A great believer in civil rights, working with Martin Luther King, Jr. and being a member of CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), she was blacklisted. Arrested during a freedom walk, she received a sentence of six months hard labor but evaded deportation although she remained a Canadian national and never took out United States citizenship. Her activities on behalf of the Civil Rights movement landed her in a Southern jail in 1962, a fact which forever remained a source of pride for her. She was, at one point, represented by Fred Grey, the first African American to represent a Caucasian woman in the American South.
