Harden Gilmore as the recipient of the 2003 Civil Rights Day Award.
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“Elizabeth Mason Harden Gilmore”. West Virginia’s African-American Women of Distinction: Volume 1. Wendy Thomas, ed. Charleston: The Printing Press, 2002.
Mrs. Gilmore’s Defining Black History – Democratic Underground Forums.
