Key Women of the Civil Rights Movement

Womens Studies 222 Winterim 2010

Sojourner Truth (1797- 1883)

The woman we know as Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York as Isabella Baumfree (after her father's owner, Baumfree). She was sold several times, and while owned by the John Dumont family in Ulster County, married Thomas, another of Dumont's slaves. She had five children with Thomas. In 1827, New York law emancipated all slaves, but Isabella had already left her husband and run away with her youngest child. She went to work for the family of Isaac Van Wagenen. While working for the Van Wagenen's -- whose name she used briefly -- she discovered that a member of the Dumont family had sold one of her children to slavery in Alabama. Since this son had been emancipated under New York Law, Isabella sued in court and won his return. Isabella experienced a religious conversion, moved to New York City and to a Methodist perfectionist commune, and there came under the influence of a religious prophet named Mathias. The commune fell apart a few years later, with allegations of sexual improprieties and even murder. Isabella herself was accused of poisoning, and sued successfully for libel. She continued as well during that time to work as a household servant. In 1843, she took the name Sojourner Truth, believing this to be on the instructions of the Holy Spirit and became a traveling preacher (the meaning of her new name). In the late 1840s she connected with the abolitionist movement, becoming a popular speaker. In 1850, she also began speaking on woman suffrage. Her most famous speech, Ain't I a Woman?, was given in 1851 at a women's rights convention in Ohio. Sojourner Truth met Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote about her for the Atlantic Monthly and wrote a new introduction to Truth's autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth moved to Michigan and joined yet another religious commune, this one associated with the Friends. She was at one point friendly with Millerites, a religious movement that grew out of Methodism and later became the Seventh Day Adventists. During the Civil War Sojourner Truth raised food and clothing contributions for black regiments, and met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1864. While there, she tried to challenge the discrimination that segregated street cars by race. After the War ended, Sojourner Truth again spoke widely, advocating for some time a "Negro State" in the west. She spoke mainly to white audiences, and mostly on religion, "Negro" and women's rights, and on temperance, though immediately after the Civil War she tried to organize efforts to provide jobs for black refugees from the war. Active until 1875, when her grandson and companion fell ill and died, Sojourner Truth returned to Michigan where her health deteriorated and she died in 1883 in a Battle Creek sanitorium of infected ulcers on her legs. She was buried in Battle Creek, Michigan, after a very well-attended funeral. Source: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/sojournertruth/a/sojourner_truth.htm

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Harriet Beecher was born June 14, 1811, the seventh child of a famous protestant preacher. Harriet worked as a teacher with her older sister Catharine: her earliest publication was a geography for children, issued under her sister's name in 1833. In 1836, Harriet married widower Calvin Stowe: they eventually had seven children. Stowe helped to support her family financially by writing for local and religious periodicals. During her life, she wrote poems, travel books, biographical sketches, and children's books, as well as adult novels. She met and corresponded with people as varied as Lady Byron, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and George Eliot. She died at the age of 85, in Hartford Connecticut. While she wrote at least ten adult novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe is predominantly known for her first, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Begun as a serial for the Washington anti-slavery weekly, the National Era, it focused public interest on the issue of slavery, and was deeply controversial. In writing the book, Stowe drew on her personal experience: she was familiar with slavery, the antislavery movement, and the underground railroad because Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio, where Stowe had lived, was a slave state. Following publication of the book, she became a celebrity, speaking against slavery both in America and Europe. She wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) extensively documenting the realities on which the book was based, to refute critics who tried to argue that it was inauthentic; and published a second antislavery novel, Dred in1856. In 1862, when she visited President Lincoln, legend claims that he greeted her as "the little lady who made this big war": the war between the states. Campaigners for other social changes, such as Caroline Norton, respected and drew upon her work. The historical significance of Stowe's antislavery writing has tended to draw attention away from her other work, and from her work's literary significance. Her work is admittedly uneven. At its worst, it indulges in a romanticized Christian sensibility that was much in favour with the audience of her time, but that finds little sympathy or credibility with modern readers. At her best, Stowe was a early and effective realist. Her settings are often accurately and detailedly described. Her portraits of local social life, particularly with minor characters, reflect an awareness of the complexity of the culture she lived in, and an ability to communicate that culture to others. In her commitment to realism, and her serious narrative use of local dialect, Stowe predated works like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn by 30 years, and influenced later regionalist writers including Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Source: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/stowe/StoweHB.html

Harriet Tubman (1820-1913)

Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad's "conductors." During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she "never lost a single passenger." Tubman was born a slave in Maryland's Dorchester County around 1820. At age five or six, she began to work as a house servant. Seven years later she was sent to work in the fields. While she was still in her early teens, she suffered an injury that would follow her for the rest of her life. Always ready to stand up for someone else, Tubman blocked a doorway to protect another field hand from an angry overseer. The overseer picked up and threw a two-pound weight at the field hand. It fell short, striking Tubman on the head. She never fully recovered from the blow, which subjected her to spells in which she would fall into a deep sleep. Around 1844 she married a free black named John Tubman and took his last name. (She was born Araminta Ross; she later changed her first name to Harriet, after her mother.) In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, was to be sold, Tubman resolved to run away. She set out one night on foot. With some assistance from a friendly white woman, Tubman was on her way. She followed the North Star by night, making her way to Pennsylvania and soon after to Philadelphia, where she found work and saved her money. The following year she returned to Maryland and escorted her sister and her sister's two children to freedom. She made the dangerous trip back to the South soon after to rescue her brother and two other men. On her third return, she went after her husband, only to find he had taken another wife. Undeterred, she found other slaves seeking freedom and escorted them to the North. By 1856, Tubman's capture would have brought a $40,000 reward from the South. On one occasion, she overheard some men reading her wanted poster, which stated that she was illiterate. She promptly pulled out a book and feigned reading it. The ploy was enough to fool the men. Tubman had made the perilous trip to slave country 19 times by 1860, including one especially challenging journey in which she rescued her 70-year-old parents. Of the famed heroine, who became known as "Moses," Frederick Douglass said, "Excepting John Brown -- of sacred memory -- I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than [Harriet Tubman]. And John Brown, who conferred with "General Tubman" about his plans to raid Harpers Ferry, once said that she was "one of the bravest persons on this continent." Becoming friends with the leading abolitionists of the day, Tubman took part in antislavery meetings. On the way to such a meeting in Boston in 1860, in an incident in Troy, New York, she helped a fugitive slave who had been captured. During the Civil War Harriet Tubman worked for the Union as a cook, a nurse, and even a spy. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she would spend the rest of her long life. She died in 1913. Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1535.html

Josephine Ruffin (1842-1924)

Josephine St. Pierre, was born in Boston on 31st August, 1842. Her mother was a white woman and her father had been born in Martinique. John St. Pierre was a successful clothes dealer and was able to afford a good education for his daughter. He objected to the segregated schools in Boston and so she was sent to Salem to be educated. When Josephine was sixteen she married George Lewis Ruffin, the first African-American to graduate from Harvard Law School.The couple were both active in the struggle against slavery and during the Civil War they helped recruit black soldiers for the Union Army. Josephine also supported women's suffrage and in 1869 joined with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Boston. George Lewis Ruffin died in 1886. He had been a successful lawyer and municipal judge and left his wife a considerable amount of money. Josephine decided to use this to fund the Woman's Era, the country's first journal published by and for African-American women. Edited by her daughter, Flora Ruffin, the monthly magazine advocated women's suffrage and equal civil rights. In 1895 Ruffin organized the formation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women. The following year it merged with the Colored Women's League to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Mary Church Terrell was elected president and Ruffin served as one of the organization's vice-presidents. Ruffin remained active in the struggle for equal rights and in 1910 helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Josephine Ruffin, co-founder of the League of Women for Community Service, died in Boston on 13th March, 1924. Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASruffin.htm

Fanny Garrison Villard (1844-1928)

Fanny Garrison Villard, the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison and Helen Villard, was born on 16th December, 1844. She taught the piano until marrying Henry Villard, the owner of the The Nation. Her son, Oswald Garrison Villard, was born in 1872. Villard an active supporter of women's rights, joined the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1906. She was also, like her son, Oswald Garrison Villard, a founder member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). A committed pacifist,Villard with Lillian Wald, led a parade of 1200 women down Fifth Avenue in New York on 29th August, 1914 to protest against the First World War.Villard was also a member of the Woman's Peace Party (WPP) and after the war helped establish the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Fanny Garrison Villard died on 5th July, 1928.

Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAWvillard.htm

Lucy Parsons (1853-1942)

Little is known about the early life of Lucy Parsons. She claimed to have been born the daughter of a Mexican women, Marie del Gather and John Waller, a Creek Indian, and orphaned at age three. From there she said she was raised on a ranch in Texas by her maternal uncle. However, later research has pointed to the possibility that she was a slave in Texas. Around 1870 she met Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier turned radical Republican and married him in either 1871 or 1872. Forced to flee Texas because of their mixed marriage, they settled in Chicago in 1873 and became heavily involved in the revolutionary elements of the labor movement. In 1877 Lucy Parsons opened a dress shop after her husband was blacklisted from the printing trade. She began writing articles about the homeless and unemployed, Civil War veterans, and working women for The Socialist in 1878, and gave birth to two children within the next few years. Known for being a powerful writer and speaker, Parsons played a crucial role in the worker's movements in Chicago. In 1883 she helped found the International Working People's Association (IWPA), an anarchist-influenced labor organization that promoted revolutionary direct action towards a stateless and cooperative society and insisted on the equality of people of color and women. Parsons became a frequent contributor to the IPWA weekly paper The Alarm in 1884. Her most famous piece was "To Tramps," which encouraged workers and the unemployed to rise up in direct acts of violence against the rich. Although Parsons was primarily a labor activist, she was also a staunch advocate of the rights of African Americans. She wrote numerous articles and pamphlets condemning racist attacks and killings. Her most significant piece being "The Negro: Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician and Prayer to the Preacher." Published in The Alarm on April 3rd, 1886, the article was a response to the Iynching of thirteen African Americans in Corrollton, MS. In it, she claimed that blacks where only victimized because they were poor, and that racism would inevitably disappear with the destruction of capitalism. In 1886 Parsons and the IPWA worked with the other industrial trade unions for a general strike in support of the 8 hour work day beyinning on the first of May that involved close to 80,000 workers. Five days later at a rally at Haymarket Square in support of the strike, a bomb was hurled at police officers after they attacked the demonstration. Police blamed the IWPA and began rounding up anarchist organizers, including Albert Parsons. Lucy Parsons took the lead in organizing their defense, and after they were all found guilty of murder, she travelled the country speaking on behalf of their innocence and raising money for their appeals. In November of that year her husband was hanged, along with the other three Haymarket defendants. After her husband's death, Parsons continued revolutionary activism on behalf of workers, political prisoners, people of color, the homeless, and women. In 1892 she published the short lived Freedom, which attacked Iynchings and black peonage. In 1905 she participated in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, an anarcho-syndicalist trade union, and also published a paper called The Liberator. In 1927 she was made a member of the National Committee of the International Labor Defense, a communist-led organization that defended labor activists and unjustly accused African Americans such as the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Herndon. After working with the Communist Party for a number of years, she finally joined in 1939, despairing of the advance of both capitalism and fascism on the world stage and unconvinced of the anarchists' ability to effectively confront them. After almost 50 years of continuous activism, Parsons died in a fire in her Chicago home in 1942. Viewed as a threat to the political order in death as well as life, her personal papers and books were seized by the police from the gutted house.

Source: http://lucyparsons.org/biography-freesociety.php

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)

Ida B. Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her father, James, was a carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth, was a famous cook. Both parents were literate and taught Ida how to read at a young age. She was surrounded by political activists and grew up with a sense of hope about the possibilities of former slaves within the American society. Both parents died, along with an infant brother, during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic when Ida was 16 years old. At that young age, she assumed the responsibility of rearing her five younger brothers and sisters. She soon became a teacher in order to earn money for the family and eventually ended up working in Memphis. While there, one day changed her life forever. She has accustomed to riding the train in whatever seat she chose. In 1883, she sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad because they forbade her from sitting in the ladies coach subsequently wrote and article about the experience. The success of her article about the ease influenced her career change to journalist. As injustices against former slaves raged throughout the South and a reign of terror began, Wells' sense of indignation and quest for justice was fueled. She decided to use her pen to expose the motives behind the violence. Lynching had become one of the main tactics in the strategy to terrorize blacks, and exposing its real purpose became the target of her crusade for justice. When three of her male friends, who were upstanding, law-abiding, successful businessmen (in direct competition with white businessmen), were lynched on the pretext of a crime they did not commit, Wells wrote about the situation with a clarity and forcefulness that riveted the attention of both blacks and whites. Her major contention that lynchings were a systematic attempt to subordinate the black community was incendiary. She advocated for both an economic boycott and a mass exodus. She traveled through the United States and England, writing and speaking about lynching and the government's refusal to intervene to stop it. This so enraged her enemies that they burned her presses, and put a price on her head, threatening her life if she returned to the South. She remained in exile for almost forty years. Wells went to Chicago in the mid-1890s where she met and married Ferdinand Barnett, a widower and a fellow crusader who was a wellknown attorney as well as the founder of The Conservator newspaper. In addition to raising Barnett's two children from his previous marriage, the couple had four children of their own in eight years. Even with this added responsibility, Wells continued in her relentless fight for social justice. She was very active in the suffragist movement and became one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Association for Colored Women (NACW). Ida B. Wells-Barnett died in 1931, leaving a formidable legacy of undaunted courage and tenacity in the fight against racism and sexism in America. Source: http://www.idabwells.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47&Itemid=54

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

Born into an affluent family in 1863, Mary Church Terrell was a native of Memphis, Tennessee. Louisa Church started a successful hair salon in Memphis which enabled the family to purchase their first house and carriage. Her father Robert Church was an ex-slave, the son of his former master. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 caused residents to desert their properties, he bought up large real estate holdings and reputedly became the first black millionaire in the South. Wanting her to have the life of a genteel lady, her father sent her to public and private schools in Ohio. In 1884, she graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in the classics. Although her father threatened to disinherit her, Mary taught at Wilberforce College and then at Washington Colored High School. In Washington, D.C. she met her future husband Robert Terrell, the principal of the citys highly respected black public school. A Harvard graduate and lawyer, he was bound for a municipal judgeship. Terrells accomplishments were impressive. She and Frederick Douglass met with President Benjamin Harrison at the White House, demanding he take a stand against lynching. She served as president of the Bethel Library and Historical Society, became the first black woman to serve on the Washington, D.C. Board of Education, and cofounded the Washington Colored Womens League. When the League merged with the National Federation of Afro-American Women to become the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, she served as the new organizations first president. In 1909, she joined the fledgling NAACP. Between 1913 and 1914, she helped found the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and wrote its creed twenty-six years later. During World War I, she was active in the War Camp Community Service which facilitated the demobilization of African American soldiers. Terrell served as a U.S. delegate to many international conferences. She met the famous writer H.G. Wells in London. In her address to the International Council of Women in Berlin, she amazed the delegates with her knowledge of French and German. Her recurring theme was full rights for women and blacks worldwide. Terrells home of Washington, D.C. remained heavily segregated until she helped change the citys racist practices in 1953. At eighty-nine, Terrell headed a committee of well-known citizens to demand the enforcement of a seventyfive-year-old law prohibiting the discrimination of respectable persons in restaurants. After she and a group of blacks were refused service at several restaurants they filed a suit in which the Supreme Court upheld the old law. Soon after, segregation faded from hotels, theaters, and other public places in the city. Mary Church Terrell died in Annapolis, Maryland in 1954, a few months after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation.
Source: http://www.afroamfl.com/blackhistory.aspx?contributor=marychurchterrell

