Raylawni Branch (born 1941) is a black Mississippi pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, a professional nursing educator and US Air Force Reserve officer.
[2][3] As a teenager, she worked in a restaurant named Fat's Kitchen in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street black business district.
There she met a regular customer, Clyde Kennard, whose tragic attempt to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi had begun in 1956 and was to play out before Branch’s young eyes.
In 1959 she saw Kennard on the morning of his appointment with arch-segregationist Dr. William David McCain, president of (then) Mississippi Southern College, to discuss his enrollment application.
[1][3] The meeting with McCain resulted in his arrest on false criminal charges and the beginning of a notorious miscarriage of justice which led to Kennard's early death at 36 because of bungled cancer treatment in the Mississippi prison system.
After a second false arrest, Branch attended the trial and was among those who tried to get Johnny Lee Roberts, the prosecution's suborned witness, to tell the truth or flee the state.
[1] After high school graduation she tried the North again as a migrant worker on farms in Michigan, living in little shacks with no utilities, then again returned to Mississippi.
She participated in several activities, including the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which she was one of the 250,000 to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
[1][2] She integrated the Greyhound Lines and Trailways Transportation System bus stations in Hattiesburg, and was the first African American ever hired at the local Big Yank clothing factory.
On September 6, 1965, she (then Raylawni Young) and eighteen-year-old Hattiesburg native Elaine Armstrong became the first African American students at Mississippi Southern.
University of Southern Mississippi leaders, such as President William David McCain, had come to realize that the battle to maintain segregation was lost.
Student athletic, fraternity, and political leaders were recruited to keep the calm and protect the university from such bad publicity Ole Miss had suffered from its reaction to James Meredith.
October 21, 1967, she was among the 35,000 anti-war protesters organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, gathered for a demonstration at the Defense Department, called the "March on The Pentagon".