Ella Baker (1903-1986) An organizer of Black economic cooperatives in
Harlem during the Depression, Ella Baker became the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary
in the 1940s and, nationally, its director of branches. She also helped coordinate Northern
support for the Montgomery bus boycott. She was the first (interim) director of SCLC and
one of its most militant members. A firm advocate for the development of grass roots
leadership and group decision making, Baker helped found the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), serving as the key mentor and advisor to SNCC's young
activists.

Daisy Bates (1920- ) As co-publisher, with her husband, of the Arkansas State Press,
Daisy Bates was a crusader for Black rights in the state. Bates became state president of the
NAACP and was a major player in the Little Rock Nine's successful bid to integrate
Central High School in 1957. Opposed by angry white mobs, the governor of Arkansas,
and the forces of the Arkansas National Guard, Bates and the students persevered. They
met at her home each school day and she accompanied them as they entered Central High
School under police escort. She continued to offer guidance and support to the students
and their families throughout the school year.

Unita Blackwell (1933- ) Born into a family of Mississippi sharecroppers, Unita
Blackwell rose to become a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party. She was arrested more than seventy times while working with SNCC to help get
Black voters registered in Mississippi. In 1976 Blackwell was elected mayor of Mayersville,
Mississippi, where she had once been denied the right to vote.

John Doar (1921- ) A U.S. Justice Department lawyer under Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, John Doar was a key government litigator in civil rights cases. His activism took
him from the courtroom into the streets as he joined the Freedom Riders on their 1961
bus trip through the South. He accompanied James Meredith when Meredith enrolled as
the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. In 1963 Doar attended the funeral
of the murdered movement leader Medgar Evers, and, appealing to the angry crowd of
mourners, helped to stave off a potentially violent response.

Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) Born into slavery, Frederick Augustus Washington
Bailey learned to read (an accomplishment for which he was severely beaten) at the age of
nine as a household servant in Baltimore. In 1838 he escaped to New York from a
Maryland plantation and soon moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he assumed
the name of Frederick Douglass. He was hired as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-
Slavery Society and became the leading abolitionist of the century, lecturing widely
throughout the North. In 1845 he wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave and was later the co-founder of the influential abolitionist newspaper, the
North Star. In his later years Douglass served in a number of government posts and in
1889 was named minister to Haiti.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) A Harvard-educated historian and early civil rights
proponent, Du Bois was a founder in 1905 of the Niagara Movement. This group
denounced the accommodationist philosophy of such leaders as Booker T. Washington,
who had sought limited rights for Black people, but not necessarily "social equality." The
Niagara Movement dissolved in 1909 when Du Bois helped to found the NAACP. He
served as editor of Crisis, the association's journal, and the group emerged as the pre-
eminent Black social justice organization in the United States. A prominent Black
theoretician, Du Bois authored several books, including the famous Souls of Black Folks
and Black Reconstruction. He joined the Communist party in 1961 and a year later
emigrated to Ghana, where he lived until his death, the day before the 1963 March on
Washington.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) President of the United States from 1953 to 1961,
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the nation's thirty-fourth chief executive. In 1953
Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court. In the year
following, the Warren court unanimously rejected the "separate-but-equal" principle of
school segregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. At first reluctant to
intervene in the 1957 crisis at Little Rock's Central High School, Eisenhower eventually
stepped in to nationalize the Arkansas National Guard and quell the violent opposition to
the school's integration.

Medgar Evers (1925-1963) A World War II veteran and college-educated
businessman, Medgar Evers was the first field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi.
Along with his brother Charles he was active in the post World War II voting rights
movement in that state. After Emmett Till's murder, he led the Black effort to find clues
about the killing (often under cover of darkness). In 1963 he organized African American
consumer boycotts of white merchants in Jackson. He was the first Black Mississippian to
apply to the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss") and later counseled James Meredith,
the first Black student to successfully enroll there. That same year he was shot and killed
on the doorstep of his home; his death galvanized the movement in North and South
alike.

