Mary Hamilton

Early life and education Hamilton was born to Robert Emerson DeCarlo and Elizabeth Winston Hamilton. She was raised Catholic by her grandmother, partially in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and was a graduate of East Denver High School in Denver, Colorado in 1953. She received her B.S. degree at Briarcliff College in Briarcliff Manor, New York, and her M.A.T. (Master of Arts in Teaching) in 1971 at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

She continued to engage in non-violent protest and helped register voters, all the while being arrested frequently at protests, Eventually she became CORE's Southern regional director. Supported by her lawyer and enduring what she later reported were lewd comments directed at her by Judge Cunningham,

She 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.

Hamilton died on November 13, 2002, after a seven-year battle against fourth-stage ovarian cancer.