Mary White Ovington (1865-1951)

Mary White Ovington was to parents who were members of the Unitarian Church and supporters of women's rights and had been involved in anti-slavery movement. Educated at Packer Collegiate Institute and Radcliffe College, Ovington became involved in the campaign for civil rights in 1890 after hearing Frederick Douglass speak in a Brooklyn church. In 1895 she helped found the Greenpoint Settlement in Brooklyn. Appointed head of the project the following year, Ovington remained until 1904 when she was appointed fellow of the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations. Over the next five years she studied employment and housing problems in black Manhattan. During her investigations she met William Du Bois, an African American from Harvard University, and she was introduced to the founding members of the Niagara Movement. Influenced by the ideas of William Morris, Ovington joined the Socialist Party in 1905, where she met people such as Daniel De Leon, Asa Philip Randolph, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman and Jack London, who argued that racial problems were as much a matter of class as of race. Ovington wrote for radical journals and newspapers such as, The Masses, New York Evening Post and The Call. She also worked with Ray Stannard Baker and influenced the content of his book, Following the Color Line (1908). In September 1908 Ovington read an article by William English Walling, entitled Race War in the North, that described the atrocities being carried out against African-Americans. Walling ended the article by calling for a powerful body of citizens to come to their aid. Ovington responded to the article by writing to Walling and at a meeting in New York they decided to form the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). The first meeting of the organization was held on 12th February, 1909. In 1910 Ovington was appointed as executive secretary of the NAACP. The following year she attended the Universal Races Congress in London. Ovington remained active in the struggle for women's suffrage and as a pacifist opposed America's involvement in the First World War. During the war Ovington supported Asa Philip Randolph and his magazine, The Messenger, which campaigned for black civil rights. After the war Ovington served the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People as board member, executive secretary and chairman. The NAACP fought a long legal battle against segregation and racial discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting and transportation. They appealed to the Supreme Court to rule that several laws passed by southern states were unconstitutional and won three important judgments between 1915-23 concerning voting rights and housing. Ovington wrote several books and articles including a study of black Manhattan, Half a Man (1911), Status of the Negro in the United States (1913), Socialism and the Feminist Movement (1914), an anthology for black children, The Upward Path (1919), biographical sketches of prominent African Americans, Portraits in Color (1927), an autobiography, Reminiscences (1932) and a history of the NAACP, The Walls Come Tumbling Down (1947). Ovington who retired as a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1947 and in doing so, ended her thirty-eight years service with the organization. Mary White Ovington died in 1951.

Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASovington.htm

Mary Burnett (1866-1923)

Mary Burnett was born in Oberlin, Ohio in 1866. After graduating from Oberlin College, she became a teacher at Bethel University in Little Rock, Arkansas. Eventually she became vice principal but left teaching after marrying William Talbert and moving to Buffalo. Talbert obtained a Ph.D degree at the University of Buffalo and during the First World War she served as a Red Cross nurse on the Western Front. Talbert was the president of the Christian Culture Congress and the National Association of Colored Women (1916-21). A founder member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), she was for several years its director. After the First World War Talbert toured Europe giving lectures on women's rights and race relations. In 1921 she travelled thousands of miles making public speeches in an attempt to gain support for Dyer's anti-lynching bill. Mary Talbert died in 1923.

Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAStalbert.htm

Charlotta Spears Bass (1874-1969)

Charlotta A. Bass stands among the most influential African Americans of the twentieth century. A crusading journalist and extraordinary political activist, she was at the forefront of the civil rights struggles of her time, especially in Los Angeles, but also in California and the nation. Bass was managing editor and publisher of the California Eagle, from 1912 to 1951. The Eagle, founded in 1879, was one of the longest running African American newspapers in the West. Bass was also a political candidate at the local, state, and national level, including running for vice president of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952. She became the first African-American woman to run for national office as the Vice Presidential candidate on the Progressive Party ticket. She used the newspaper, along with directaction campaigns and the political process, to challenge inequality for Blacks, workers, women, and other minorities in Los Angeles. Her mission was nothing short of achieving the equality and justice promised by the United States Constitution. She believed her own role in society, and the role of the Black community, was defined by Americanism, democracy, and citizenship. Acting on this belief, Bass was one of the pioneers who helped to lay the groundwork for the later Civil Rights Movement and the women's liberation movement. She fought important battles against job and housing discrimination, police brutality, and media stereotyping, and for immigrant and women's rights and civil liberties. Over time, her role as an activist evolved from championing local business concerns, to strengthening the labor movement, fighting fascism at home and abroad during World War II, and showing a global concern for world peace. Her leadership, courage, truth-telling, and tenacity were an effective force in Los Angeles, and the world, that yielded greater equality for Blacks, workers, and other people facing oppression. Bass paid a price for her outspokenness. Her life was threatened on numerous occasions. The FBI placed her under surveillance on the charge that her newspaper was seditious and continued to monitor her until her death. Accused of being a Communist, in 1950, she was called before the California Legislature's Joint FactFinding Committee on un-American Activities. The accusations began to take a toll on her effectiveness in the community and her ability to sell her newspaper. In 1951, she sold the paper and continued her work in the political realm. Whatever the consequences, Bass didn't waver in her pursuit of justice. Both Bass and her newspaper served the people--fighting for them, speaking for them, and leading them in battles against inequality and injustice.

Source: http://www.socallib.org/bass/story/index.html

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)

Equal parts educator, politician, and social visionary, Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the most prominent African American women of the first half of the twentieth centuryand one of the most powerful. Known as the "First Lady of the Struggle," she devoted her career to improving the lives of African Americans through education and political and economic empowerment, first through the school she founded, Bethune-Cookman College, later as president of the National Council of Negro Women, and then as a top black administrator in the Roosevelt administration. Born the fifteenth of seventeen children to parents who were former slaves, Mary Jane McLeod grew up in rural South Carolina and attended segregated mission schools. She initially intended to become a missionary but turned to education when the Presbyterian mission board rejected her application to go to Africa. After marrying Albertus Bethune in 1898, she moved to Florida where in 1904 she founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls. In 1923, the school merged with the all-male Cookman Institute of Jacksonville and eventually became Bethune-Cookman College, a four-year, coeducational institution. Bethune served as the college's president until 1942 and again from 1946-47. At the same time, Bethune also cemented her position as a leader in African American education and the African American women's club movement by serving as president of state, regional, and national organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women. In 1935, she founded a more politically oriented organization, the National Council of Negro Women, a coalition of black women's organizations focused on ending segregation and discrimination and cultivating better international relationships. She served as its president until 1949. During World War II, Bethune served as special assistant to the secretary of war and assistant director of the Women's Army Corps. In that capacity she organized the first women's officer candidate schools and lobbied federal officials, including Franklin Roosevelt, on behalf of African American women who wanted to join the military. Bethune left the federal government after the NYA disbanded in 1944. She continued as president of the National Council of Negro Women until 1949 and, in that capacity, attended the founding conference of the United Nations. After her retirement, she returned to Florida where she continued to speak and write about civil rights issues. She died in 1955.

Source: http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/bethune-mary.htm

Daisy Lampkin (1884-1965)

Born August 9, 1884 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Daisy Lampkin became one of the most highly acclaimed African American women of her time. While Lampkin is best known for becoming the first women to be elected to the national board of the NAACP, she spent much of her life rallying for racial and gender equality. Lampkins social and political activism began shortly after graduating from high school. After migrating to Pittsburgh, Lampkin worked as a motivational speaker for housewives and organized women into consumer protest groups. In addition, as an active member of the Lucy Stone Womens Suffrage League and the National Suffrage League, Lampkin rallied for womens right to vote. Understanding the challenges specific to African American women, she also became involved with the National Association for Colored Women (NACW), and was later named national organizer and chair of the executive board. Due to Lampkins exceptional activism for African Americans, she was profiled in the Pittsburgh Courier in December of 1912. In response, Lampkin became a strong advocate of the Courier and even received a cash prize in 1913 for selling the most subscriptions. After several years of investing time and money to this newspaper, Lampkin was elected vice-president of the Courier Publishing Company in 1929. For over thirty years, Lampkin was an enthusiastic member and officer for the NAACP. Between 1930 and 1964, she served as an officer for three consecutive terms. Lampkin began as a regional secretary (19301935), than served as the national secretary (1935-1947), and lastly, as a member of the board of the directors (1947-1964). Throughout her years of service with the NAACP, Lampkin increased membership and gave speeches throughout the United States. In addition, she continued to rally for voting rights, becoming vice-chair for both the Colored Voters Division of the Republican Party and the Negro Voters League of Pennsylvania. Decades of rallying for social, political, and gender equality took its toll on Lampkins physical health and she suffered a stroke in 1964. After spending her entire adult years advocating for equality, Lampkin retired to her home. In December of 1964, she was honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt-Mary McLeod Bethune World Citizenship Award from the National Council of Negro Women for her dedication to racial and gender equality. After giving over fifty years of her life to the struggle for African American equality, Lampkin passed away on March 10, 1965.

Source: http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/lampkin-daisy-1884-1964

Inez Milholland (1886-1916)

Inez Milholland was born in Brooklyn, New York on 6th August, 1886. She attended Vassar and was suspended after organizing a women's suffrage meeting in a cemetery. Inez was an early member of the NAACP founded in 1909. After her graduation in 1909, Milholland made her first appearance as a suffrage orator, stopping a New York campaign parade for President William Howard Taft when she began speaking through a megaphone from a window in a building the parade was passing. As she spoke hundreds of men broke ranks to see and hear her, thus beginning her reputation as the one of the most powerful, persuasive, and beautiful orators in the suffrage movement. In the same year, Milholland applied to the law schools at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia only to be rejected on the basis of her sex. Eventually, she entered the New York University School of Law from which she would receive a law degree in 1912. While studying for her degree, Milholland continued her suffrage work as well as other social activism, most notably participating in the shirtwaist and laundry worker strikes in New York City, for which she was arrested.

In 1913 Milholland led the women's suffrage demonstration in Washington on a white horse. Wearing white robes, the photograph of Milholland during the parade became one of the most memorable images of the struggle for women's rights in America. Milholland lived in Greenwich Village and was associated with a group of socialists involved in the production of The Masses journal. This included Max Eastman, John Reed, Crystal Eastman, Inez Milholland, Louis Untermeyer, Randolf Bourne, Dorothy Day, Mabel Dodge, Floyd Dell and Louise Bryant. Like most of the people involved with The Masses, Milholland was opposed to America's involvement in the First World War. In December, 1915, Milholland and other pacifists travelled on Henry Ford's Peace Ship to Europe. On her return to the United States she became one of the leaders of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage. The movement's most popular orator, Milholland was in demand as a speaker at public meetings all over the United States. Milholland, who suffered from pernicious anemia, and was warned by her doctor of the dangers of vigorous campaigning. However, she refused to heed this advice and on 22nd October, 1916, she collapsed in the middle of a speech in Los Angeles. She was rushed to hospital but despite repeated blood transfusions she died on 25th November, 1916.

Sources: http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/inez-milholland.html and http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jmilholland.htm

Anna Arnold Hedgeman(1889-1990)

Born Anna Arnold in Marshalltown, Iowa she moved with her family to Anoka, Minnesota when she was very young. Her father created an insular world for Hedgeman and her sisters. "I grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, in a small, comfortable Midwestern town with the traditional main street," she wrote in her book The Trumpet Sounds. "There was no poverty as I have come to know it in the slums of our urban centers. I had not realized that a man could need bread and not be able to get it." The only African American family in an area dominated by European immigrants, the Arnolds were very much a part of the community and the young Arnold children were never made to feel different. Hedgeman's father created a nurturing environment that stressed education and a strong work ethic. In that environment, however, there was also a strictness and high level of expectation for Hedgeman and her two sisters. She learned to read at home, but wasn't permitted to attend school until she was seven years old. Following her graduation from high school, Hedgeman prepared to attend Hamline University, a small Methodist college. She would become the first African American student at Hamline. One of the highlights of her college years was a lecture given by author and NAACP president W.E.B. DuBois in St. Paul. Hedgeman recalled in The Gift of Chaos, "The audience gave rapt attention and I returned to the campus with the image of black men of poise, dignity, and intelligence, who were determined to be free." In November of 1933 Hedgeman married her husband, Merrit, who was an interpreter of African American folk music. The following year, she returned to New York to be with her husband and took a job as a supervisor and consultant to the Emergency Relief Bureau, now called the Department of Welfare. She would remain in that position until 1938 when she went back to the YWCA as director of the African American branch in Brooklyn. Disillusioned with the blatant segregation policies of the national Association, Hedgeman resigned and went to work as an assistant in race relations for the National Office of Civilian Defense. In 1944, Hedgeman served as the executive director of the newly-formed National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. This organization initiated national legislative programs to ensure that minority groups would have access to education and jobs. The main goal of the organization was to secure passage of the FEPC bill, which would have guaranteed the right to work without regard to race, creed, or color. Passage of the bill was defeated in 1945. In 1949, after working on Harry Truman's presidential campaign, Hedgeman went to work as an assistant to the administrator of the Federal Security Agency, which was later known as the Office of Health, Education and Welfare. This position enabled her to spend three months in India as an exchange leader for the Department of State. Upon returning to New York, Hedgeman became involved in city politics and, following the election of Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. in 1954, became the first African American woman to hold a mayoral cabinet position in the city's history. In this position, Hedgeman was responsible for corresponding with eight city departments and served as a liaison for international guests visiting New York. Disenchanted with the back room bureaucracy of city hall, Hedgeman resigned in 1958 to take a job as a public relations consultant for the Fuller Products Company, a cosmetics firm. At Fuller Products, she made contacts with church and civic groups and gave daily lectures to salesmen. When company president S.B. Fuller bought the New York Age, the nation's oldest African American newspaper, Hedgeman was asked to serve as associate editor and columnist. Due to dwindling circulation, the paper ceased production in 1960. That same year, Hedgeman was the keynote speaker at the first Conference of the Woman of Africa and of African Descent held in Ghana. In 1963, Hedgeman was asked to serve as Coordinator of Special Events for the Commission of Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches. Her first task was to locate 30,000 white Protestants from across the country who were willing to participate in a March on Washington scheduled for August 28, 1963. Hedgeman played a major role in what is considered one of the greatest civil rights moments in history. When she noticed that there were no women scheduled to speak at the Lincoln Memorial, Hedgeman moved swiftly to correct the oversight. She also worked with the National Council of Churches to ensure passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, a descendant of the FEPC bill proposed twenty years earlier. Selected Awards: Consumer Protective Committee Award, 1955; Outstanding Citizen's Award, Abyssinian Baptist Church, 1956; Manhattan Arts and Educational Guild Award Certificate, 1957; Rust College Shield Award, 1971; Frederick Douglass Award, 1974; Pioneer Woman Award, New York State Conference on Midlife and Older Women, 1983.
Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/anna-arnold-hedgeman

Marion Anderson (1897-1993)

Throughout her life, Marian had experienced racism, but the most famous event occurred in 1939. Hurok tried to rent Washington, D.C.s Constitutional Hall, the citys foremost center, but was told no dates were available. Washington was segregated and even the hall had segregated seating. In 1935, the hall instated a new clause: concert by white artists only. Hurok would have walked away with the response hed received, but a rival manager asked about renting the hall for the same dates and was told they were open. The halls director told Hurok the truth, even yelling before slamming down the phone, No Negro will ever appear in this hall while I am manager. The public was outraged, famous musicians protested, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), who owned the hall. Roosevelt, along with Hurok and Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), encouraged Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange a free open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for Easter Sunday. On April 9, Marian sang before 75,000 people and millions of radio listeners. Several weeks later, Marian gave a private concert at the White House, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt was entertaining King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Britain. In 1957, she toured India and the Far East as a goodwill ambassador through the U.S. State Department and the American National Theater and Academy. She traveled 35,000 miles in 12 weeks, giving 24 concerts. After that, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed her as a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. She sang at his inauguration, as well as John F. Kennedys in 1961. In 1962, she toured Australia. In 1963, she sang at the March on Washington for Job and Freedom. During her career, she received many awards, including the Springarn Medal in 1939, given annually to a black American who shall have made the highest achievement during the preceding year or years in any honorable field of endeavor. In 1941, she received the Bok award, given annually to an outstanding Philadelphia citizen. She used the $10,000 prize money to found the Marian Anderson Scholarships. In 1963, President Lyndon Johnson awarded her the American Medal of Freedom. In 1977, Congress awarded her a gold medal for what was thought to be her 75th birthday. In 1980, the U.S. Treasury Department coined a half-ounce gold commemorative medal with her likeness. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan presented her with the National Medal of Arts. Early on, she insisted on vertical seating in segregated cities; meaning black audience members would be allotted seats in all parts of the auditorium. Many times, it was the first time blacks would sit in the orchestra section. By 1950, she would refuse to sing where the audience was segregated.

