The news was packaged as a short story inside the metro section of yesterday’s Washington Post, but in terms of significance it surely ranks in its way with the most important news items of the week. The U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis on Saturday had a ceremony breaking ground for a new building on its campus that will be named in honor of the academy’s first African-American graduate, Wesley Brown.

The Post reports that he was the sixth black midshipman, but that the previous five all left before graduating, “forced out” by “torments inflicted by bigoted upperclassmen.” Mr. Brown, now retired after 20 years of service in the Navy, stuck it out and in 1949 became the first black graduate of Annapolis.

It seems at first like a Southern story – Mr. Brown graduated from Dunbar High School in the District of Columbia and enrolled at Howard University, also in the District, before heading to the Naval Academy, which is in Maryland. Yet as in so many cases, integration got a boost from the North. It was a congressman from New York, Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem, who nominated young Mr. Brown for a spot at the Naval Academy, according to an account in the Trident, the military newspaper that serves Annapolis.

Fifty years on, integration in America seems to many Americans to have been inevitable, or to have been the work of giants like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. Yet it was also the work of little-known heroes at individual institutions, people like Wesley Brown who wanted to serve their country alongside their fellow Americans and whose example inspires us in the struggle for freedom to this day.