James Farmer (1920- ) James Farmer trained for the ministry at Howard University,
but refused ordination in the Methodist church in protest over its racially segregated
congregations. In 1941 he became race-relations secretary for the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, an organization dedicated to pacifism and international harmony. A year
later Farmer joined with students from the University of Chicago in forming the Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial protest group which adopted many of the pacifist
techniques of Mahatma Gandhi. Farmer and CORE pioneered the sit-in technique at a
Chicago restaurant in 1943, and CORE grew into a national organization. In 1961 the group
staged the first of several Freedom Rides, in which an interracial group of protesters faced
violence and arrest as they rode together to challenge segregation on interstate buses.
Farmer served as CORE's national director from 1961 to 1966 and later mounted an
unsuccessful bid for Congress.

Orval Faubus (1910- ) Elected governor of Arkansas in 1954, Faubus used all powers
at his disposal to fight the court-ordered integration of public schools. In 1957 he called in
the National Guard to resist the integration of Little Rock's Central High School by a group
of Black teenagers, known as the Little Rock Nine. Although President Eisenhower
nationalized the Guard and forced the school to admit the students, Faubus retaliated the
following year by closing down the public schools. In a 1958 Gallup poll he was named
one of the ten most admired men in America.

James Forman (1929- ) Executive Secretary of SNCC for most of the 1960s, James
Forman was active in voter registration drives, marches, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and
demonstrations throughout the South. A Chicago school teacher and believer in the tactic
of nonviolent direct action in the early to mid-1960s, he was active in training Northern
students for their participation in Mississippi Freedom Summer. He also strengthened
ties between the young people of SNCC and the burgeoning African liberation
movements.

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) A nineteenth century proponent of nonviolence,
the immediate abolition of slavery, and equal rights for women, Garrison was a
prominent white journalist and publisher for thirty-five years of the newspaper, the
Liberator. He formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and through it helped
to inflame public opinion against slavery.

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) Born in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey spent his early years in
the printing trade there and soon became a fighter for the rights of Black people and the
working class. Fired from his job after participating in a printers' union strike, he traveled
to South America and England. In 1914 he founded the Universal Negro Improvement
Association, the first Black nationalist mass movement, and called for Black people to
seek economic independence from whites. He moved to New York two years later.
Garvey espoused racial pride, racial solidarity, and the creation of an independent and
powerful Negro nation in Africa. In 1925 he was jailed on alleged fraud charges in
connection with the UNIA's many business enterprises, and he was deported to Jamaica in
1927.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) Born into a sharecropping family of twenty children,
Fannie Lou Hamer never attended school beyond the third grade. She turned to activism
in 1962 when she was forced off the plantation by the white land owner because she had
registered to vote. Hamer became SNCC's Mississippi field secretary and vice chairman of
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a political party established to fight for voting
rights and for African American participation in the democratic process. At the 1964
Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, Hamer was a leader of the MFDP's
challenge of the official, all-white Mississippi delegation. After the movement, she went
on to lecture throughout the country on issues of civil rights, women's rights, and the
anti-war movement.

James Hicks (1916-1986) A pioneering Black journalist, Hicks covered the Emmett
Till trial as well as the crisis at Little Rock's Central High for the Amsterdam News, the
largest Black-owned newspaper in New York. Hicks was later named executive editor of
that paper and became an acquaintance of Malcolm X. At the Till trial, he and the other
African American reporters had to sit at a Blacks-only press table in the segregated
courtroom.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) Head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-
eight years, J. Edgar Hoover was an autocratic crime fighter and anti communist. Arguing
that the F.B.I. was an investigative agency and not a protection force, he refused to extend
federal protection to civil rights organizers and demonstrators, though they often faced
harassment and violence. He suspected Communist infiltration in the movement, and
under his direction the F.B.I. waged counterintelligence programs against various civil
rights groups and individuals who supported these groups.

Charles H. Houston (1895-1950) The vice dean of Howard University Law School in
the 1930s, Charles H. Houston championed equal education for Black people in several
landmark court cases. At Howard he trained twenty-two of the twenty-four NAACP
lawyers who eventually worked on the Brown v. Board of Education case, also putting
them through rigorous "mock court" sessions in preparation for active court appearances.
The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in that case discarded the legally enforced
"separate-but-equal" doctrine and paved the way for integration in the schools.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) Vice president of the United States under John F.
Kennedy, Johnson became president upon Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.
He was a former U.S. senator from Texas and a consummate politician and deal maker.
Under his "Great Society" program, his administration succeeded in carrying forth much
of Kennedy's agenda, winning passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting
Rights Act. In 1964 he also launched the "War on Poverty," a federal program aimed at
helping the economically disadvantaged. His escalation of U.S. military involvement in
the Vietnam War met with a rising public outcry, however, and he did not seek his party's
renomination in 1968.

