Final S.S. Individuals (MS)

Theodore Bilbo

BILBO, Theodore Gilmore, a Senator from Mississippi; born on a farm near Poplarville, Pearl River County, Miss., October 13, 1877; attended the public schools, Peabody College, Nashville, Tenn., the law department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; teacher in district and high schools of Mississippi for five years; admitted to the bar in 1908 and commenced practice in Poplarville, Miss.; member, State senate 1908-1912; elected lieutenant governor 1912-1916; twice elected Governor and served 1916-1920 and 1928-1932; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1934, 1940 and again in 1946 and served from January 3, 1935, until his death in New Orleans on August 21, 1947; did not take the oath of office in 1947 at the beginning of the Eightieth Congress; chairman, Committee on District of Columbia (Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth Congresses), Committee on Pensions (Seventy-eighth Congress); interment in Juniper Grove Cemetery, near Poplarville, Miss.

Byron De La Beckwith

American white supremacist (born Nov. 9, 1920, Colusa, Calif.—died Jan. 21, 2001, Jackson, Miss.), was the convicted murderer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. On June 12, 1963, Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his home. Beckwith was charged with the murder, but he was set free in 1964 after two trials resulted in hung juries. He was convicted in a third trial held in 1994 and given a life sentence.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an influential champion of women's rights for more than half a century. She was introduced to the reform movement by her husband, abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton. (At their 1840 wedding, they omitted the word "obey" from the vows; for their honeymoon, they went to the World's Antislavery Convention.) With abolitionist Lucretia Mott, Stanton organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first U.S. convention on women's rights. She drafted the convention's famed Declaration of Sentiments and, despite controversy, insisted that it assert women's right to vote. In the 1860s, after her seven children were grown, Stanton became a renowned lecturer on woman suffrage. With Susan B. Anthony she founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and served as its president for more than twenty years (1869-90). Stanton was also a capable writer; she collaborated on three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881-85) with Anthony and Matilda Gage, and wrote the biblical commentary The Woman's Bible (1895) and an autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898).

Emmett Till

The brutal 1955 murder of teenager Emmett Till, and the news coverage it drew, helped ignite the civil rights movement in America in the 1950s. Exactly what Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, said or did to offend Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old white woman working in a Mississippi grocery store that August day, is unclear; he may have whistled at her. This prompted Bryant's husband, store owner Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, to abduct, beat and shoot Emmett Till and throw his body in a river. An open-casket funeral and news pictures of Emmett Till's disfigured face caused worldwide news coverage of the case, in which an all-white jury acquitted the killers. Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett Till had made an obscene comment to her and she told the court that "I was just scared to death." After the trial, Roy Bryant and Milam, now immune from further prosecution, confessed the killing to the magazine Look. The case was reopened 50 years later and Emmett Till's body was exhumed for an autopsy, but the FBI announced in 2006 that it would not file federal charges and a grand jury refused to indict in 2007.

Lester Maddox

U.S. public official, governor of Georgia (1967-71), b. Atlanta. He achieved national notoriety in 1964 when he drove African Americans from his restaurant in defiance of federal civil-rights legislation and then closed the establishment rather than desegregate it. Elected (1966) governor as an avowed segregationist with the support of the Ku Klux Klan , he was unable to stem the tide of integration. Although prevented by the state constitution from succeeding himself as governor, he was subsequently elected lieutenant governor (1971-75). He was an unsuccessful candidate for the 1974 and 1990 Democratic gubernatorial nomination and in the 1976 presidential election.

Ross Barnett

"Fifty-second governor of Mississippi, was born in Standing Pine, Leake County, Mississippi on January 22, 1898. His education was attained at Mississippi College, where he graduated in 1922, and at the University of Mississippi, where he earned a law degree in 1926. After establishing his legal career in Jackson, Barnett entered into politics, however he was defeated in both his 1951 and 1955 gubernatorial bids. Barnett next secured the 1959 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and was elected governor by a popular vote in November of that same year. He was sworn into office on January 19, 1960. During his tenure, the states workmen's compensation law was revised; a right to work law was sanctioned; and the University of Mississippi admitted it's first black student in 1962. Barnett completed his term and left office on January 21, 1964. After running unsuccessfully for reelection to the governorship in 1967, Barnett retired from political life. Governor Ross R. Barnett passed away on November 6, 1987, and was buried in the Barnett Cemetery in Standing Pines, Mississippi."--National Governors Association Web page.