Source: http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/ande-mar.htm

Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987)

Septima Clark is considered the Teacher to the Movement She was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 3, 1898, and was the second of eight children. In 1916 she finished 12th grade and, unable financially to attend Fisk University as her teachers had hoped and, as an African American, forbidden to teach in the Charleston public schools at that time, Poinsette took the state examination that would permit her to teach in rural areas. Her first job was on John's Island, South Carolina. The racial inequity of teachers' salaries and facilities she experienced while there motivated her to become an advocate for change. Clark left John's Island in 1919 in order to teach and to campaign for a law allowing black teachers in the Charleston public schools. The same year that the law was passed (1920), Septima Poinsette married Nerie Clark, a navy cook. The marriage ended five years later when Nerie Clark died of kidney failure. The couple had two children; one died in infancy. Clark returned to teaching on John's Island until 1927, when she moved to Columbia, South Carolina. There she continued to teach and to pursue her own education, studying during summers at Columbia University in New York City and with W.E.B. Du Bois at Atlanta University in Georgia. She received a bachelor's degree from Benedict College in 1942 and a master's degree from Hampton Institute in 1945. During this time she was also active in several social and civic organizations, among them the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with whom she campaigned, along with attorney Thurgood Marshall, for equal pay for black teachers in Columbia. In an effort to diminish the effectiveness of the NAACP, the South Carolina state legislature banned state employees from being associated with civil rights organizations, and in 1956 Clark was forced to leave South Carolina for a job in Tennessee when she refused to withdraw her membership from the NAACP. In Tennessee she helped found citizenship schools that were designed to achieve literacy and political empowerment within the black community. Clark joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961 as director of education and teaching. In 1962 the SCLC joined with other organizations to form the Voter Education Project, which served to train teachers for citizenship schools and assisted in increased voter registration among African Americans. A decade later the first African Americans since Reconstruction were elected to the U.S. Congress. After Clark retired from active SCLC work in 1970, she fought and won reinstatement of the teaching pension and back pay that had been canceled when she was dismissed in 1956. She later served two terms on the Charleston County School Board. In 1979 Clark received a Living Legacy Award from U.S. President Jimmy Carter. She died on John's Island, South Carolina, on December 15, 1987.

Source: http://dickinsg.intrasun.tcnj.edu/akaauthors2/Septima.htm

Ella Jo Baker (1903-1986)

Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. She developed a sense for social justice early in her life. As a girl growing up in North Carolina, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner. Ella Baker Center honors Ella's legacy of building justice and peace through grassroots action: Books Not Bars fights to redirect California's resources away from youth incarceration and towards youth opportunities. Green Collar Job Campaign works to ensure that the emerging green economy is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Soul of the City is our hands-on, hands-together campaign to create an Oakland that is safe, healthy, and balanced.

Baker studied at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations. In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women's organizations. Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South. In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King's new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship. On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service. Baker left the SCLC after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted to assist the new student activists and organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- SNCC -- was born. Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize in the 1961 Freedom Rides. In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters. With Ella Bakers guidance and encouragement, SNCC became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country. Her influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: Fundi, a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.

Source: http://ellabakercenter.org/page.php?pageid=19&contentid=9

Virginia Foster Durr (1903-1999)

Virginia Foster Durr was born near Birmingham in 1903, her long life bridged the post-Civil War era to the American Civil Rights Movement. The granddaughter of a former slave holder, she became an ostracized anti-racist convert. Her amazing life of determined tenacity testifies to the ability of an individual to be transformed by observation, experience, and basic sense of right and wrong from an unquestioning racist to a courageous activist, organizer, and leader for social justice. Durr grew up in Birmingham early in the 20th century in a closely knit family. Her family attended Ku Klux Klan parades and taught her that the KKK were protectors of Southern womanhood. As a young woman, she attended Wellesley College. In her Sophomore year, she faced the difficult choice of either agreeing to eat at the same table as a Black student or leaving school. She chose to stay at school, which she considered a great intellectual and enriching experience. Due to a family financial crisis in 1923, she was forced to leave Wellesley and returned to Birmingham, Alabama, where she met her future husband, Alabama attorney and Rhodes Scholar, Clifford Durr. They married and in 1933 moved to DC and both became avid New Dealers. In Washington, her political consciousness grew and she became very active through Mrs Roosevelt and the Democratic Womens groups in organizing to eliminating the poll tax, which prevented poor people, most women and Blacks from voting. In 1938, Virginia Durr became a founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (SCHW), which became the main vehicle for her fight against the poll tax. SCHW also worked to bring together disparate liberal groups in the South to end violence against labor organizations and to work toward integration. As a founder of this organization and as a member of a variety of other organization like and the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), she challenged White privilege. She worked closely with friends like Eleanor Roosevelt, Ella Baker , Mary McCloud Bethune to courageously challenge the racist social, economic, and political attitudes on a community and national level. Her opposition to all Jim Crows segregation laws caused her to be castigated, denounced, and shunned by a large segment of the white community in Montgomery Birmingham. Neither she, nor her husband, Clifford, was deterred from their determined work to erode institutionalized racism and civil liberties. The Durrs supported the Highland Folk School, and got a scholarship for Mrs Parks which provided her with an experience that would lead to the Montgomery bus boycott. Years later in December, 1955, it was the Durrs who bailed their long-time friend, Rosa Parks out of jail after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. Because of their anti-racist work, the Durrs were hounded by the FBI. Virginia was even accused of being a communist and called before a Congressional committee chaired by Senator Jim Eastland, who believed everyone in the Civil Rights Movement was a communist. As the senator tried to interrogate Virginia, she stood silent and in Southern belle fashion, she defiantly began to powder her nose. Durr provided White Southern women, as well as all White women, with an important role model and helped imbue them with the courage to step from behind old barriers of ignorance and racial bigotry onto a path illuminated by freedom leading toward democratic justice.

ook.lnk
Source: http://www.nwhp.org/whm/durr_bio.php

Thomasina Johnson Norford

(1908-2002)

Served as the Director of the AKA Non-Partisan Council. Stepped down in 1946 to become the Chief of the Division of Minority Affairs for the U.S. Employment Service. This was one of the highest positions held by a black woman in the federal government. Later that year, she chaired a forum devoted to The Role of Club Women in the Field of Legislation. Lobbyist, Capitol Hill, Washington, D. C. Active in desegregating the WAVES and the D. C. unit, U. S. Employment Service. She was a long-time activist with the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority's lobbying project, advocating the interests of Black people on Capitol Hill during the 1940s. She was involved in lobbying efforts for antidiscrimination amendments and against Jim Crow laws banning Black women from the female branches of the armed forces and Blacks in general from public health care and educational facilities and jobs. She used operating approaches and action strategies, including her tactic of getting Black professionals to provide expert testimony on bills pending before Congress. She held the role as head of Black Women Democrats for FDR during his reelection campaign, and her later position as chief of the minority groups section in the Department of Labor (the highest ranking Black woman in federal government at that time). She also worked in the sit-in/picketing movement among Howard University students, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth groups, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in Washington, DC, during the 1940s.

Pauli Murray (1910-1985)

The Reverend Doctor Pauli Murray, poet, lawyer, writer, teacher, civil rights activist, and priest was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Murray was the granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner. She would have been a life-long resident of Maryland, but accidents of fate intervened. Murray was one of six children and as a young child, her father developed a serious illness. When her mother died, the family was split up. Murray went to live with her maternal aunt and grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. Growing up in the "colored" section of Durham, she rebelled against the segregation that was an accepted fact of life and refused to attend a segregated southern college. Upon applying to Hunter College in New York, she was both disheartened and motivated when she was rejected for admission. Determined to gain entry, she attended high school for a year in New York where she was the only Black among 4,000 students. Ten years after leaving Durham and with a Hunter College degree, she fought for admission to the graduate school of the University of North Carolina - a school originally funded by her own slave-owning ancestors. Murray was denied admission on the basis of race. She applied to Harvard Law School for graduate study, but was rejected because of her sex. She felt compelled to start a letter-writing campaign which put the Dean, the faculty, and the Harvard Corporation to shame. As she learned from personal experience, "One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement." Several years later, she entered Howard University Law School with the intention of destroying the Jim Crow laws, but came up against their cousin, the "Jane Crow regulations". In 1943, employing one of the earliest uses of nonviolent tactics, she and a group of women students from Howard University successfully organized the first sit-in demonstration resulting in the desegregation of a cafeteria in Washington, D.C. Murray's first book, "State's Laws on Race and Color", was published in 1951, and became an invaluable reference for civil rights lawyers. After publishing several books and poems she moved beyond published works. Her letterwriting campaign to the White House challenging the Roosevelt Administration on domestic policies led to a longlasting friendship and professional relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. In many ways, Murray was an extraordinary woman. At the age of 62, she decided to become an Episcopal priest. In 1978, Murray was ordained in Washington, after a year of training as a special student at the General Theological Seminary in New York and after the Episcopal Church decided to admit women to the priesthood, . She became the first Black woman and one of the first women to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. In 1966, Murray was co-founded the National Organization for Women and served on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Source: http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/murray.html

Johnnie Carr (1911-2008)

On December 1, 1955, African-Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, started a boycott of the city's racially segregated bus system. A young preacher, Martin Luther King, was chosen as leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association which directed the boycott. The boycott would last a year, it would lead to the desegregation of the bus system, and it would launch Martin Luther King to leadership of a national civil rights movement. It is well known that Rosa Parks sparked the boycott, when she was arrested for refusing to give her seat up for a white passenger. Less well known is that a group of women had prepared for a boycott, organized the boycott, supervised much of the practical leadership of the boycott, and continued to press for civil rights in Montgomery long after the boycott was over. One of those women was Johnnie Carr, who succeeded King as leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association and held the post to her death, aged 97. Born in 1911, Carr lived her whole life in Montgomery. She was fortunate to attend a new school for black girls. The school was owned and run by white teachers from Northern states. One of her school friends was Rosa Parks. In 1946, Carr helped to found a women's political council - a group of black professional women dedicated to improving the status of the city's black community. The council ran citizenship classes for African-Americans that explained their constitutional rights. The women also lobbied white leaders to demand better treatment for the black community. In 1954 and 1955, the council met the mayor and bus officials six times to complain about the abusive behavior of white bus drivers. When the mayor rebuffed their demands, the women threatened to boycott the buses. Thus when Parks was arrested, the women's council was ready to act. It printed leaflets calling for a boycott, and passed them to friends to distribute. Johnnie Carr arranged for five volunteers to help to hand out leaflets in her neighborhood. The women's council had long been pressing for black women's rights. But the Women's Council recognized that men would need to be the formal leaders. As Carr put it later, Women were considered secretaries, anything but a president. And that is just how society was, you couldn't get away from it. I think we just accepted the servant role and done what we could because we felt like togetherness was the point. Even so, the women's council ran much of the day-to-day business of the boycott. This was unheralded work, but vital to the longevity of the action - which took white city leaders by surprise. Carr and others catered for the regular mass meetings and demonstrations. We really had to work hard because we had to get people to give food and get people to prepare food. Carr also chaired the boycott's welfare committee, which tried to meet the financial needs of those who lost their job or welfare payments on account of their support for the action. After King left for Atlanta in 1960, the Montgomery Improvement Association seemed set to fold. Carr helped to revive it, and she succeeded King as leader. As she had before the boycott, she worked to improve the lives of the local black community. She helped to lead the campaign to integrate the city's public schools. Her son, Arlam, was the named plaintiff in a successful legal suit. She was one of the main speakers at the 50th anniversary commemoration of Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat, speaking to thousands of schoolchildren who marched to the Capitol. She told the children: Look back, but march forward. We can go forward for the thing that Rosa Parks started when she refused to give up her seat. Shortly before her death, she spoke at Martin Luther King Day annual parade in Montgomery.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3515846.ece

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1912-1992)

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was a civil rights activist and educator. From near Culloden, Georgia, she was the youngest of twelve children. Educated in the segregated public schools of Macon and then at Fort Valley State College, Gibson became a public school teacher in Macon, where she was briefly married to Wilbur Robinson. Their one child died in infancy. She left Macon after five years of teaching and went to Atlanta, where she earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. In the fall of 1949, after teaching one year at Mary Allen College in Crockett, Texas, Robinson accepted a position at Alabama State College. She was a professor of English at Alabama State throughout the bus boycott. In Montgomery she joined both the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and the Womans Political Council, (WPC) which had been founded three years earlier by another Alabama State English professor, Mary Fair Burks. Near the end of 1949, Robinson (while boarding a public bus) was humiliated by an abusive and racist Montgomery City Lines bus driver, and she set out to use the WPC to target racial seating practices on Montgomery buses. In May 1954, more than eighteen months before the arrest of Rosa Parks but just several days after news of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision began to sweep the country, Robinson wrote to Montgomery's mayor as WPC president, gently threatening a Black boycott of city buses if abuses were not curtailed. Following Rosa Parks arrest in December 1955, Robinson played a central role in the start of the protest by producing the leaflets that spread word of the boycott among the Black citizens of Montgomery.

