Despite the "college" in its name, it was a private boarding school for elementary to high-school boys, ages 6 to 18.
Moore, then president of the Philadelphia NAACP, was known as much for his colorful language and tough ex-Marine demeanor as his skills as a lawyer.
Girard, he said, was a "cesspool of bigotry and a shrine to segregation."
He argued that even some of the street-gang members he sometimes drew to the protests "could use that education," adding that they might not have been in a gang if they had had good schooling.
"Education and training, don't you think we need it?" he asked a reporter.
National leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins, national NAACP president, also marched at Girard.
Some 3,000 people came in early August 1965 to hear King speak of how "sad" it was "to stand in the city . . . that is the cradle of liberty but has a kind of Berlin Wall to keep God's colored children out."
Then, after 14 years of legal battles to break Girard's will, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling admitting black boys.
The year was 1968.
Owen Gowans was seven and entering second grade when he was one of the first four African-American boys to walk through Girard's gates that fall.
Now a manager in the training department at SEPTA, Gowans, 47, said that he did not know that day of the significance of walking through those gates.
Gowans' father died when he was 2. He recalled his mother, Audrey Small Gowans, "encouraging me that it [Girard] would be good for me, and I believed in my mom that everything would work out."
In a famous photo of the four boys, Gowans is on the right in a plaid jacket. The jacket is now on display at the Girard College Museum at Founder's Hall.
The other boys were Theodore Hicks, William Dade and Carl Riley.
"I didn't know until years later that this whole thing was a big civil-rights case," Gowans said recently.