Lucy Stone

1818-93, reformer and leader in the women's rights movement, b. near West Brookfield, Mass., grad. Oberlin, 1847. In 1847 she gave her first lecture on women's rights, and the following year she was engaged by the Anti-Slavery Society as one of their regular lecturers. As a speaker she had great eloquence and was often able to sway an unruly and antagonistic audience. She married Henry Brown Blackwell in 1855 but continued, as a matter of principle, to use her own name and was known as Mrs. Stone. In 1870 she founded the Woman's Journal, which was for nearly 50 years the official organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association and, after 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After her death it was edited by her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. In 1921 the Lucy Stone League was formed to continue the battle for women's rights.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

1821-77, Confederate general, b. Bedford co., Tenn. (his birthplace is now in Marshall co.). At the beginning of the Civil War, Forrest, a wealthy citizen of Memphis, organized a cavalry force, which he led at Fort Donelson (Feb., 1862) and Shiloh (April). He assumed command of a cavalry brigade in the Army of Tennessee (June) and in July captured a large Union garrison at Murfreesboro. He was made a brigadier general. With a newly recruited command he effectively cut Grant's communications in a raid through W Tennessee (Dec., 1862). After foiling a Union attempt to cut the railroad between Chattanooga and Atlanta (May, 1863), Forrest participated in the Chattanooga campaign until trouble with Braxton Bragg led him to accept a command in N Mississippi. He was promoted to major general (Dec., 1863); captured Fort Pillow (Apr., 1864); defeated a superior force at Brices Cross Roads, Miss. (June); and held Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith to a drawn battle at Tupelo, Miss. (July). These Union failures against Forrest caused Sherman, then advancing on Atlanta, much concern for his communications. Forrest commanded all the cavalry under John Bell Hood in that general's Tennessee campaign (Nov.-Dec., 1864) and was promoted to lieutenant general (Feb., 1865). He surrendered shortly after his defeat at Selma, Ala., in April. After the war he engaged for a time in railroading and also was important in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan . Forrest, probably the greatest Confederate cavalryman, is one of the most interesting figures of the war.

Carrie Chapman Catt

1859-1947, American suffragist and peace advocate, b. Carrie Lane, Ripon, Wis., grad. Iowa State College (now Iowa State Univ.), 1880. She was superintendent of schools (1883-84) in Mason City, Iowa. In 1885 she married Lee Chapman, a journalist (d. 1886), and in 1890, George Catt, an engineer (d. 1905). From 1890 to 1900 an organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she became its president in 1900. She led the campaign to win suffrage through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), she organized the League of Women Voters for the political education of women. At the Berlin convocation of the International Council of Women she helped organize the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, of which she was president from 1904 to 1923. After 1923 she devoted her efforts chiefly to the peace movement. With Nettie R. Shuler she wrote Woman Suffrage and Politics (1923).

Margaret Sanger

1879-1966, American leader in the birth control movement, b. Corning, N.Y. Personal experience and work as a public-health nurse, much of it on New York City's Lower East Side, convinced her that family planning, especially where poverty was a factor, was a necessary step in social progress. She studied in London with Havelock Ellis and others and, back in the United States, began her campaign almost single-handedly. Indicted in 1915 for sending birth control information through the mails and arrested the next year for conducting a birth control clinic in Brooklyn, Sanger gradually won support from the public and the courts. A clinic opened (1923) in New York City functioned until the 1970s. She organized the first American (1921) and international (1925) birth control conferences and formed (1923) the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. She was president of the committee until its dissolution (1937) after birth control under medical direction was legalized in most of the states. In the 1960s, Sanger actively supported the use of the newly available birth control pill. She visited many countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, lecturing and helping to establish clinics. Her books include Woman and the New Race (1920), Happiness in Marriage (1926), and an autobiography (1938).

