Noel House

Gladys Noel Bates, who grew up on Pearl Street, was a Tougaloo biology graduate teaching science at Smith Robertson Junior High when she lent her name to a 1948 suit for equal pay for Black teachers in Jackson. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Constance Baker Motley and Robert Carter backed it. The price came fast: shots hit her family's home, the house was burned, crosses burned nearby, and she and her husband lost their jobs, ending her standing to sue. Richard Jess Brown, a Lanier High School teacher, took her place as plaintiff.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Farish Street Historic District — 0.9 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Old Capitol Museum — 1.3 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 1.4 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 2.9 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• M.W. Stringer Grand Lodge — steps away
• Subway Lounge — 0.4 mi
• Scott Radio Service — 0.6 mi
• Jesse Robinson — 0.6 mi