Charmaine McKissick-Melton, associate professor in N.C. Central University’s Department of English and Mass Communications likes starting her classes with facts about black history.

She started doing this while teaching an honors seminar at Notre Dame University about 15 years ago.

“I’ve been doing that for a long, long time,” she stated. “At Notre Dame, they needed to hear African-American history too,” she adds.

“To leave that out is leaving out a part of American history.”

The McKissick family lived history at the center of the civil rights movement locally and nationally.

Her father, Floyd McKissick, Sr., was an activist and she was born just as the civil rights movement was gaining full momentum across America.

“I was born a few weeks before they found Emmett Till’s body and a few months before Rosa Parks decided to sit down,” said McKissick-Melton, who was one of the first black grade school students to integrate North Durham Elementary School.

Floyd McKissick, Sr., was a civil rights attorney and civil rights leader who fought inequality and injustice against blacks on the local and national scenes.

“There probably wouldn't have been a civil rights movement without him,” states Vivian McCoy who worked as an activist along with McKissick.

McCoy said McKissick organized the first area youth chapter of the NAACP in 1958.

“Durham was definitely different because of him,” said McCoy.

“I kind of always knew my daddy was somebody different,” said McKissick-Melton.

After getting his undergraduate degree at NCCU, McKissick applied to UNC-Chapel Hill’s law school, but was denied entry.

He and four other black students along with the NAACP sued UNC-Chapel Hill in federal court to gain entrance.

Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall represented their case and in 1951, the students won admission to the law school.

By then, McKissick had finished his law courses at NCCU’s law school where he earned his law degree.

He still took summer courses at UNC however to be one of the first blacks to attend the school.

During his career as an attorney in Durham, he represented hundreds of civil rights cases brought before courts in the 1960s.

In 1966, he took over leadership of the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE) from James Farmer and moved the organization toward a stronger, more vocal position in the civil rights movement.

After leaving CORE in 1968, McKissick launched a plan to build a new community, called Soul City, in Warren County, N.C.

Soul City was designed to be an open, self-contained community with a population of 55,000 where all races could live in harmony and earn fair wages working in clean industries.

“When he used the word soul, he wasn’t talking about James Brown,” said McKissick-Melton. “It was soul from the Bible.”

His plan received support from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but the project never completely developed as McKissick had hoped.

He died of cancer in 1991 working as the pastor of Soul City’s First Baptist Church and as a state district court judge.

During the 1960s as McKissick fought for civil rights on the streets and in the courts, his children faced the challenges of being among the first to integrate Durham’s public school.

She remembers frequent taunting from white students. She was also the target of spitball attacks in the school cafeteria.

Despite all this, she maintained a perfect ‘A’ average.

“It was not a fun time,” she said, adding that her older sisters, Jocelyn and Andreé and brother, Floyd Jr. were subject to more brutal attacks than she encountered from white students.

McKissick-Melton said that a lot of the “dirty work” happened in the bathrooms when the teachers weren’t around.

“The girls ganged up on Andreé in a stall and pushed her head into a commode which had feces in it.”

“As you get older, you tend to remember the fond things ... when I was younger, I tended to remember a lot of negative things,” she said.

McKissick-Melton recalls lively debates and NAACP meetings about whether she should attend the birthday party of one of her white classmates.

“Black people and white people didn’t just go to each other’s houses and deal with each other in that way,” she said.

“That was the talk of Durham for quite awhile — at the time, it was really controversial.”

McKissick-Melton fondly recalled all of the civil rights activists who often stayed at the McKissick’s residence because they were unable to stay in area hotels.

Their home was affectionately known as the “Dew-Drop Inn.”

“That’s what people did - they dropped in — and you never knew how long they were going to stay,” she said with a laugh.

She said she met civil rights leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and James Farmer.

Adam Clayton Powell, a minister from Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, was elected to the House of Representatives in 1945.

James Farmer, who co-founded CORE in 1942, was considered one of the “big six” of the civil rights movement.

McKissick-Melton said that meeting Malcolm X after his 1964 voyage to Mecca and Africa was “most memorable.”

“The most charismatic person I had ever met,” she said.

“I expected him to be loud and angry but he was so quiet.”