She became one of the most active board members of the Montgomery Improvement Association, but she remained out of the limelight in order to protect her teaching position at Alabama State as well as those of her colleagues. In 1960, Robinson left Alabama State (and Montgomery), as did other activist faculty members. After teaching one year at Grambling College Robinson moved to Los Angeles, where she taught English in the public schools until her retirement in 1976 and where she was active in a number of women's community groups. Robinson's health suffered a serious decline just as her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, was published in 1987. She was honored by a 1989 publication prize given by the Southern Association for Women Historians. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson died in 1992.

Source: http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2012/Jo_Ann_Gibson_Robinson_was_an_unsung_activist

Dorothy Height (1912-)

After college, Dorothy Height worked as a teacher in the Brownsville Community Center, Brooklyn, New York. She was active in the United Christian Youth Movement after its founding in 1935. In 1938, Dorothy Height was one of ten young people selected to help Eleanor Roosevelt plan a World Youth Conference. Through Eleanor Roosevelt, she met Mary McLeod Bethune and became involved in the National Council of Negro Women. Also in 1938, Dorothy Height was hired by the YWCA. She worked for better working conditions for black domestic workers, leading to her election to YWCA national leadership. In her professional service with the YWCA, she was assistant director of the Emma Ransom House in Harlem, and later executive director of the Phillis Wheatley House in Washington, DC. Dorothy Height became national president of Delta Sigma Theta in 1947, after serving for three years as vice president. In 1957, Dorothy Height's term as president of Delta Sigma Theta expired, and she was selected as the president of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, an organization of organizations. Always as a volunteer, she led NCNW through the civil rights years and into self-help assistance programs in the 1970s and 1980s. She built up the organization's credibility and fund-raising capacity such that it was able to attract large grants and therefore undertake major projects. She also helped establish a national headquarters building for NCNW. She was also able to influence the YWCA to be involved in civil rights beginning in the 1960s, and worked within the YWCA to desegregate all levels of the organization. Height was one of the few women to participate at the highest levels of the civil rights movement, with such others as A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, jr., and Whitney Young. At the 1963 March on Washington, she was on the platform when Dr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Dorothy Height traveled extensively in her various positions, including to India, where she taught for several months, to Haiti, to England. She served on many commissions and boards connected with women's and civil rights. "We are not a problem people; we are a people with problems. We have historic strengths; we have survived because of family." - Dorothy Height In 1986, Dorothy Height became convinced that negative images of black family life was a significant problem, and to address the problem, she founded the annual Black Family Reunion, an annual national festival. In 1994, President Bill Clinton presented Height with the Medal of Freedom. When Dorothy Height retired from the presidency of the NCNW, she remained chair and president emerita.

Source: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/civilrights/p/dorothy_height.htm

Annie Devine (1912-2000)

A Mississippi civil rights activist. Devine participated in the Freedom Summer Project, Mississippi, 1964. She attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City along with Victoria Gray-Adams and Fannie Lou Hamer. Their objective was to unseat their state's all-white delegation and be recognized as delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, of which Mrs. Devine was a founder...Their effort, called the Mississippi Challenge, failed in the short run, but led to a nationwide lobbying drive by the Mississippi Freedom Democrats and calls for Congressional investigations into voting in Mississippi. Thus, the three women's resolve fed into the groundswell that produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mrs. Annie Devine, Fannie Lou Hamer and Victoria Gray Adams, were cofounders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party whose objective was to be recognized as delegates at the 1964 Democratic Convention.Their mission was to unseat congressmen from Mississippi who they claimed were elected illegally because of discriminatory voting practices. They became the first black women to be seated on the Floor of the House of Representatives. Annie Devine was from Canton, Mississippi and graduated from Tougaloo College. She is featured in "Standing On My Sisters Shoulders." Sources: http://www.fannielouhamer.info/devine.html and http://crdl.usg.edu/people/d/devine_annie_1912_2000/

Rosa McCauley Parks (1913-2005)

Rosa McCauley grew up in Montgomery, Alabama and attended the all-Black Alabama State College. Rosa and her husband Raymond Parks were active in Montgomery's chapter of the NAACP. She worked as the chapter's youth adviser; on voter registration drives and was secretary of the NAACPs Montgomery branch in 1943. As the 1950s began, the segregated seating policies on public buses were growing as a source of resentment and bitterness within the Black community in Montgomery. Blacks were required to pay their fares at the front of the bus, and then board again through the back door. The white bus drivers would harass Blacks, sometimes driving away before they were able to get back on the bus. On December 1, 1955, Parks took her seat in the front of the "colored section". When the driver asked Parks and three other Black riders to give up their seats to whites, Parks refused and was arrested; she soon agreed to let the NAACP provide legal council. Rosa Parks' case was filed in United States District Court, which ruled in her favor, declaring segregated seating on buses unconstitutional, a decision later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was more than an inadvertent symbol; she was an experienced activist with strong beliefs. whose arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a bus set in motion the turning point in the African-American battle for civil rights. Parks and her husband relocated to Detroit in 1957, where in time, Congressman John Conyers hired her as an administrative assistant, a position she held until 1987. Rosa Parks, a committed activist died on October 24, 2005. On October 30th, and 31st of that year, she became the first woman to lie in honor in the vast circular room under the Capitol dome. By voice vote the House agreed to the action "so that the citizens of the United States may pay their last respects to this great American."

Source: http://www.aaregistry.com/detail.php?id=47

Daisy Lee Gatson Bates (1914-1999)

Daisy Bates was born on November 11, 1914 in Huttig, Union County, Arkansas. Bates mother was killed while resisting the sexual advances of three local white men. Her father left the family shortly after her mother's death and she was raised by friends of the family. In 1952 Daisy Bates was elected president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP branches. Bates and her husband L.C. Bates were important figures in the Little Rock Integration Crisis in 1957. The Bates published a local black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, which publicized violations of the US Supreme Court desegregation rulings. Bates guided and advised the nine students, known as the Little Rock Nine, when they attempted to enroll at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The students attempts to enroll provoked a confrontation with Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus who called out the National Guard to prevent the students from enrolling. President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and dispatching the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to ensure that the court orders were enforced. Their involvement in the Little Rock Crisis resulted in the loss of much advertising revenue to their newspaper and it was forced to close in 1959. In 1960 Daisy Bates moved to New York City and wrote her memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, which won a 1988 National Book Award. Bates moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Democratic National Committee. She also served in the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson on anti-poverty programs. In 1965 she suffered a stroke and returned to Little Rock. In 1968 she moved to the rural black community of Mitchellville, Desha County, Arkansas. She concentrated on improving the lives of her neighbors by establishing a self-help program which was responsible for new sewer systems, paved streets, a water system, and community center. Bates revived the Arkansas State Press in the 1980s. Daisy Bates died in Little Rock, Arkansas on 4 November 1999. The 3rd Monday in February has been established as an official state holiday in her honor. The street that runs in front of Little Rock Central High School has been renamed for her.

Source: http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Bates_Daisy.html

Bernice Robinson (1914-1994)

Bernice Robinson was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 7, 1914. The day she was born was the first time it had snowed in Charleston for over a hundred years. Bernice brought the snow to Charleston--or so her mother believed--, and this meant that she was going to spend her life disturbing the elements. She was the ninth and last child in the Robinson family. Although Bernice Robinson had first gone to New York City with the intention of becoming a musician, she returned to Charleston with a politically valuable skill. As a beautician, she could maintain ecnomic independence from what, at the time, was a virtually all-white business community. This meant that she could work for the NAACP without fear of financial reprisals. And she did. In 1955, Bernice attended a Highlander workshop on the United Nations with Septima Clark. Rosa Parks was at that workshop. After many months of work and with the ongoing support of Highlander, a school was ready. Esau approached Bernice about being the teacher. Reluctantly, she agreed. Bernice was still working in her beauty shop and also caring for an ill mother, but she began recruiting and faced her first class with the words, "I'm not going to be the teacher. We're going to learn together. You're going to teach me some things, and maybe there are a few things I might be able to teach you, but I don't consider myself a teacher. I just feel that I'm here to learn with you. We'll learn things together." Everyone presented Bernice with what they wanted to learn and that became the curriculum. At the end of five months, all fourteen of the pupils that she started with had received their voter registration certificates, they could read and write, and they could do arithmetic. After that, the program continued to grow beyond anyone's expectations, expanding to Wadmalaw and Edisto Islands, and soon to Charleston itself. Bernices's mother died in 1961. That same year National news headlines focused on the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Freedom Riders that it sponsored. Violence attracted the photographers' eyes, because angry whites in Alabama and Mississippi used beatings and arson and legal harrassment to resist the Freedom Rider's test of desegregation practices. Also in 1961, but with little publicity, the SCLC, SNCC, and CORE cooperated in another endeavor: expanding the impact of the Citizenship Schools. Bernice Robinson, who had been the first Citizenship School teacher, was employed by both Highlander and the SCLC to set up voter-registration workshops in communities across the racially tense South. As such, she made no news headlines, but neither was she immune from threats or danger. The legacy of the Freedom Riders was certain. Once fear had been set loose in Dixie, few civil rights workers were safe. Having waged the most successful and widespread literacy campaign ever seen in the United States, Bernice left the SCLC in 1970 and was hired by the South Carolina Commission for Farm Workers (SCCFW), under whose auspices she supervised VISTA volunteers in her native Charleston. In 1972 she made an unsuccessful bid for a Congress, then returned to the SCCFW and worked with migrants until 1977. Like those of Julian Bond, Bernice Robinson's accomplishments during the sixties defined her as a pure activist. Through the Citizenship Schools, she served as a frontline adult educator in the civil rights movement, gaining her a prominent place among those who have had a lasting impact on society through their educational work. She died in 1994. Source: http://www3.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/resources/bernicerobinson.cfm

Billy Holiday (1915-1959)

Holiday began working with Lester Young in 1936,her with her now-famous nickname of "Lady Day." When Holiday joined Count Basie in 1937 and then Artie Shaw in 1938, she became one of the very first black women to work with a white orchestra, an impressive accomplishment of her time. In 1939, when Holiday was working with Columbia Records, she was first introduced to the poem "Strange Fruit," an emotional piece about the lynching of a black man. Though Columbia would not allow her to record the piece due to subject matter, Holiday went on to record the song with an alternate label, Commodore, and the song eventually became one of Holiday's classics. It was "Strange Fruit" that eventually prompted Lady Day to continue more of her signature, moving ballads. Holiday recorded about 100 new recordings on another label,Verve, from 1952 to 1959. Her voice became more rugged and vulnerable on these tracks than earlier in her career. During this period, she toured Europe, and made her final studio recordings for the MGM label in March of 1959. Despite her lack of technical training, Holiday's unique diction, inimitable phrasing and acute dramatic intensity made her the outstanding jazz singer of her day. White gardenias, worn in her hair, became her trademark. "Singing songs like the 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck," she wrote in her autobiography. "I've lived songs like that." Billie Holiday, a musical legend still popular today, died an untimely death at the age of 44.

Source: http://www.cmgww.com/music/holiday/index.php

Lena Horn (1917-)

American singer and actress who first came to fame in the 1940s. Horne left school at age 16 to help support her ailing mother and became a dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City. In two years at the Cotton Club she appeared with such entertainers as Cab Calloway and eventually starred in her own shows. In 1935 she joined the Noble Sissle orchestra under the name Helena Horne. Horne was married from 1937 to 1944 to Louis J. Jones. In the early 1940s she was hired to sing for Charlie Barnet's orchestra. She was discovered by producer John Hammond, and soon after she performed in a solo show at Carnegie Hall in New York City. In 1942 Horne moved to Los Angeles, after which she appeared in such movies as Cabin in the Sky (1943), Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), and The Wiz (1978). Her role in the film Stormy Weather (1943) included her rendition of the title song, which became her trademark. A remarkably charismatic entertainer, Horne was one of the most popular singers of her time. One of her albums, Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria (1957), was a long-time bestseller, and her first featured performance on Broadwayin the musical Jamaica (1957) won her a New York Drama Critics' Poll Award in 1958. Though primarily known as an entertainer, Horne also was noted for her work with civil rights and political organizations; as an actress, she refused to play roles that stereotyped African American women. She was married to Lennie Hayton from 1947 until his death in 1971. Her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music (1981), garnered many awards, including a Drama Critics' Circle Award and a special achievement Tony Award. In 1984 Horne received a Kennedy Center honour for lifetime contribution to the arts, and in 1989 a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. Source: http://www.biography.com/articles/Lena-Horne-9344086

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)

Fannie Lou Hamer, known as the lady who was "sick and tired of being sick and tired," was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the granddaughter of slaves. Her family were sharecroppers - a position not that different from slavery. Hamer had 19 brothers and sisters. She was the youngest of the children. In 1962, when Hamer was 44 years old, SNCC volunteers came to town and held a voter registration meeting. She was surprised to learn that African-Americans actually had a constitutional right to vote. When the SNCC members asked for volunteers to go to the courthouse to register to vote, Hamer was the first to raise her hand. This was a dangerous decision. She later reflected, "The only thing they could do to me was to kill me, and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember." When Hamer and others went to the courthouse, they were jailed and beaten by the police. Hamer's courageous act got her thrown off the plantation where she was a sharecropper. She also began to receive constant death threats and was even shot at. Still, Hamer would not be discouraged. She became a SNCC Field Secretary and traveled around the country speaking and registering people to vote. Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In 1964, the MDFP challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Hamer spoke in front of the Credentials Committee in a televised proceeding that reached millions of viewers. She told the committee how African-Americans in many states across the country were prevented from voting through illegal tests, taxes and intimidation. As a result of her speech, two delegates of the MFDP were given speaking rights at the convention and the other members were seated as honorable guests. Hamer was an inspirational figure to many involved in the struggle for civil rights. She died on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59. Source: http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/hamer.html

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

In 1938 she married Henry Blakely and moved to a kitchenette apartment on Chicagos South Side. Between the birth of her first child, Henry, Jr., in 1940 and the birth of Nora in 1951, she became associated with the group of writers involved in Harriet Monroe's still-extant Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. From this group she received further encouragement, and by 1943 she had won the Midwestern Writers Conference Poetry Award. In 1945 her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (published by Harper and Row), brought her instant critical acclaim. She was selected one of Mademoiselle magazine's "Ten Young Women of the Year," she won her first Guggenheim Fellowship, and she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her second book of poems, Annie Allen (1949), won Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. From that time to the present, she has seen the recipient of a number of awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees usually designated as Doctor of Humane Letters. President John Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962. In 1985 she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Just as receiving a Pulitzer Prize for poetry marked a milestone in her career, so also did her selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the 1994 Jefferson Lecturer, the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government. Her first teaching job was a poetry workshop at Columbia College (Chicago) in 1963. She went on to teach creative writing at a number of institutions including Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin. A turning point in her career came in 1967 when she attended the Fisk University Second Black Writers' Conference and decided to become more involved in the Black Arts movement. She became one of the most visible articulators of "the black aesthetic." Her "awakening" led to a shift away from a major publishing house to smaller black ones. While some critics found an angrier tone in her work, elements of protest had always been present in her writing and her awareness of social issues did not result in diatribes at the expense of her clear commitment to aesthetic principles. Consequently, becoming the leader of one phase of the Black Arts movement in Chicago did not drastically alter her poetry, but there were some subtle changes that become more noticeable when one examines her total canon to date. In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

Source: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/brooks/life.htm

Juanita Kidd Stout (1919-1998)

Dr. Juanita Kidd Stout was an African-American educator, lawyer, and in 1959 was one of the first Black women in America to be elected to the Bench. Born in Wewoka, Oklahoma she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Iowa, and taught music in the high schools at Seminole and Sand Springs, Oklahoma, prior to pursuing a career in law. She later received the J.D. and LL.M. degrees from Indiana University. Moving east and after practicing law for five years, she joined the District Attorneys office in Philadelphia, serving as Assistant District Attorney and later as Chief of Appeals, Pardons and Paroles. In 1959, she was elected Judge of the Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia and was reelected in 1969 and 1979, both times receiving the highest vote of the Philadelphia Bar Association with respect to judicial qualifications. Stout, known as a tireless, relentless public servant, believed in the value of education and loyalty to the law of the land. During the sixties she gained national recognition for her vigorous fight against crime and all aspects of juvenile delinquency. She was a champion of justice, whose actions were tempered with quiet encouragement and counsel she gave to the hundreds of young men and women who appeared in her court. Stout received many awards, including "Outstanding Woman Lawyer of the Year, National Association of Women Lawyers, 1965; "Outstanding alumni Award" from the Oklahoma State University 4-H Club, 1967; the "National 4-H Alumni Recognition Award,"1968; and the "Good Citizen Award" from the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO in 1971. President Kennedy appointed her as a Special Ambassador to the Kenya Independence Celebration in 1963, and in 1967, under the State Departments Cultural Exchange Program, she toured six African countries and lectured at law schools, colleges, high schools, and civic groups. She served as a forum member of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, and was constantly in demand as a public speaker. She wrote numerous articles and was the subject of articles in Time, Life, the Wall Street Journal, and Readers Digest. During her years on the bench, she tried hundreds of cases, including the notorious 1993 murder case involving Ira Einhorn. Juanita Kidd Stout passed away in 1998.