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Sworn in as president of the United States in 1961,
Kennedy was slow to embrace the civil rights movement in his policy making, though he
eloquently championed the movement in several key speeches. His first decisive move
came in the fall of 1962, when he sent federal troops to ensure James Meredith's
registration at the University of Mississippi. Kennedy came to support the efforts of
Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly in Birmingham, and also crafted what became the
1964 Civil Rights Act. His presidency was cut short by an assassin's bullets in November
1963.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) A powerful and inspiring speaker with his roots
in the church, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the foremost leader of the modern civil rights
movement. He earned his Ph.D. degree in theology from Boston University in 1955 but
returned to his native South to become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he led the Black community's year-long boycott
of the city's buses, sparked by Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat to a white
passenger. The crisis ended in a Supreme Court ruling banning discrimination in
municipal transportation. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) in 1957 and went on to lead voter registration drives and demonstrations
throughout the South, as well as the massive 1963 March on Washington. A steadfast
believer in Gandhian nonviolence, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and
was an early and prominent critic of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In 1968 King
was shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had been working on behalf of
striking Black sanitation workers.

John Lewis (1940- ) John Lewis was a seminary student in Nashville, Tennessee,
when he joined the student sit-in movement and helped to found the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was chairman of that group from 1963
to 1966 and addressed the 1963 March on Washington as SNCC's representative. The
youngest speaker that day, he was convinced by older movement leaders to cut out
portions of his inflammatory, anti-Kennedy speech. He was jailed numerous times and
suffered a concussion as a result of the beatings on "Bloody Sunday" during the Selma
march. Lewis went into local politics in the 1970s in Atlanta and was elected to Congress
in 1986.

Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) A student and colleague of Charles H. Houston,
Thurgood Marshall was head of the NAACP's legal staff from 1939 to 1961. He engineered
the NAACP's legal battle against racial segregation in the schools, culminating in victory
in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court. Marshall joined
the high court in 1967 as the nation's first African American Supreme Court justice, after
serving as U.S. Solicitor General.

Bob Moses (1935- ) Bob Moses, a New York school teacher and Harvard graduate
student, was an influential leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). He was a chief organizer and recruiter for Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964
and a key figure in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that year. He was beaten,
shot at, and arrested several times in Mississippi. During the Vietnam War, Moses moved
to Canada to avoid the draft, and lived in rural Tanzania with his wife and children before
returning to the United States in 1976. He received his doctoral degree and won a
MacArthur Foundation Award ("genius grant") in 1982. Moses is now involved in the
implementation of the Algebra Project, a nationwide program providing innovative
instruction in mathematics aimed at African American and Latino elementary and
secondary school students.

Diane Nash (1938- ) In 1960, at the age of twenty-two, Diane Nash was a leader of
Nashville's student sit-in movement, which targeted segregated lunch counters with
nonviolent direct action. She was a founding member of SNCC that same year and also
helped to mobilize support for the Freedom Rides in 1961. The following year Nash
joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and helped conceive and
coordinate that organization's Birmingham campaign. She later became active in both the
peace movement and the women's movement.

E.D. Nixon (1899-1987) A former state and local president of the NAACP in Alabama,
E.D. Nixon was head of Montgomery's chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
labor union, founded by A. Philip Randolph. When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing
to move to the back of a public bus, Nixon arranged for her bail and convinced her to let
the movement use her case to test the segregation laws. He was an organizer of the
ensuing Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 that successfully challenged segregation on the
city's buses.

Rosa Parks (1913- ) Rosa Parks first joined the movement as a youth organizer for
the Montgomery, Alabama, NAACP, working with E. D. Nixon. In the summer of 1955
she attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee training center for labor union and
civil rights activists. That December she was arrested in Montgomery when she refused to
give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. Her arrest touched off the successful
Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.