Hoover, J. Edgar

1895-1972, American administrator, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), b. Washington, D.C. Shortly after he was admitted to the bar, he entered (1917) the Dept. of Justice and served (1919-21) as special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer . In this capacity he directed the so-called Palmer Raids against allegedly radical aliens. Director of the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935) after 1924, Hoover built a more efficient crime-fighting agency, establishing a centralized fingerprint file, a crime laboratory, and a training school for police. During the 1930s, to publicize the work of his agency in fighting organized crime, he participated directly in the arrest of several major gangsters. After World War II, Hoover focused on the perceived threat of Communist subversion. In office until his death, he became increasingly controversial. His many critics considered his anticommunism obsessive, and it has been verified that he orchestrated systematic harassment of political dissenters and activists, including Martin Luther King , Jr. Hoover accumulated enormous power, in part from amassing secret files on the activities and private lives of political leaders and their associates. After his death reforms designed to prevent these abuses were undertaken. His writings include Persons in Hiding (1938), Masters of Deceit (1958), and A Study of Communism (1962).

Robert Moses

1900-1975, American baseball player, b. Lonaconing, Md. A left-handed pitcher, he played for the Philadelphia Athletics (1925-33) and Boston Red Sox (1934-41). In 1931 his season record of 31 victories against four defeats (including 16 consecutive wins that equaled an American League record) earned him the league's Most Valuable Player award. In his 17 years he won 300 and lost 141 games for a lifetime winning percentage of .680; he led the league in earned run average nine times and in strikeouts seven times. Grove was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1947.

Langston Hughes

1902-67, American poet and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, b. Joplin, Mo., grad. Lincoln Univ., 1929. He worked at a variety of jobs and lived in several countries, including Mexico and France, before Vachel Lindsay discovered his poetry in 1925. The publication of The Weary Blues (1926), his first volume of poetry, enabled Hughes to attend Lincoln Univ. in Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1929. His writing, which often uses dialect and jazz rhythms, is largely concerned with depicting African American life, particularly the experience of the urban African American. Among his later collections of poetry are Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), One-Way Ticket (1949), and Selected Poems (1959). Hughes's numerous other works include several plays, notably Mulatto (1935); books for children, such as The First Book of Negroes (1952); and novels, including Not Without Laughter (1930). His newspaper sketches about Jesse B. Simple were collected in The Best of Simple (1961).

Ralph Bunche

1904-71, U.S. government official and UN diplomat, b. Detroit, Ph.D., Harvard, 1934. He taught political science at Howard Univ. (1928-40). In government service after 1941, he worked under the joint chiefs of staff and was a chief research analyst in the Office of Strategic Services. The first African American to be a division head in the Dept. of State (1945), he entered the United Nations in 1946 as director of the Trusteeship Division. He became (Dec., 1947) principal secretary of the UN Palestine Commission and was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the 1948 Arab-Israeli truce. He served as UN undersecretary general for special political affairs (1955-67) and undersecretary general from 1967 until his retirement due to poor health shortly before his death.

Thugood Marshalll

1908-93, U.S. lawyer and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1967-91), b. Baltimore. He received his law degree from Howard Univ. in 1933. In 1936 he joined the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As its chief counsel (1938-61), he argued more than 30 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully challenging racial segregation, most notably in higher education. His presentation of the argument against the separate but equal doctrine achieved its greatest impact with the landmark decision handed down in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). His appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1961 was opposed by some Southern senators and was not confirmed until 1962. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court two years later; he was the first black to sit on the high court, where he consistently supported the position taken by those challenging discrimination based on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and supported the rights of criminal defendants. His support for affirmative action led to his strong dissent in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). As appointments by Presidents Nixon and Reagan changed the outlook of the Court, Marshall found himself increasingly in the minority; in retirement he was outspoken in his criticism of the court.