Source: http://www.oklahomawomensnetwork.com/women-bios/stout_juanita_kidd.html

Mamie Till Mobley (1921-2003)

Mamie Till-Mobley became a figure in the civil rights movement after she held an open casket funeral service for her son, Emmett Till, after his slaying in Mississippi in 1955. Mrs. Till-Mobley continued to speak out about her son, but many black leaders felt her greatest role came at the height of her pain: the decision to have an open coffin. The press took pictures of Till with a bullet in the skull, an eye gouged out and his head partially crushed. His body had been found floating in the Tallahatchie River, identifiable only by the ring Till wore that belonged to his late father. Mamie Elizabeth Carthan was born in Hazelhurst, Miss., and grew up in Chicago. She was a 1956 cum laude graduate of Chicago Teachers College and in 1975 received a master's degree in administration and supervision from Loyola University in Chicago. She taught special education in Chicago elementary schools.
Source: http://crdl.usg.edu/people/t/till_mobley_mamie_d_2003/

Gloria Richardson (1922-)

Gloria Hayes Richardson was born on May 6, 1922 in Baltimore, Maryland to parents John and Mabel Hayes. During the Great Depression her parents moved the family to Cambridge, Maryland, the home of Mabel Hayes. Young Gloria grew up in a privileged environment. Her grandfather, Herbert M. St. Clair, was one of the towns wealthiest citizens. He owned numerous properties in the citys Second Ward which included a funeral parlor, grocery store and butcher shop. He was also the sole African American member of the Cambridge City Council through most of the early 20th Century. Gloria attended Howard University in Washington at the age of 16 and graduated in 1942 with a degree in sociology. After Howard, she worked as a civil servant for the federal government in World War II-era Washington, D.C. but returned to Cambridge after the war. Despite her grandfathers political and economic influence, the Maryland Department of Social Services, for example, refused to hire Gloria or any other black social workers. Gloria Hayes married local school teacher Harry Richardson in 1948 and raised a family for the next thirteen years. When the civil rights movement came to Cambridge in 1961 in the form of Freedom Riders, the town was thoroughly segregated and the African American unemployment rate was 40%. Gloria Richardsons teenage daughter, Donna, became involved with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committees (SNCC) effort to desegregate public accommodations. Gloria, however, refused to commit herself to non-violence as a protest tactic. When the SNCC-led protests faltered in 1962, Gloria and other parents created the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) which became the only adult-led SNCC affiliate in the civil rights organizations history. CNAC enlarged the scope of grievances to include housing and employment discrimination and inadequate health care. Richardson was selected to lead CNAC. This Richardson-led effort differed from most other civil rights campaigns of the era. It took place in a border state rather than the Deep South. It addressed a much wider array of issues rather than the one or two that motivated other campaigns. Since Richardson and her followers refused to commit to non-violence as a philosophy or a tactic, CNAC protests were far more violent and confrontative. Protests in 1963, for example, prompted Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes to send in the Maryland National Guard. The Guard remained in the city, which was effectively under martial law, for nearly a year. The Cambridge Movement also drew the attention of U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy who unsuccessfully attempted to broker an agreement between Cambridges white political leaders and Richardsons CNAC. By the summer of 1964 Richardson resigned from the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee citing her exhaustion from leading nearly two years of continuous demonstrations. Richardson, who had divorced Harry Richardson in the late 1950s, married freelance photographer Frank Dandridge. The couple moved to New York City with Richardsons younger daughter Tamara. Although she maintained ties with Cambridge and with the local movement, Gloria Richardson never lived in Cambridge again.

Source: http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/richardson-gloria-1922

Mary Fair Banks (1920s-1991)

Alabama State College, BA, English literature; University of Michigan, MA, English literature; Columbia University, doctorate in education; postgraduate study at Harvard University, Oxford University, the Sorbonne, among others. Co-founder and member, Women's Political Council of Montgomery, 1946-60. Career- Alabama State Laboratory High School, English teacher; Alabama State College, head of English department, late 1940s-60; helped launch the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56; University of Maryland, professor of literature, 1960-86. Mary Fair Burks, as a co-founder of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, Alabama (WPC), helped organize and maintain the historic protest. First only targeting conditions for black on buses, it was only later that the goals of the boycott grew to include integration. Burks, an English professor, grew up in a radically segregated world, but worked to see the end of segregation long before her death in 1991. Burks was born in the 1920s and grew up in Montgomery in the 1930s, bucking the Jim Crow system of segregation even as a child. She used white-only elevators, restrooms, and other facilities in what she later called "my own private guerilla warfare," according to the King Chronologies Online. She earned her bachelor's degree in English literature from Alabama State College at age 18. She returned to Montgomery after earning her master's degree from the University of Michigan. Burks taught English at the Alabama State Laboratory High School and then taught at the college. She married the high school principal and became head of the Alabama State College English department. She later earned her doctorate from Columbia University. In 1946 Burks founded the WPC with JoAnn Robinson to work at fixing some of the problems in Montgomery's black community. The grass-roots organization was made up of college women and those who lived in the area. "The WPC was formed for the purpose of inspiring Negroes to live above mediocrity, to elevate their thinking, to fight juvenile and adult delinquency, to register and vote, and in general to improve their status as a group," JoAnn Robinson wrote in her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. "We were woman power, organized to cope with any injustice, no matter what, against the darker sect." Burks was the group's first president, and lead the women "who would work together as leaders and followers, giving and taking suggestions, and who would never reveal the secrets of the WPC," Robinson wrote. "Dr. Burks, a profound scholar, highly intelligent and fearless, was a native Alabaman who had suffered from the segregated rules, the hypocrisy of race separation. ... Dr. Burks knew that one day, when human beings had taken all they could digest, the fight would begin. Thus her thoughts gave birth to the WPC...." Burks handed over presidency of the group to Robinson in 1950, but remained as involved as ever. "The WPC was the largest, best organized, and most assertive black civic organization in the Alabama capital," according to Stewart Burns, editor of Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Burks and Robinson became involved with the mayor's office and the Montgomery City Commission. They informed the commissioners about their goals of working with the city to resolve nuisance issues when blacks were concerned. The mayor's office and commission were sincere in working with the WPC, and the group's members were invited to attend city meetings that involved minority groups. The WPC worked hard to find solutions to the city's troubles that were in the interest of the black community. The city of Montgomery and the WPC maintained a productive working relationship for several years. That partnership effectively ended when the struggle for integration on buses began.

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/mary-fair-burks

Ada Sipuel Fisher (1924-1995)

From Chickasha, Oklahoma she was the daughter of a minister. Her brother planned to challenge segregationist policies of the University of Oklahoma, but went to Howard University Law School to not delay his career further by protracted litigation. Sipuel was willing to delay her legal career in order to challenge segregation. In 1946, she applied at the University of Oklahoma and was denied because of race, and in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Oklahoma must provide instruction for Blacks equal to that of whites. In order to comply, the state of Oklahoma created the Langston University School of Law, located at the state capital. Further litigation was necessary to prove that this law school was inferior to the University of Oklahoma law school. Finally, in 1949, Sipuel was admitted to the University of Oklahoma law school becoming the first African American woman to attend an all white law school in the South. By this time she was married and pregnant with the first of her two children. The law school gave her a chair marked "colored," and roped it off from the rest of the class. Her classmates and teachers welcomed her, shared their notes and studied with her, helping her to catch up on the materials she had missed. Sipuel had to eat in a separate chained-off guarded area of the law school cafeteria. She recalled that years later some white students would crawl under the chain and eat with her when the guards were not around. Her lawsuit and tuition were supported by hundreds of small donations, and she believed she owed it to those donors to make it. She graduated in 1951 with a Master's degree, and began practicing law in her hometown of Chickasha in 1952. In 1992, Oklahoma's governor David Walters appointed her to the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which she noted in an interview, "completes a forty-five year cycle." She further stated, "Having suffered severely from bigotry and racial discrimination as a student, I am sensitive to that kind of thing," and she planned to bring a new dimension to university policies.

Source: http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1921/Ada_Lois_Sipuel_Fisher

Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005)

Shirley St. Hill Chisholm was born on November 30, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York to Charles and Ruby St. Hill. Her father was from British Guiana and her mother was from Barbados. In 1927, Shirley was sent to Barbados to live with her maternal grandmother. She received a good education from the British school system, which she later credited with providing her with a strong academic background In 1934, she rejoined her parents in New York. Shirley excelled in academics at Girls High School in Brooklyn from which she graduated in 1942. After graduation she enrolled in Brooklyn College where she majored in sociology. Shirley encountered racism at Brooklyn College and fought against it. When the black students at Brooklyn College were denied admittance to a social club, Shirley formed an alternative one. She graduated in 1946 with honors. During this time, it was difficult for black college graduates to obtain employment commensurate to their education. After being rejected by many companies, she obtained a job at the Mt. Calvary Childcare Center in Harlem. In 1949, she married Conrad Chisholm, a Jamaican who worked as a private investigator. Shirley and her husband participated in local politics, helping form the Bedford-Stuyvesant political League. In addition to participating in politics, Chisholm worked in the field of day care until 1959. In 1960, she started the Unity Democratic Club. The Unity Club was instrumental in mobilizing black and Hispanic voters. In 1964 Chisholm ran for a state assembly seat. She won and served in the New York General Assembly from 1964 to 1968. During her tenure in the legislature, she proposed a bill to provide state aid to day-care centers and voted to increase funding for schools on a per-pupil basis. In 1968, After finishing her term in the legislature, Chisholm campaigned to represent New York's Twelfth Congressional District. Her campaign slogan was "Fighting Shirley Chisholm--Unbought and Unbossed." She won the election and became the first African American woman elected to Congress. During her first term in Congress, Chisholm hired an all-female staff and spoke out for civil rights, women's rights, the poor and against the Vietnam War. In 1970, she was elected to a second term. She was a sought-after public speaker and cofounder of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She remarked that, "Women in this country must become revolutionaries. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes." On January 25, 1972, Chisholm announced her candidacy for president. She stood before the cameras and in the beginning of her speech she said, "I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people." The 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami was the first major convention in which any woman was considered for the presidential nomination. Although she did not win the nomination, she received 151 of the delegates' votes. She continued to serve in the House of Representatives until 1982. She retired from politics after her last term in office. She has received many honorary degrees, and her awards include Alumna of the Year, Brooklyn College; Key Woman of the Year; Outstanding Work in the Field of Child Welfare; and Woman of Achievement. Shirley Chisholm passed away on January 1, 2005.

Source: http://www.essortment.com/all/shirleychisholm_ruol.htm

Victoria Jackson Gray Adams (1926- 2006)

Born on Nov. 5, 1926, in Palmers Crossing, the daughter of Mack and Annie Mae Ott Jackson, Mrs. Gray Adams was educated at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Jackson State College in Mississippi. She went on to serve as a campus minister at Virginia State University and to teach and lecture at schools, colleges and universities across the nation. Victoria Jackson Gray Adams, a key figure in the struggle by Mississippi blacks to win their political and civil rights in the 1960s and the first woman to seek a seat in the United States Senate from her state. Mrs. Gray Adams, a teacher, door-to-door saleswoman of Beauty Queen cosmetics and leader of voter education classes from the hamlet of Palmers Crossing, on the edge of Hattiesburg, Miss., decided to take on Senator John C. Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat who at the time had been in the Senate for 16 years. In July 1964, she announced that she and others from the tiny Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would challenge the power of the segregationist politicians, like Mr. Stennis, who represented her state. The time had come, she said, to pay attention to the Negro in Mississippi, who had not even had the leavings from the American political table. That decision became a turning point for the civil rights movement and for the Democratic Party, which for most of its history had been profoundly influenced by all-white delegations from the South. From Hattiesburg, the waves of the civil rights movement swept quietly through the church world into politics, the author Taylor Branch wrote in Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (Simon & Schuster, 1998). Mrs. Gray Adams was defeated by a ratio of 30 to 1 in the Democratic primary, in part because Mississippi had effectively disenfranchised black voters. But the party she started and led went on to challenge the right of the all-white Mississippi delegation to represent her state at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Millions of Americans watching on television saw Fannie Lou Hamer, the best known of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Partys founders, tell the conventions credentials committee that she had been jailed and beaten for trying to register blacks to vote. Is this America? Ms. Hamer asked. The all-white Mississippi delegation walked out of the convention. It rejected a compromise proposal to give the integrated Freedom Democratic Party token representation on the floor. It was the beginning of the end of an old political tradition. In 1968, Mississippi seated an integrated delegation at the Democratic convention. We really were the true Democratic Party, Mrs. Gray Adams said in the 2004 interview. In the end, she said, we accomplished the removal of the wall, the curtain of fear in Mississippi for African-Americans demanding their rights. She continued: We eliminated the isolation of the African-Americans from the political process. I believe that Mississippi now has the highest number of African-American elected officials in the nation. We laid the groundwork for that. Mrs. Gray Adams said she learned in 1964 that there were two kinds of people in grass-roots politics, those who are in the movement, and those who have the movement in them. The movement is in me, she said, and I know it always will be.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/obituaries/19adams.html?_r=2&oref=slogin

Coretta Scott King (1927-2006)