A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) A founder of Messenger magazine in 1917, A. Philip
Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. For thirty-two years
he was president of the union, which sought to improve the lot of Black railroad workers.
In 1941 he called for a massive march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in
government employment and the defense industries. That march was canceled when
President Franklin Roosevelt, fearing the threat of 10,000 Black demonstrators in
Washington, D.C., issued an executive order banning such discrimination. Twenty-two
years later, with Black people still facing pervasive inequality and discrimination,
Randolph proposed and, with aide Bayard Rustin, helped organize the 1963 March on
Washington, attended by more than 200,000 demonstrators.

Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942- ) Bernice Johnson Reagon was a youth activist in the
Albany, Georgia, movement of the early 1960s, and president of the NAACP's youth
chapter there. She was a founding member of SNCC's Freedom Singers, an a capella
group that toured the country providing inspiration and raising money for the
movement. Reagon later organized another a cappella vocal group, Sweet Honey in the
Rock, in which she still sings. She received her doctorate from Howard University and
became Director of Black Family Life for the Smithsonian Institution.

Jo Ann Robinson (1912- ) Jo Ann Robinson was an English professor at Alabama
State College in Montgomery and co-chair of the Women's Political Council, an
organization of Black professional women who were active in the struggle to end
segregation. A key figure in launching the thirteen-month Montgomery bus boycott,
Robinson mimeographed and, with the help of two students, distributed thousands of
flyers calling upon Black residents to begin the boycott.

Bayard Rustin (1910-1987) Bayard Rustin was an associate of A. Philip Randolph for
three decades. In the 1940s he was a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist
organization, and in 1947 he was jailed for his participation in the FOR's Journey of
Reconciliation, an interracial bus trip through the upper South that was a harbinger of the
Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. He was an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
Montgomery bus boycotters and was also a founder of SCLC in 1957. As the deputy
director of the massive 1963 March on Washington, Rustin played a key role in organizing
and implementing that major demonstration. A coalition builder, Rustin sought to link
the civil rights movement with the labor movement and other groups advocating
progressive social change. An effective debater and cogent thinker, he was also an activist,
arrested twenty-three times in his work for civil rights and economic justice. In his later
years, Rustin headed the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

Fred Shuttlesworth (1922- ) An NAACP leader and clergyman in Birmingham,
Alabama, Fred Shuttlesworth was a founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for
Human Rights after the NAACP was banned by the state of Alabama. He fought for civil
rights in Birmingham during the late 1950s and early 1960s and was host to the Freedom
Riders in 1961. In 1963 he and Martin Luther King, Jr., worked to lead SCLC's campaign in
Birmingham, a notoriously segregated city rife with violence against Blacks.

Sojourner Truth (1799?-1883) Born into slavery, Isabella Van Wagener was set free
upon passage of the New York Emancipation Act of 1827. She took on the name
Sojourner Truth and became an itinerant preacher, crusading for the abolition of slavery
and for woman suffrage. She often lectured alongside Frederick Douglass, and her
speeches galvanized audiences throughout the Northeast. President Abraham Lincoln
appointed her counselor to the freedmen of Washington, D.C., and she continued to
lecture on behalf of Black rights after the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman (1820?-1913) Born into slavery in Maryland, Harriet Tubman
escaped to the North via the Underground Railroad in 1849. She became the best known
of the railroad's "conductors," ushering more than three hundred people to freedom in
nineteen trips to the South. Often referred to as the "Moses of her people," Tubman
worked alongside other prominent abolitionists during the 1850s. During the Civil War,
she worked as a Union army nurse, scout, and spy, and after the war she participated in
temperance and women's rights activities.

Nat Turner (1800-1831) Born into slavery in Virginia, Nat Turner learned to read and
write at an early age. He became convinced that God had chosen him to lead his people
out of slavery, and in 1831 he led a slave uprising in which more than fifty white people
were killed. Turner was convicted and sentenced to death, as were sixteen of his
compatriots, and he was hanged on November 11, 1831.

