Arthur D. Hlavaty

Read up on Pauli Murray. She organized lunch counter sit-ins to desegregate restaurants when she was a law student at Howard university in the mid 1930s. (They were stopped because the legislature pressured the university, which depended on the legislature for its funding.)

That was after she made the newspapers and caused a big public dialogue because she applied to the University of north Carolina and was denied entry on account of her race. Which was only after another young man won a supreme court decision that said forcing a negro to go out of state for graduate school did not satisfy the consideration of "separate but equal".

In the 1930s as well, Eleanor Roosevelt was already publicly fighting segregation, including inviting Marian anderson to sing at the white house and renouncing her DAR membership when they would not allow Anderson to sing in constitution hall. (https://fdrlibrary.org/anderson)

Which is not to say that soldier shouldn't get a memorial. But the whole moniker "Civil rights era" is a misnomer. People were fighting for universal civil rights the entire history of the united States. It's a continuum. People are still fighting for them.