Coretta Scott King was the wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.. The couple met in Boston, where Coretta Scott was studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music; they were married on 18 June 1953.The family moved to Montgomery, Alabama and then to Atlanta as Dr. King became a civil rights leader and a prominent public figure. After Dr. King's assassination in 1968, Coretta King established the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta; she also supported the establishment of a national holiday in honor of her husband, an idea which became law in 1986. Coretta and Martin Luther King had four children:Yolanda (born 1955), Martin Luther III (b. 1957), Dexter (b. 1961), and Bernice (1963). In 1969 the American Library Association (ALA) created the annual Coretta Scott King award to honor children's book authors and illustrators of African descent. For decades, Mrs. King was CEO of the King Center she founded to continue her husband's principles of nonviolent social change to fight poverty, racism and war. She's been awarded 60 honorary degrees, authored 3 books and served in dozens of organizations. Resulting from her efforts, the King Center covers 23 acres, archives a definitive history of the US civil rights movement, hosts a million visitors a year, and has trained tens of thousands in Dr. King's philosophy. She also successfully spearheaded a massive campaign to establish Dr. King's birthday as the first federal holiday for an African-American. She's led peace delegations around the world, and lent support to world spiritual and political leaders. Source: http://usliberals.about.com/od/peopleinthenews/p/CorettaKing.htm

Maya Angelou (1928-)

Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture. As a teenager, Dr. Angelous love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Franciscos Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Franciscos first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook, however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would soon take center stage. In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom. In 1960, Dr. Angelou moved to Cairo, Egypt where she served as editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer. The next year, she moved to Ghana where she taught at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for The Ghanaian Times. During her years abroad, Dr. Angelou read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. While in Ghana, she met with Malcolm X and, in 1964, returned to America to help him build his new Organization of African American Unity. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and the organization dissolved. Soon after X's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Dr. Angelou to serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King's assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to international acclaim and enormous popular success. The list of her published verse, non-fiction, and fiction now includes more than 30 bestselling titles. A trailblazer in film and television, Dr. Angelou wrote the screenplay and composed the score for the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia. Her script, the first by an African American woman ever to be filmed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She continues to appear on television and in films including the landmark television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots (1977) and John Singleton's Poetic Justice (1993). In 1996, she directed her first feature film, Down in the Delta. In 2008, she composed poetry for and narrated the award-winning documentary The Black Candle, directed by M.K. Asante, Jr. Dr. Angelou has served on two presidential committees, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and has received 3 Grammy Awards. President Clinton requested that she compose a poem to read at his inauguration in 1993. Dr. Angelou's reading of her poem "On the Pulse of the Morning" was broadcast live around the world.
Source: http://mayaangelou.com/bio/

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)

Lorraine Hansberry's parents were both active in the black community in Chicago, including in social change work. Her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, studied African history. Visitors to the home included Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and Jesse Owens. Her family moved, desegregating a white neighborhood with a restrictive covenant, in 1938, and though there were violent protests, they did not move until a court ordered them to do so. The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court as Hansberry vs. Lee, when restrictive covenants were ruled illegal (which did not stop enforcement of them in Chicago and other cities). One of Lorraine Hanberry's brothers served in a segregated unit in World War II; another refused his draft call, objecting to segregation and discrimination in the military. Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin for two years, then left to work for Paul Robeson's newspaper, Freedom, first as a writer and then associate editor. She attended the Intercontinental Peace Congress in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1952, when Paul Robeson was denied a passport to attend. She met Robert Nemiroff on a picket line, and they were married in 1953, spending the night before their wedding protesting the execution of the Rosenbergs. Lorraine Hansberry left her position at Freedom, focusing mostly on her writing and taking a few temporary jobs. Lorraine Hansberry completed her first play in 1957, taking her title from Langston Hughes' poem, "Harlem." "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore -- and then run?" She began to circulate the play, Raisin in the Sun, trying to interest producers, investors, and actors. Sidney Poitier expressed interest in taking the part of the son, and soon a director and other actors (including Louis Gossett, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis) were committed to the performance. Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959. The play, with themes both universally human and specifically about racial discrimination and sexist attitudes, was successful, and a screenplay soon followed in which Lorraine Hansberry added more scenes to the story -- none of which Columbia Pictures allowed into the film. Lorraine Hansberry was commissioned to write a television drama on slavery, which she completed as The Drinking Gourd, but it was not produced -- NBC executives apparently didn't support the idea of a black screenwriter writing about slavery. Moving with her husband to Croton-on-Hudson, Lorraine Hansberry continued not only her writing but also her involvement with civil rights and other political protest, even after being diagnosed with cancer. In 1964, The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality was published for SNCC (Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) with text by Hansberry. She divorced Nemiroff in March, though they continued to work together. In October, Lorraine Hansberry moved back into New York City as her new play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window began rehearsals. Although critical reception was cool, supporters kept it running until Lorraine Hansberry's death in January. After her death, her ex-husband finished her work on a play centered on Africa, Les Blancs. This play opened in 1970 and ran for only 47 performances.

Source: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/aframerwriters/p/hansberry.htm

Yvonne Brathwaite Burke (1932-)

Yvonne Brathwaite Burke was a rising star in California and national politics years before she won a seat in the U.S. House. In 1966, she became the first African-American woman elected to the California assembly. At the 1972 Democratic National Convention she served as vice chair of the platform committee, gaining national television exposure. That same year she became the first black woman from California (and one of only three black women ever) elected to the House. Her meteoric career continued with a prime appointment to the Appropriations Committee and her election as the first woman chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). But Burkes most notable distinction in the eyes of much of the public occurred in 1973, when she became the first Congresswoman to give birth and be granted maternity leave while serving in Congress. Perle Yvonne Watson was born on October 5, 1932, in Los Angeles, California, the only child of James Watson, a custodian at the MGM film studios, and Lola (Moore) Watson, a real estate agent in East Los Angeles. Yvonne (she rejected the name Perle) grew up in modest circumstances and at first was enrolled in a public school.1 At age four she was transferred to a model school for exceptional children. Watson became the vice president of her class at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. She enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1949 but transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles, where she earned a B.A. in political science in 1953. She was among the first black women to be admitted to the University of Southern California School of Law, Los Angeles, earning her J.D. and passing the California bar in 1956. After graduating, she found that no law firms would hire an African-American woman and, consequently, entered into her own private practice, specializing in civil, probate, and real estate law. In addition to her private practice, she served as the states deputy corporation commissioner and as a hearing officer for the Los Angeles Police Commission. In 1957, Yvonne Watson wed mathematician Louis Brathwaite. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964. Yvonne Brathwaite organized a legal defense team for Watts rioters in 1965 and was named by Governor Edmond Brown to the McCone Commission, which investigated the conditions that led to the riot. A year later she won election to the California assembly. She eventually chaired the assemblys committee on urban development and won re-election in 1968 and 1970.2 Brathwaite ultimately grew impatient with the pace of social legislation in the California assembly and, when courtmandated reapportionment created a new congressional district, decided to enter the race for the seat. The district encompassed much of southwest Los Angeles, was nearly 75 percent registered Democrats, and had a large AfricanAmerican constituency. In the Democratic primary, Brathwaite faced Billy Mills, a popular African-American Los Angeles city councilman. She amassed 54 percent of the vote to defeat Mills and three other challengers. Just days after the primary, on June 14, 1972, Yvonne Brathwaite married businessman William Burke, who had been an aide to Mills. Less than a month later, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke garnered national media attention as the vice chair of the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach that nominated George McGovern. She spent much of the convention controlling the gavel during the long and sometimes-raucous platform deliberations, eventually helping to pass revised rules that gave minorities and young voters a greater voice in shaping party policy.3

Source: http://baic.house.gov/member-profiles/profile.html?intID=123

Myrlie Evers-Williams (1933-)

Myrlie Beasley Evers was born March 17, 1933, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In 1950, she enrolled at Alcorn A&M College, where she met Medgar Evers, an upperclassman and Army veteran. She left school before earning her degree, and they married on Christmas Eve, 1951, and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She was raised by her grandmother (Annie McCain Beasley) and her aunt (Myrlie Beasley Polk) both were schoolteachers. (Contemporary Black Biography Vol.8: 66). Myrlie went to Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lorman, Mississippi, where she met the man of her dream, Medger Evers. Medger Evers was older than Myrlie, and he was also a veteran; but this didn't stop both of them from getting marries on December 24, 1951. The next year, Medger graduated, but Myrlie was still a sophomore in college . The couple settled in a black town in the Mississippi delta called Mound Bayou. Medger worked as an insurance agent for Magnolia Mutual Insurance, one of the best jobs for blacks offered by blacks.(Black Women in America: 12641266).1999). For Us the Living: The Story of Medgar Evers was made into a television film with the screenplay by Ossie Davis. It was directed by Michael Schultz and starred Howard Rollins, Jr., Irene Cara, Laurence Fishburne, and Paul Winfield in 1983. Another film Ghosts of Mississippi is the story of the final trial of the assassin, Bryon De La Beckwith, who was charged in 1963 with the murder of the husband of Myrlie Evers-Edgars's 60's civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The movie covers District Attorney, Bobby DeLaughters' alliance with Myrlie Evers as he becomes more involved with bringing Beckwith to trial for the third time 30 years after the first trial. Some of the characters are played by the actual participants in this story. In 1995, her second husband, Walter Williams, whom she had married in 1975, died. Myrlie Evers made history when she became the first woman to chair the NAACP. In 1999, Little, Brown re-published her memoir, "Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be," which describes her journey from being the wife of an activist to becoming a community leader in her own right.

Source: http://mswritersandmusicians.com/writers/myrlie-evers.html

Unita Blackwell (1933-)

Unita Blackwell was born in 1933. She is an African-American politician and activist. From Lula, Mississippi, her parents were both sharecroppers in Coahoma County. Because of limited educational opportunities for Blacks in that state, Blackwell had to cross the State line to attend school, in West Helena, Arkansas. She became a field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964, joining their efforts to register black voters in Mississippi. Also that year, she served as a delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Blackwell served as a community development specialist with the National Council of Negro Women. Since 1977, she has served as mayor of the Issaquena County Community of Mayersville. Blackwell has risen as a prominent speaker on rural housing and development. In 1979, she participated in President Jimmy Carters Energy Summit at Camp David. She later received a masters degree in regional planning from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In 1992, Blackwell received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Source: http://www.fannielouhamer.info/blackwell.html

Eleanor Holmes Norton (1937-)

Civil rights activist, politician. Born June 13, 1937 in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Antioch College,Yale University and Yale University Law School, Norton worked in private practice before becoming assistant director of the American Civil Liberties Union (196570) where she defended both Julian Bond's and George Wallace's freedom-of-speech rights. While in college and graduate school, Norton was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the time Norton graduated from Antioch, she had already been arrested for organizing and participating in sit-ins in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Ohio. While in law school, she traveled to Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Summer and worked with civil rights stalwarts like Medgar Evers. Norton's first encounter with a recently released, but physically beaten Fannie Lou Hamer forced Norton to bear witness to the intensity of violence and Jim Crow repression in the South. Her time with SNCC inspired her lifelong commitment to social activism and her budding sense of feminism. In the early 1970s, Eleanor Holmes Norton was a signer of the Black Womans Manifesto, a classic document of the Black feminist movement. As Chairman of the New York Human Rights Commission (19707), Norton championed women's rights and anti-block-busting legislation. She then went to Washington to chair the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (1977 83), and in 1982 became a law professor at Georgetown University. In 1990, Norton was elected as a Democratic non-voting delegate to the House from the District of Columbia. Currently under scrutiny, the DC Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act (or DC Vote) would give one vote to the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives, but not the Senate. Norton is a regular panelist on the PBS women's news program To the Contrary

Source: http://www.biography.com/articles/Eleanor-Holmes-Norton-9425250

Diana J. Nash (1938-)

Diane Judith Nash was born on May 15, 1938 in Chicago, Illinois to Leon Nash and Dorothy Bolton Nash. Nash grew up a Roman Catholic and attended parochial and public schools in Chicago. In 1956, she graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago, Illinois and began her college career at Howard University in Washington, D.C. before transferring to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. While a student in Nashville Nash witnessed southern racial segregation for the first time in her life. In 1959, she attended nonviolent protest workshops led by Reverend James Lawson who was affiliated with the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference. Later that year she protested exclusionary racial policies by participating in impromptu sit-ins at Nashvilles downtown lunch counters. Nash was elected chair of the Student Central Committee because of her nonviolent protest philosophy and her reputation from these sit-ins. By February 13, 1960, the mass sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1 had spread to Nashville. Nash organized and led many of the protests which ultimately involved hundreds of black and white area college students. As a result, by early April Nashville Mayor Ben West publicly called for the desegregation of Nashvilles lunch counters and organized negotiations between Nash and other student leaders and downtown business interests. Because of these negotiations, on May 10, 1960 Nashville, Tennessee became the first southern city to desegregate lunch counters. Meanwhile Nash and other students from across the South assembled in Raleigh, North Carolina at the urging of NAACP activist Ella Baker. There they founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960. After the Nashville sit-ins, Nash helped coordinate and participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides across the Deep South. Later that year Nash dropped out of college to become a full-time organizer, strategist, and instructor for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nash married civil rights activist James Bevel in 1961 and moved to Jackson, Mississippi where she began organizing voter registration and school desegregation campaigns for SCLC. Arrested dozens of times for their civil rights work in Mississippi and Alabama in the early 1960s, Nash and her husband, James Bevel, received SCLCs Rosa Parks award from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965. Dr. King cited especially their contributions to the Selma Right-to-vote movement that eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1966, Nash joined the Vietnam Peace Movement. Through the 1960s she stayed involved in political and social transformation. In the 1980s she fought for womens rights. Nash now works in real estate in her home town Chicago, Illinois, but continues to speak out for social change.

Source: http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/nash-diane-judith-1938

Marian Wright Edelman (1939-)

Marian Wright Edelman was born in and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, one of five children. Her father, Arthur Wright, was a Baptist preacher who taught his children that Christianity required service in this world and who was influenced by A. Phillip Randolph. He died when Marian was only fourteen, urging in his last words to her, "Don't let anything get in the way of your education." Marian Wright Edelman went on to study at Spelman College, abroad on a Merrill scholarship, and she traveled to the Soviet Union with a Lisle fellowship. When she returned to Spelman in 1959, she became involved in the civil rights movement, inspiring her to drop her plans to enter the foreign service, and instead to study law. She studied law at Yale and worked as a student on a project to register African American voters in Mississippi. In 1963, after graduating from Yale Law School, Marian Wright Edelman worked first in New York for the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund, and then in Mississippi for the same organization. There, she became the first African American woman to practice law. During her time in Mississippi, she worked on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement, and she also helped get a Head Start program established in her community. During a tour by Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark of Mississippi's poverty-ridden Delta slums, Marian met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy, and the next year she moved to Washington, D.C., to marry him and to work for social justice in the center of America's political scene. They had three sons. In Washington, Marian Wright Edelman continued her work, helping to get the Poor People's Campaign organized. She also began to focus more on issues relating to child development and children in poverty. Marian Wright Edelman established the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) in 1973 as a voice for poor, minority and handicapped children. She served as a public speaker on behalf of these children, and also as a lobbyist in Congress, as well as president and administrative head of the organization. The agency served not only as an advocacy organization, but as a research center, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need. To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds. Marian Wright Edelman also published her ideas in several books. The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours was a surprising success. In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was elected President, Hillary Clinton's involvement with the Children's Defense Fund meant that there was significantly more attention given to the organization. But Edelman did not pull her punches in criticizing the Clinton administration's legislative agenda -- such as its "welfare reform" initiatives -when she believed these would be disadvantageous to the nation's neediest children.

