ST. LOUIS – 61 years ago, Percy Green was arrested for climbing up the Gateway Arch while it was still under construction to protest job discrimination. In August, during Paint Louis, the city’s annual hip hop and street art festival, Green was once again honored, this time with a mural.
St. Louis artists Kristian Blackmon, Marquis Terrel, and Lindy Drew collaborated on the piece, celebrating Green’s lifelong fight for justice.
On July 14, 1964, Percy Green joined Dick Daly in climbing a construction ladder about 125 feet up onto the unfinished north leg of the Arch. Their protest ultimately led to more minority contractors hired for the Arch project, but not without costing him his job as a research and development technician at McDonnell Douglas, where he was working on Project Mercury.
His firing eventually resulted in the iconic Supreme Court case McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, which established a new basis that is still used today to determine whether an employer is discriminating in hiring.
The now 90-year-old has been honored on multiple occasions, such as at the Arch back in 2019, when he was honored on the 55th anniversary of the protest. The civil rights activist was meeting the public outside the Arch gift shop and signing commemorative posters honoring his historic fight. One of those getting a poster was Lynne Jackson, the great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott, the African-American slave who in 1857 unsuccessfully sued for his freedom.
“I think everybody needs to honor people who have gone out on a limb so-to-speak, you know, to help for social justice,” Jackson said.
Like Dred Scott, Green got the nation’s attention in his fight for equality.
“Civil disobedience is like a double-edged sword. As I see it, one is the purposes of educating the observers, the community-at-large, and it also applies pressure to the company or the entity that is responsible for the demonstration in the first place,” Green said.
While Green acknowledges the progress in the fight for job equality for minorities, he said there is still a long way to go.
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