C.T. Vivian (1924- ) A member of SCLC's executive staff from 1962 to 1967, the
Reverend C.T. Vivian led SCLC's involvement in the Selma movement. He was also
active in other SCLC campaigns throughout the South. He remains active in
organizations, such as the Center for Democratic Renewal, which oppose violent white
"hate groups."

Wyatt Tee Walker (1929- ) Walker was the activist minister of the Gillfield Baptist
Church in Petersburg, Virginia, from 1952 to 1960. He was chief of staff to Martin Luther
King, Jr., and served as the director of SCLC's executive board from 1960 to 1964. He is
currently the executive minister of a prominent activist church in Harlem.

George Wallace (1919- ) The governor of Alabama from 1963 to 1967, George
Wallace was a notorious foe of the civil rights movement. In 1963 he stood in the
doorway of an administration building at the University of Alabama in an attempt to
block the registration of Black students there. Playing to the nationwide "white backlash"
toward the movement, Wallace drew 10 million votes as an independent candidate for
president in 1968. He was elected governor of Alabama again in 1970, and was shot and
seriously wounded during a second presidential bid in 1972. As more Black voters were
added to the voting rolls, he began hiring Black people to state positions and, in 1982, was
elected governor once again, this time with considerable African American support.

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) Born in Mississippi, the daughter of slaves, Ida B. Wells
began teaching at the age of fourteen. In 1884 she moved to Tennessee, where she
attended university classes and continued to teach. In 1891 she refused to give up a seat on
a segregated railroad car and filed suit against the company. Although she initially won
her case, the decision was reversed by the state supreme court. An avid reader, Wells
joined a lyceum of public school teachers and soon became the editor of two Black weekly
newspapers. In 1889 she bought part interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight
and later became its editor. In 1892, outraged by the lynching deaths of three Black men in
the Memphis area, she began a fierce newspaper campaign against lynching. The
newspaper's offices were ransacked as a result, and Wells moved to New York to continue
her career as a writer, lecturer, and anti-lynching crusader. Upon her marriage in 1895 to
Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer, editor, and public official, she moved to Chicago. Now Ida
Wells-Barnett, she remained active, continuing to write and helping to organize Chicago
Black women in the causes of anti-lynching and woman suffrage. She attended the
Niagara Movement's 1909 meeting, which gave rise to the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, but she quickly shunned the NAACP as too moderate.

Roy Wilkins (1901-1981) A newspaperman in his early years, Roy Wilkins joined the
staff of the NAACP in 1931. Three years later he became editor of Crisis, the association's
journal, and moved up through the ranks to become executive secretary in 1955 and
executive director in 1965. A believer in constitutional means to social change, he testified
before Congress on many occasions, wrote extensively on behalf of racial equality, and
gave counsel to several presidents.

Malcolm X (1925-1965) Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm Little grew up with
parents who were organizers with the Marcus Garvey movement and who structured the
family according to the movement's principles of Black pride and self-reliance. Malcolm
spent part of his early years in foster placements. He later moved to Boston and then New
York City, where in 1946 he was convicted and jailed on robbery charges. In prison,
Malcolm became interested in the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,
religious leader of the "Nation of Islam." Upon his release from prison in 1952 Malcolm
changed his name to Malcolm X and rose through the ranks of the NOI. A powerful
orator and critical thinker, Malcolm eventually became the NOI's leading spokesman. He
was made minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem in 1954 and three years later started the
NOI newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Malcolm was named national minister of the
organization in 1963 but the following year he broke with the organization over issues of
leadership, political involvement, and his own evolving philosophy. After visiting Mecca
and several African nations, Malcolm became an advocate of Pan-Africanism and spoke
out against colonialism. He attempted to bring the United States before the United
Nations on charges of human rights abuses toward people of African descent. He also
offered his support to the more traditional civil rights movement and in February 1965, at
the invitation of SNCC, he addressed a packed crowd in a Selma church. Three weeks
later, Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem.

Andrew Young (1932- ) A minister and close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Andrew Young helped to develop SCLC's voter registration campaigns. He became
executive director of SCLC in the mid-1960s. Young won election to Congress in 1972ั
becoming the first Black congressman from Georgia since the early 1870sัand then served
as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Jimmy Carter. In 1981 he was
elected mayor of Atlanta, serving two terms in that post.