Source: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marianwrightedelman/p/m_w_edelman.htm

Claudette Colvin (1939-)

Few people know the story of Claudette Colvin: When she was 15, she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person nine months before Rosa Parks did the very same thing. Most people know about Parks and the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that began in 1955, but few know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system. Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more. Colvin was the first to really challenge the law. Now a 69-year-old retiree, Colvin lives in the Bronx. She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday. The bus driver ordered her to get up and she refused, saying she'd paid her fare and it was her constitutional right. Two police officers put her in handcuffs and arrested her. Her school books went flying off her lap. "All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily," Colvin says. It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who led more than 70 slaves to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist. The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter. "We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says. "You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up." To see her arrest report go to: http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu:5801/transcription/document_images/InVol6/550302-001.pdf

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101719889

Linda Brown Thompson (1943-)

As a third-grader in Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s, Linda Brown Thompson is often credited with single-handedly bringing down segregation in America. The truth is far more nuanced and interesting. In fact, Browns family was just one of thirteen African-American families recruited in Topeka by the NAACP. In 1950, the national civil rights organization was busy enlisting plaintiffs nationwide in preparation for a legal assault on the separate but equal Supreme Court ruling that had permitted segregation in American schools for half a century. In the fall of 1950, the Browns and 12 Topeka families were asked by the NAACP to try and enroll their children in their neighborhood white schools, with the expectation that they would be rejected. The NAACP then filed a lawsuit against the Board of Education in Topeka. That lawsuit and others brought on behalf of plaintiffs in Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, DC were presented together on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. By alphabetical accident, because Browns name started with a b, the landmark 1954 decision that ended legalized segregation in America went down in history as Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous the doctrine of separate-but-equal was inherently unconstitutional. Delivering the courts opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren asserted that segregated schools are not equal and cannot be made equal, and hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws. This landmark ruling began our nations long journey toward school desegregation. Thompson was one of several plaintiffs who called for the re-opening of the Brown case in 1979. Brown contested that Topeka school district 501 hadnt met the federal governments directives on desegregation. In 1993, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the schools were still segregated and ordered the district to take steps to desegregate them. The decision led to the construction of three additional schools. The revived case was closed in 1999. Thompson continues to live in Topeka. She co-owns Brown and Brown Associates, an educational consulting firm, with her younger sister, Cheryl Brown Henderson. The sisters have spoken of the court case, its ramifications and their experiences in numerous venues throughout the country. They have also appeared on several television news programs and were invited to the White House by then-President Bill Clinton.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/kcet/publicschool/innovators/brown.html

Terry Lynn Brown

Linda Brown and Her Sister Walking to School (1953) by Carl Iwasaki (Modern Print). Sisters Linda and Terry Brown were not allowed to attend nearby all-white New Summer School in Topeka, Kansas, but had to walk through the dangerous Rock Island switchyard to catch a bus for the all-black Monroe School. On May 17, 1954, in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the separate-but-equal doctrine, ending the legal basis for segregation of public schools.

Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson

Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson are credited with igniting the 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott. As students, Jakes and Patterson lived on Jennings Street, so County officials will rename the street Jakes & Patterson Street in their honor. There will be a celebration and unveiling of the new street sign at 11 a.m. Friday, January 30. In 1956, Jakes was a 26-year-old Education student from West Palm Beach, Fla., when she and her close friend, Patterson, a 20-year-old English major from Lakeland, Fla., were arrested for refusing to move to the back of a crowded Tallahassee city bus. After sitting in the front of the bus next to a white female passenger, the two brave and defiant FAMU students were placed under arrest. When news of their arrest reached the FAMU campus, the student body, under the leadership of Student Government Association President Brodes Hartley, planned and initiated the beginning stages of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott, a strategic 10-month long economic protest. I am extremely honored to participate in recognizing the historic contribution and significant impact of two courageous admirable advocates for change, said Tallahassee Mayor John Marks. After graduating from FAMU in 1956, Jakes went on to enjoy a productive and lengthy career as a Florida schoolteacher. Her first position was as an elementary teacher in Broward County, where she taught for 22 years. She later served 11 years as an educator in Lee County before retiring in the late 1990s. Patterson graduated from FAMU in 1957. She went on to serve as a teacher for some 12 years at her alma mater, Rochelle Junior and Senior High School in Lakeland, before her untimely death in 1969. The recognition for these trailblazing civil rights activists is appropriate and long overdue, said FAMU President James H. Ammons, Ph.D. The marker and the street will stand as a permanent testament to the sacrifice, diligence and contributions of these two women. They will also acknowledge the hundreds of other FAMU students, Rev. C.K. Steele, members of the Inter Civic Council and other members of the local, state, and national community who were unwavering in their valiant stance against social injustices. During FAMUs 2006 Spring Commencement activities, both Patterson (posthumously) and Jakes received the Universitys Distinguished Alumni Award and its first Freedom Award.

Source: http://www.famu.edu/index.cfm?a=headlines&p=display&news=997&archive

Thelma Mothershed Wair (1940-)

Thelma Jean Mothershed Wair made history as a member of the Little Rock Nine, the African-American students involved in the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The world watched as they braved constant intimidation and threats from those who opposed desegregation of the formerly all-white high school. Mothershed was a junior when she entered Central. Despite the fact that she had a cardiac condition since birth, she had a near perfect record for attendance. Thelma Mothershed was born on November 29, 1940, in Bloomberg, Texas, to Arlevis Leander Mothershed and Hosanna Claire Moore Mothershed. Her father was a psychiatric aid at the Veterans Hospital, and her mother was a homemaker. She has three sisters and two brothers. Mothershed attended Dunbar Junior High School and Horace Mann High School before transferring to Central High. Despite daily tormenting from some white students at Central High, she completed her junior year at the formerly all-white high school during the tumultuous 195758 year. Because the citys high schools were closed the following year, Mothershed earned the necessary credits for graduation through correspondence courses and by attending summer school in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her diploma from Central High by mail. Mothershed graduated from Southern Illinois University at Cabondale in 1964 with a BA in home economics and earned her MS in Guidance and Counseling Education in 1970; in 1985, she received an administrative certificate in education from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She taught home economics in the East St. Louis school system for twenty-eight years before retiring in 1994. Mothershed married Fred Wair on December 26, 1965. The couple has one son. Thelma Wair has also worked at the Juvenile Detention Center of the St. Clair County Jail in St. Clair County, Illinois, and as an instructor of survival skills for women at the American Red Cross Shelter for the homeless. During the 198990 school year, the East St. Louis chapter of the Top Ladies of Distinction and the early childhood/pre-kindergarten staff of District 189 honored her as an Outstanding Role Model. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) awarded her and the other Little Rock Nine, along with Daisy Bates, the prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1958. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nations highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine. Wair currently lives in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

Source: http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=724

Bettye Collier-Thomas (1941-)

The daughter of Joseph Thomas and Katherine (Bishop) Collier, Bettye Marie Collier was born on February 18, 1941, in Macon, Georgia, the second of three children. Her father, the recipient of a B.S. degree in business from Florida A&M College and a masters degree from Georgia College, was a business executive and public school teacher. Her mother attended Florida A&M College and later completed her education at Hunter College. For a number of years she was employed as a teacher by the Board of Education of the City of New York. Bettye Collier attended elementary schools in New York, Georgia, and Florida, and high school in Jamaica, New York. As a third-generation college graduate, Collier-Thomas was born into a family of educators, administrators, morticians, artisans, and small business owners, graduates of Fort Valley State College, Howard University, Florida A&M College, Harvard University, Boston University, and other professional schools. Her progenitors include her great-uncle Frank Richard Veal, a graduate of Howard and Boston Universities, a noted African Methodist Episcopal minister and president of several colleges and universities; her grandfather William T. Collier, one of the first blacks to work as a building subcontractor in Georgia and the first to serve on a grand jury in Milledgeville, Georgia; her great-uncle George Williams, the only black to own and operate a barber shop on the main street in Milledgeville; and her grandmother Luzella Veal Collier, a teacher and nurse. Collier-Thomas initially thought she would pursue a career in law, but in the eleventh grade she was inspired by a history teacher at John Adams High School in Jamaica, New York, to become a historian. Bettye Collier-Thomas received a bachelors degree from Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, and a masters degree from Atlanta University. In 1974 she became the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in history from George Washington University. During her college career she received many academic awards and honors, including induction into Alpha Kappa Mu National Honor Society, which was the black Phi Beta Kappa organization during segregation; and Whos Who in American Colleges and Universities. Collier-Thomas received a Presidential Scholarship to attend Atlanta University and a Ford Foundation Fellowship for doctoral studies at George Washington University. An educator and administrator for thirty years, from 1966 to 1976 Collier-Thomas served as a professor and administrator at Howard University and held faculty positions at Washington Technical Institute and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. From 1977 to 1981 she was a special consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities, developing the agencys first program of technical assistance to black museums and historical organizations. From 1977 to 1989 Collier-Thomas served as founding executive director of the Bethune Museum and Archives (BMA). In 1982 Congress designated this institution a National Historic Site, and in 1993 President George Bush signed legislation formally incorporating it into the Department of the Interior. From 1989 to the present Collier-Thomas has served as associate professor of history and director of the Temple University Center for African American History and Culture. Read more: Collier-Thomas, Bettye M. (1941) - African-American History, Archives Founder and Director http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/4568/Collier-Thomas-Bettye-M-1941.html#ixzz0bPjPbbOF Dr. Collier-Thomas' current publications include Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, My Soul Is a Witness: A Chronology of the Civil Rights Era 1954-1965, Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850-1979 and A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories.

Source: http://dickinsg.intrasun.tcnj.edu/akaauthors2/Bettye.htm

Elizabeth Ann Eckford (1941-)

Elizabeth Ann Eckford made history as a member of the Little Rock Nine, the nine African-American students who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The image of fifteen-year-old Eckford, walking alone through a screaming mob in front of Central High School, propelled the crisis into the nations living rooms and brought international attention to Little Rock (Pulaski County). Elizabeth Eckford was born on October 4, 1941, to Oscar and Birdie Eckford, and is one of six children. Her father worked nights as a dining car maintenance worker for the Missouri Pacific Railroads Little Rock station. Her mother taught at the segregated state school for blind and deaf children, instructing them in how to wash and iron for themselves. On September 4, 1957, Eckford arrived at Central High School alone. The Little Rock Nine were supposed to go together, but their meeting place was changed the previous night. The Eckford family had no phone, and so Daisy Bates intended to go to their place early the next day but never made it. As a result, Eckford was alone when she got off the bus a block from the school and tried to enter the campus twice, only to be turned away both times by Arkansas National Guard troops, there under orders from Governor Orval Faubus. She then confronted an angry mob of peoplemen, women, and teenagersopposing integration, chanting, Two, four, six, eight, we aint gonna integrate. Eckford made her way through the mob and sat on a bus bench at the end of the block. She was eventually able to board a city bus, and went to her mothers workplace. Because all of the citys high schools were closed the following year, Eckford did not graduate from Central High School, but she had taken correspondence and night courses and so had enough credits. She was accepted by Knox College in Illinois but soon returned to Little Rock to be closer to her parents. She also attended Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, and has a BA in history. Eckford served in the U.S. Army for five years, serving for her first two as a pay clerk and then, upon reenlisting, worked as an information specialist and wrote for the Fort McClellan, Alabama, and the Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, newspapers. Eckford has held various jobs throughout her life. She has been a waitress, history teacher, welfare worker, unemployment and employment interviewer, and a military reporter. Eckford was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as were the rest of the Little Rock Nine and Daisy Bates, in 1958. In 1997, Elizabeth Eckford shared the Father Joseph Biltz Award (presented by the National Conference for Community and Justice) with Hazel Bryan Massery, a segregationist classmate who appears in the famous Will Counts photograph, and during the reconciliation rally of 1997, the two former adversaries made speeches together. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nations highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine. She is currently a probation officer in Little Rock and is the mother of two sons.

Source: http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=721

Melba Patillo Beals (1941-)

At age 12, when Melba Pattillo read about the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, she was hopeful her life would change. She had grown up drinking from a water fountain marked "colored," riding in the back of the bus and attending separate and inferior Black schools. She daydreamed about attending the all-white Central High with its massive building covering two square blocks and standing six stories high. She wanted to avail herself of the opportunities rumored to exist within the castle-like structure. In 1957, while most teenage girls were listening to Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue," watching Elvis gyrate and collecting crinoline slips, a 15-year-old Melba Pattillo and 8 other black students faced the wrath of segragionists and the Govenor of Arkansas to become the first black students to enter Central High School. The civil rights battle which erupted rocked this country, put the world on edge and set Melba's life forever on a different course. She faced angry, rampant killer mobs and renegade police who forced then-President Eisenhower to send combat-ready soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to protect the lives of the nine students. At seventeen, Melba began writing articles for major newspapers and magazines. She later earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and worked as a news reporter for San Francisco's public television station, KQED, and for the NBC affiliate, KRON-TV. She has written numerous articles for periodicals including People, Essence and the San Francisco Examiner. Her best-selling books that chronicle her experiences, WARRIORS DON'T CRY: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock Central High School and its sequel WHITE IS A STATE OF MIND: Freedom is Yours to Choose; have provided inspirational reading for millions. Her best-selling primer on public relations, EXPOSE YOURSELF: Using The Power of Public Relations to Promote Your Business and Yourself, is an acknowledged industry reference. In 1998, for their courage and self-sacrifice, the Congress of the United States awarded the Little Rock Nine America's top civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal. Other recipients of this rarely given honor - just over 300 in the history of the nation - include President George Washington, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Bob Hope, Walt Disney, President Harry S. Truman, General Colin Powell and Mother Teresa. Melba Beals is a much sought after keynote speaker for vast and varied audiences who stand and applaud her informative, dynamic, inspirational, humorous and life-changing speeches. Her diversity seminar, The Spirit of Diversity: Seeing Equal - Being Equal, are aimed at quelling the fires of conflict due to the difference in one's race, creed or color.

Source: http://melbabeals.com/

Carlotta Walls LaNier (1942-)

In 1957, at age 14, Carlotta Walls LaNier was the youngest Little Rock Nine member to integrate Central High School. This act of courage and defiance became the catalyst for change in the American educational system. By ushering in a new order, she and her fellow warriors became foot soldiers for freedom. Despite her youth, Mrs. LaNier understood the impact of education in a promising future. Inspired by Rosa Parks and the desire to get the best education available, she enrolled in Central High School. Anger and violent behavior threatened their safety and motivated President Dwight D. Eisenhower to dispatch the Armys 101st Airborne Division to protect their constitutional rights. She graduated from Little Rock Central High School in 1960. Mrs. LaNier attended Michigan State University for two years. In 1968, she graduated from Colorado State College - now the University of Northern Colorado, on whose board of trustees she sits. Mrs. LaNier is an active supporter of her community, serving on the Board of Trustees for the University of Northern Colorado and Iliff School of Theology. She also serves as president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation and is a member of the Denver Chapter of The Links, Incorporated, and the Johnson Legacy, Inc. Board of Directors. In addition to the NAACPs Spingarn Medal and the Congressional Gold Medal, awarded to her as a member of the Little Rock Nine, Mrs. LaNier is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Northern Colorado and an inductee in the Colorado Womans Hall of Fame and the Girl Scouts Women of Distinction. After working for the YWCA, Mrs. LaNier has pursued a successful career as a real estate broker for more than 30 years and founded her own real estate brokerage firm, LaNier and Company, which she currently operates, with son Whitney. In addition to her son, she and husband, Ira, have an adult daughter, Brooke, and lives in Englewood, Colorado. A sought-after lecturer, Mrs. LaNier speaks across the country and is on a promotional tour of her first book, A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice of Little Rock Central High School. Fans around the world have heavily anticipated the release of this gripping memoir from the youngest of the "Little Rock Nine", which offers an inside look at the most famous school integration in American history, and the courage and faith required to survive it all. A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice of Little Rock Central High School is currently pre-selling on www.amazon.com. Click the book cover below for access. The release date is set for August 25, 2009.

