It is with a heavy heart that we learned this week of the passing of Fred Carter. His legacy, with that of his family, is inexorably tied to the civil rights movement in Gloucester County, Virginia and the nation.

The year that Carter was born—1944—was the same year that Irene Morgan refused to give up her seat on a Greyhound bus in Saluda. Carter’s father, George Nelson Carter Sr., president of the Tri-County (Gloucester, Mathews and King and Queen) NAACP at that time, stood with Morgan in the fight against this injustice. The case eventually made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Virginia’s state law enforcing segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional.

Carter left his own mark on the civil rights movement with the desegregation of Gloucester County schools. Working with C. Flippo Hicks, a white attorney, the two men set about a peaceful transition to integrated schools.

“So Flip was a really smart guy and he and I s...