[6] After being arrested in Lebanon, Tennessee, a mayor who visited her addressed her as Mary, without the honorific "Miss" or "Mrs.", which were then frequently denied to African Americans, but she corrected him: "if you don't know how to speak to a lady...then get out of my cell."

Things came to a head when she was one of many civil rights protesters arrested in 1963 in Gadsden, Alabama,[6] and during cross examination at a habeas corpus hearing by the prosecutor in the Etowah County courthouse she refused to answer unless he stopped addressing her as "Mary", demanding she be called "Miss Hamilton".

[8] Supported by her lawyer and enduring what she later reported were lewd comments directed at her by Judge Cunningham,[6] she was fined $50 for contempt of court and, when she refused to pay, spent five days in jail.

The case made national headlines and landed Hamilton on the cover of Jet magazine, but left her tired and in ill health.

[9] She subsequently worked as a union organizer for 1199, the Drug & Hospital Workers, and as an educator in New York, earning an MAT from Manhattanville College in 1971 and going on to teach English at Sleepy Hollow High School until she retired in 1990.