Source: http://littlerock9.org/CarlottaWalls.aspx

Minnijean Brown Trickey (1942-)

Minnijean Brown Trickey is one of the nine African American students who collectively resisted opposition to the desegregation to enter Little Rock Central High School in 1957, with protection from federal troops. Although all of the Nine experienced verbal and physical harassment during their year at Central, Brown was first suspended, and then expelled for retaliating against the daily torment. She moved to New York and lived with Drs. Kenneth B. And Mamie Clark, African American psychologists who used their social science findings for the Brown v. Board Supreme Court case. She graduated from the New Lincoln School in 1959. Brown attended Southern Illinois University in journalism. She received a Bachelor of Social Work in Native Human Services from Laurentian University and Master of Social Work at Carleton University, in Ontario Canada. Minnijean Brown Trickey has worked in various settings committed to peacemaking; environmental issues; developing youth leadership; diversity education and training; cross-cultural communication; gender and social justice advocacy. She served in Clinton Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Workforce Diversity at the Department of the Interior. Her teaching experience in social work includes Carleton University, and community colleges in Canada. She continues as a teacher, writer and motivational speaker. She is the Shipley Visiting Writer for Heritage Studies at Arkansas State University. Brown Trickey is the recipient of numerous awards for her community work for social justice, including Lifetime Achievement Tribute by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, the International Wolf Award for contributions to racial harmony. With the Little Rock Nine, she received the NAACP Spingarn Medal and the Congressional Gold Medal. She is the subject of a documentary, Journey to Little Rock: the Untold Story of Minnijean Brown Trickey, which has received critical acclaim in international film festivals in Africa, the UK, the U.S., South America and Canada. She was featured in People Magazine, Newsweek, the Ottawa Citizen, the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, Donahue, as well as numerous other television, radio and print media. She appeared with the Little Rock Nine on Oprah and the Today show.

Source: http://www.nwhp.org/whm/trickey_bio.php

Gloria Ray Karlmark (1942-)

Gloria Cecelia Ray Karlmark made history as a member of the Little Rock Nine, the nine African-American students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1957. The world watched as they braved constant intimidation and threats from those who opposed desegregation of the formerly all-white high school. Gloria Ray was born on September 26, 1942, in Little Rock, one of the three children of Harvey C. and Julia Miller Ray. By the time Ray entered Central High, her father was retired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he had founded the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service for Negroes, and her mother was a sociologist working for the state of Arkansas. Ray was a fifteen-year-old student at all-black Horace Mann High School in Little Rock when she registered to attend the all-white Central High for her junior year. The Nine were harassed daily by white students at the school. Ray was tormented by one white student in particular, who called her names and bumped her several times, once knocking her across the floor. Unable to attend high school in 1958, during the Lost Year when all of the high schools in Little Rock were closed, Ray moved out of state to finish her high school education. The family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where her mother was able to find employment, and Ray graduated from Kansas City Central High School. Following high school, Ray attended Illinois Institute of Technology and received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and mathematics. She worked briefly as a public school teacher and research assistant at the University of Chicago Research Medical Center. Ray married Krister Karlmark in 1966, and in 1970, she joined International Business Machines (IBM) Nordic Laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden, where she worked as a systems analyst and technical writer. Karlmark graduated from Kungliga Patent & Registreringsverket in Sweden as a patent attorney, and from 1977 until 1981, she worked for IBM International Patent Operations. From 1976 to 1994, Karlmark founded and was editor-in-chief of Computers in Industry, an international journal of computer applications in industry. In 1994, Karlmark went to work in the Netherlands for Philips Telecommunications in Hilversum and, later, for Philips Lighting in Eindhoven. She and her husband have two children, Mats and Elin. Karlmark, along with Daisy Bates and the rest of the Little Rock Nine, was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1958. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nations highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine. Karlmark is now retired and lives in Amsterdam.

Source: http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=726#

Dorothy Counts (1942-)

Dorothy Counts was the daughter of a Johnson C. Smith University professor. At age 15, she became the first black student to attend Charlotte's all-white Harding High School. This action challenged segregation, the practice of keeping people separated according to their race. On September 4, 1957, she and three other students broke the "color barrier" that had denied them admission to Charlotte's best schools simply because the students were black. On that day, an angry crowd greeted Dorothy Counts. People threw rocks and screamed "Go back where you came from." Reporters and photographers came to witness and record the conflicts.Violence erupted in other cities where black students tried to enter all-white schools. Events such as these were part of a long struggle for equality, called "civil rights." Counts' family was concerned for her safety and sent her to Pennsylvania to finish high school. Today, Dorothy Counts Scoggins lives in Charlotte. She is a counselor with Child Care Resources. Source: http://www.cmstory.org/people/people.asp?id=15

Charlayne Hunter Gault (1942-)

Charlayne made civil rights history as the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Georgia in 1962, and has gone on to establish herself as one of television's premier journalists. She joined The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a correspondent, and became The NewsHour's national correspondent in 1983. In 1989, she was also a correspondent for MacNeil/Lehrer Productions' fivepart series, Learning in America. Previously, Charlayne served as a "Talk of the Town" reporter for The New Yorker. After winning a Russell Sage Fellowship to Washington University, she was on the staff of Trans-Action magazine. In 1967, she joined the investigative news team at WRC-TV, Washington, D.C., and also anchored the local evening news. In 1968, Charlayne joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter specializing in coverage of the urban African American community. Her work was honored with many awards during her ten years at the paper, including the National Urban Coalition Award for Distinguished Urban Reporting. Charlayne has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, Essence, and Vogue. During her association with The NewsHour, Charlayne has won additional awards: two Emmys, and a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism for her work on Apartheid's People, a NewsHour series on South Africa. She also received the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists; the 1990 Sidney Hillman Award; the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award; the American Women in Radio and Television Award; and two awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for excellence in local programming. Charlayne is author of In My Place, (1992), a memoir about her experiences at the University of Georgia. She is the recipient of more than two dozen honorary degrees. Charlayne is married, has two children, and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ww/hunter-gault.html

Patricia Hill Collins (1948-)

Patricia Hill Collins is a social theorist whose research, scholarship and activism have examined intersecting power relations of race, gender, social class, sexuality and/or nation. Her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, published in 1990, with a revised tenth year anniversary edition published in 2000, won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for significant scholarship in gender, and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second book, Race, Class, and Gender: An Antholog (2004) edited with Margaret Andersen, and with a seventh edition currently in preparation, is widely used in undergraduate classrooms in over 200 colleges and universities. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2004) received ASAs 2007 Distinguished Publication Award. Her other books include Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Temple University Press, 2005). She has published many articles in professional journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Signs, Sociological Theory, Social Problems, and Black Scholar, as well as in edited volumes. Professor Collins has taught at several institutions, held editorial positions with professional journals, lectured widely in the United States and abroad, served in many capacities in professional organizations, and has acted as consultant for a number of community organizations. She is also Charles Phelps Taft Emeritus Professor of Sociology within the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. In 2007, she was elected the 100th President of the American Sociological Association, the first African American woman to hold this position in ASAs 104-year history. Source: http://www.nwsaconference.org/2008/speakers.php

Vivian Malone Jones (1942-2005)

Vivian Malone Jones, who on a blisteringly hot June day in 1963 became one of two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama after first being barred at the door by the defiant governor, George C. Wallace. Her entrance to the university came as the civil rights struggle raged across the South. On June 12, the day after Ms. Jones and James Hood were escorted into the university by federalized National Guard troops, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death in Jackson, Miss. On May 30, 1965, Ms. Jones became the first black to graduate from the University of Alabama in its 134 years of existence, earning a degree in business management with a B-plus average. The performance of Governor Wallace, who stood at the doorway of Foster Auditorium flanked by state troopers, fulfilled a campaign pledge stop integration at "the schoolhouse door. But historians have written that his defiance was scripted and came with a promise to federal authorities that he would be brief and would soon comply. At the time, The Tuscaloosa News wrote contemptuously that the governor "squeezed every suspenseful moment of drama from the occasion." The students waited in a car as Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, deputy attorney general of the United States, avoided a direct confrontation. He said to Mr. Wallace: "From the outset, Governor, all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students. Only after the federalized guard troops arrived, four and a half hours after Mr. Wallace's initial refusal, were the students admitted. Mr. Wallace read a second statement challenging the constitutionality of the court order, then briskly left. The students entered Foster Hall, registered, went to their dormitories, ate in the cafeteria and experienced no further incidents that day. Vivian Juanita Malone grew up in Mobile, Ala., where she was a member of the National Honor Society in high school. She earned a bachelor's degree at Alabama A & M, a predominantly black university, but it lost its accreditation. To get an accredited degree, she applied to the University of Alabama's School of Commerce and Business Administration and was admitted as a junior. One night at midnight, someone knocked on her dormitory door and told her there was a bomb threat. No bomb materialized, but that November, there were three bomb blasts at the university, one of them four blocks from her dormitory. After Mr. Evers was killed, Ms. Jones said she felt even more determined not to give up. "I decided not to show any fear and went to classes that day," she said in an interview with The Post Standard of Syracuse in 2004. In the same interview, she said one of her strongest memories of Alabama was that she often smiled at white students, but got no response. The university hired a driver for her, a student at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa named Mack Jones. They later married, and he became an obstetrician. After graduating from Alabama, Ms. Jones worked for the United States Justice Department in its civil rights division. She also worked at the Environmental Protection Agency as director of civil rights and urban affairs and director of environmental justice before retiring in 1996 to sell life insurance. In 1996, former Governor Wallace presented the Lurleen B. Wallace Award for Courage, named for his late wife, to Ms. Jones. He told her that he made a mistake 33 years earlier and that he admired her. They discussed forgiveness. In a speech to University of Alabama graduates in 2000, Ms. Jones suggested one lesson that might be taken from her historic experience: "You must always be ready to seize the moment."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/national/14jones.html?_r=1

Angela Davis (1944-)

Angela Davis, radical black activist and philosopher, was arrested as a suspected conspirator in the abortive attempt to free George Jackson from a courtroom in Marin County, California, August 7, 1970. The guns used were registered in her name. Angela Davis was eventually acquitted of all charges, but was briefly on the FBI's most-wanted list as she fled from arrest. Angela Davis is often associated with the Black Panthers and with the black power politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She joined the Communist Party when Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. She was active with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) before the Black Panthers. Angela Davis ran for U.S. Vice President on the Communist Party ticket in 1980. Angela Davis has been an activist and writer promoting women's rights and racial justice while pursuing her career as a philosopher and teacher at the University of Santa Cruz and San Francisco University -- she achieved tenure at the University of California at Santa Cruz though former governor Ronald Reagan swore she would never teach again in the University of California system. She studied with political philosopher Herbert Marcuse. She has published on race, class, and gender (see below).

June E. Johnson (1947-2007)

June E. Johnson was born in Greenwood, Mississippi to the late Theoda and Lula Bell Johnson, Sr. on December 31, 1947. Her parents hosted visiting SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) workers for many years. June was raised by her maternal grandmother Emily Johnson Holt who also preceded her in death. June began attending SNCC meetings in her early teens after seeing a flyer about a mass meeting at one of the local churches. Robert (Bob) Moses convinced her parents to allow June to attend the meeting and subsequent voter registration workshops. In June 1963, after attending a voter registration workshop, June was arrested and beaten in jail in Winona, Mississippi along with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, Euvester Simpson, Annelle Ponder, James West and others. June worked as a paralegal for North Mississippi Rural Legal Services (1972-73). Throughout 1970s she was actively involved in lawsuits aimed at stopping racist practices of Greenwood city and Leflore county governments as named plaintiff and as paralegal investigator. With Marion Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, June drew attention to failures of Mississippi anti-poverty agencies and investigated Mississippi prison conditions. In 1978, she was the first African-American woman candidate for Leflore County Board of Supervisors. June moved to Washington, D.C., in 1982, worked in city government for the Office of Paternity and Child Support Enforcement (1983-86), and as a home hospital teacher. From 1995 until September 2006 (after health began to fail her) June was the program monitor in the Office of Early Childhood Development and served as first Vice-President of the Washington, D.C., Ward 6 Democrats. She was a research consultant for the film Freedom Song (2000), about Mississippi SNCC workers and lead consultant for the documentary Standing on My Sisters Shoulders, a film documenting her civil rights activism, along with fellow activists Dorie Ladner, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray Adams, Annie Devine, Lawrence Guyot and others. Additionally, she is featured in a documentary produced by American Public Radio entitled Mississippi Becomes A Democracy. Continuing her consultations to various organizations and institutions right up to her death, June provided information that few spoke of or cared to share. She never stopped planning on how to get accurate information out about the civil rights movement. She often recalled Mrs. Hamer called me to her bedside when she was dying and told me all about her unfinished business. "I gave Blood with this lady, do you understand me?!
Source: http://www.fannielouhamer.info/johnson.html

Ruby Bridges (1954-)

On the morning of her first day at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Ruby Bridges' mother told her: "Now I want you to behave yourself today, Ruby, and don't be afraid." And Ruby and her mother went to the school, where so many people were outside, shouting and throwing things that the little girl thought it must be Mardi Gras. She seemed to be remembering her mother's words as she entered the school without showing any fear at all, despite the fact that it was 1960, there were U.S. Marshals walking beside her, and she was the first black child to enter an all-white school in the history of the American South. It was in 1960 that a federal court ordered the desegregation of schools in the south, and although Ruby Bridges' father thought she could get a perfectly good education at an all-black elementary school, Ruby Bridges' mother insisted that her daughter pave the way for other black children in the newly-integrated school system. Charles Burks, one of the U.S. Marshals who escorted Ruby Bridges and her mother into the school building, remembers the little girl who became a hero. "She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn't whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. And we're all very proud of her." The first year, all the parents of Frantz Elementary pulled their children out of school to protest the integration. As a result, Ruby Bridges spent her first year in a class of one. The teacher, a woman from Boston, was one of the few white instructors who was willing to teach a black child. She and Ruby Bridges showed up for school every single day that year, and they held class as if there were no angry mob outside, no conflict over a little girl attending first grade. Ruby Bridges family suffered from the bigotry of the times. Her father lost his job as a result of the controversy, and her grandparents lost their place as tenant farmers.

Source: http://www.africanaonline.com/ruby_bridges.htm