Juliette Aline Derricotte was born in Athens, Georgia, into a large working family. Her father made shoes; her mother sewed. Athens was a college town that had no room in its colleges for her.

The Lucy Cobb Institute was a private school for white girls in her own hometown. Juliette wanted to go there. She was refused because she was Black. It was, by her own account, the first time the shape of her life was decided by someone else.

She was about fifteen. At a church picnic someone asked the girl what she intended to become.

Talladega College in Alabama had been founded after the Civil War by two men who had been enslaved. She arrived as a student and would spend the rest of her life returning to it.

PLACEHOLDER - this entry is currently a heading with nothing under it. If there is a story here (a leadership role, a first speech, a mentor), it belongs. If not, cut it rather than leave a gap in the sequence.

She finished at the top of her class. Asked where her drive had come from, she named three sources and refused to rank them.

Straight out of college she took a position with the national student division of the YWCA. The job was to travel to college campuses - white ones and Black ones - and get students talking honestly to each other. She held it for eleven years.

This is her own field report from a campus visit. The last line is the one to sit with.

Mary Jenness, who profiled her in 1936, collected accounts from people who had watched her work a room.

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She had been chosen as one of ten American delegates to a world student conference in England. Du Bois, then editing The Crisis, wrote to her directly.

She crossed the Atlantic as one of ten Americans sent to the World's Student Christian Federation conference at High Leigh, England - and spent the rest of the summer traveling the continent.

She was twenty-seven and abroad for the first time. Paris startled her.

Speaking to delegates from around the world, she reframed what she and others like her were asking for.

Eight years after graduating, her college elected her to its board of trustees - the first woman ever seated there.

Between assignments she earned a master's degree at Columbia, studying religious education.

She went as a delegate to the World's Student Christian Federation meeting in India, traveling through a country then under British rule and finding the color line waiting for her there too.

This is the passage our project takes its name from. Set it apart - full width, large type, nothing competing with it. Note that she does not resolve the contradiction. That is the point.

Years later she summed up what the eleven years of travel had done to her.

She left the road for Nashville and took charge of the lives of Fisk University's women students. She was thirty-two.

She had been invited to speak at a gathering where she was not permitted to eat. She began by naming exactly what had happened.

She was driving from Nashville toward Athens with three Fisk students in the car. On the highway near Dalton, Georgia, there was a collision. She was badly hurt. The nearest hospital was Hamilton Memorial, and Hamilton Memorial did not admit Black patients. She was carried instead to a private home.

She was moved to Chattanooga the next day and died there. She was thirty-four.

ADD THIS ENTRY. A Fisk student riding with her was also injured, also refused, and also died. Naming him is the difference between telling one story and telling the whole one.

Her death was reported across the country. Max Yergan, then working for the YMCA, put the case plainly.

ADD THIS ENTRY. W. E. B. Du Bois gathered eyewitness testimony, official statements, and letters, and published the results in The Crisis. That investigation is the reason we can reconstruct the day at all - and it is the spine of the documentary we are making.

A passenger bus struck a bridge near Dalton. Four people were killed and sixteen injured. Every one of them was refused at the door of Hamilton Memorial Hospital. The youngest to die was nine years old. Nothing had changed.