Lenora Rolla

Her grandfather, William Hall, was a former slave from Mississippi; her grandmother, also born into slavery, had been given as a wedding gift to a white couple who came to Texas from South Carolina.

Lenora's father was a farmer and her mother, Amanda Hall, worked as a maid in Fort Worth, sending money back home to the family.

Rolla attended the Cooper Street School in Trezevant Hill, a historic African-American community in what is now Fort Worth's hospital district, and was baptized at Southside Baptist Church on Easter Sunday in 1916.

[8] In 1954 Rolla met Martin Luther King, Jr. while traveling on assignment to Montgomery, Alabama, to report on the Brown vs. Board of Education trial for the Dallas Express.

[9] In 1963, she was selected to serve on Lyndon B. Johnson's Conference on Community Leaders, sponsored by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and participated in the historic March on Washington, in which Martin Luther King, Jr. presented his "I Have a Dream" speech and Rolla called the "high point" of her life.

"[9] Through her leadership in the civil rights movement, Rolla met and was influenced by Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Marian Anderson, Esther Rolle, Alex Haley, and Dick Gregory, and brought many such figures to Fort Worth.

She visited a number of African countries in 1980 as a missionary and again in 1994 as part of a "homeland" tour based on Alex Haley's Roots saga and organized by the author's son.

In 1986, Rolla participated in the Hands Across America benefit to end homelessness, standing along Lancaster Avenue with her friend and fellow activist, Opal Lee.

Boone, and directly across the street from the Baker Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a longtime center of the black community in Fort Worth.

Lenora Rolla conceived the Society's logo of three interlocking keys, which was later drawn and refined by an inmate at the Fort Worth Federal Correctional Institution.

Throughout the 1980s, Rolla took Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society displays to local schools and churches in order to correct widely held misconceptions about the role of African Americans in U.S. history.

[5] The Society's headquarters on Humbolt Street, which display artifacts and larger items from the collection, have been named the Lenora Rolla Heritage Center Museum in her honor.

She was a member of the Tarrant County Historical Commission, the Colored Federated Women's Club, American Woodmen, and Heroines of Jericho.