It can take courage to stand up for what is right, especially when both the laws and customs of your hometown are stacked against you. The three veteran civil rights activists pictured here, all Morgan State University alumni, have been courageous their whole lives — dating to when they were college students, and black Baltimoreans were restricted in where they could live, work, eat, even play. They fought those restrictions and helped make their city a more just place.

Helena Hicks (right) was among a group of Morgan students who went to the Read's drugstore on Lexington Street in January 1955, sat at the whites-only lunch counter and waited to be served. Within days, the chain abandoned its discriminatory policy. Hicks would go on to spend 35 years as an administrator for the state and professor at the University of Baltimore.

Joyce Dennison (center) was among a group of mostly college-age protesters who took on the whites-only policy at Hillen's Northwood movie theater. A photograph that ran in the Feb. 22, 1963, editions of The Sun showed Dennison behind bars, calmly reading “An Introduction to Social Science.” But after months, the protests worked. Dennison would go on to become a schoolteacher, Army staff sergeant and director of the Maryland AIDS Hotline.

Leo W. Burroughs Jr. (left) was among scores of Baltimoreans who protested the whites-only policy at Woodlawn's Gwynn Oak Park, the last of the area's family amusement parks. As a leader of the Baltimore chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, he was arrested in July 1963 along with some 400 others. On Aug. 28, 1963, Gwynn Oak Park was opened to all. Burroughs is now a retired community and civic organizer.

Gathered recently at their alma mater, the three attracted a crowd of students, many realizing that these were the same people looking out from news photos on the student union walls. During an impromptu address, the three warned that the struggle is far from over. “You wonder now if we're going back to where we were,” Burroughs said. “Everybody says that's impossible, but it depends on who gets elected and where this country is going. We cannot take for granted that the future is going to be brighter.”

Leo W. Burroughs Jr., 74, Joyce Dennison, 75, and Helena Hicks, 82, photographed on Sept. 28, 2016, at the Morgan State University Student Union, at a display of lunch-counter stools from the Read's on Lexington Street. Baltimore Sun photo by Kenneth K. Lam.