Orval Faubus

1910-94, governor of Arkansas (1955-67), b. Combs, Ark. A schoolteacher, he served in World War II and after the war became Arkansas's state highway commissioner. Elected to the governorship after a runoff, Faubus initially pursued a liberal course in office but to combat his political opponents who were staunch segregationists, he adopted a hard-line civil-rights position. In 1957, Faubus gained national attention when he called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, but he was eventually forced to withdraw the Guard. After rioting broke out, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent U.S. troops to Little Rock and put the National Guard under federal command in order to ensure the integration of the school. Faubus's political expediency resulted in his repeated reelection as governor but also prevented him from moving into the national political arena. In 1970, 1974, and 1986 he sought reelection as governor of Arkansas but was unsuccessful in each attempt at a political comeback, the last time losing to Bill Clinton .

Rosa Parks

1913-2005, American civil-rights activist, b. Tuskegee, Ala., as Rosa Louise McCauley. A seamstress and long-time activist-member of the Montgomery, Ala., chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she sparked the Montgomery bus boycott with her Dec. 1, 1955, arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a municipal bus to a white man. This successful protest, which lasted just over a year, marked the emergence of Martin Luther King , Jr., to national prominence as a civil-rights leader and provided the model for future nonviolent movement actions. Fired from her job and unable to find work, Parks moved in 1957 to Detroit, where she remained active in the civil-rights movement and worked (1965-88) as an aide to U.S. Representative John Conyers. She was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest honor, in 1999.

Ralph Ellision

1914-94, African-American author, b. Oklahoma City; studied Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee Univ.). Originally a trumpet player and aspiring composer, he moved (1936) to New York City, where he met Langston Hughes , who became his mentor, and became friends with Richard Wright , who radicalized his thinking. Ellison's earliest published writings were reviews and stories in the politically radical New Masses magazine. His literary reputation rests almost completely on one novel, Invisible Man (1952). A classic of American literature, it draws upon the author's experiences to detail the harrowing progress of a nameless young black man struggling to live in a hostile society. Ellison also published two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). His collected essays were published in 1995, and a volume of stories appeared in 1996. For many years Ellison struggled with the writing of a second novel, sections of which appeared (1960-77) in magazines, but it was still uncompleted at his death. Condensing the sprawling mass of text and notes written over four decades, his literary executor assembled the novel Juneteenth, which was published in 1999.

Gwendolyn Brooks

1917-2000, American poet, b. Topeka, Kans. She grew up in the slums of Chicago and lived in that city until her death. Brooks's poems, technically accomplished and written in a variety of forms including quatrains, free verse, ballads, and sonnets, deal with the experience of being black and often of being female in America. She attracted critical attention with her first volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Brooks went on to win the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Annie Allen (1949), becoming the first black woman to win this award. Her verse was collected in The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1970), which also includes an earlier novelette, Maud Martha (1953). Her work took on a more radical tone beginning with In the Mecca (1968); the subsequent poems in Riot (1970) are written in street dialects. Her other writings include Primer for Blacks (1980) and To Disembark (1981).

Phyllis Schlafly

1924-2016, American conservative activist, b. St. Louis, Mo., as Phyllis McAlpin Stewart, grad. Washington Univ. (B.A. 1944, J.D. 1978), Harvard (M.A. 1945). A Republican, she was an anticommunist crusader in the 1950s and 60s and ran for Congress unsuccessfully three times (1952, 1960, 1970). She is best known for the ultimately successful campaign she organized (1972) to deny ratification to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she denounced as damaging to the family. Schlafly, a vehement opponent of abortion and gay marriage as well, founded (1972) the Eagle Forum, an ultraconservative interest group focused on social issues. She was the author of more than 20 books, a syndicated columnist, and a radio commentator.

James Baldwin

1924-87, American author, b. New York City. He spent an impoverished boyhood in Harlem, became a Pentecostal preacher at 14, and left the church three years later. He moved to Paris in 1947 and his first two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), reflecting his experience as a young preacher, and Giovanni's Room (1956), which dealt with his homosexuality, as well as the intensely personal, racially charged essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), were written while he lived there. Baldwin returned to the United States in 1957 and participated in the civil-rights movement, later returning to France where he lived for the remainder of his life. Another Country (1962), a bitter novel about sexual relations and racial tension, received critical acclaim, as did the perceptive essays in what is probably his most celebrated book, The Fire Next Time (1963). His eloquence and unsparing honesty made Baldwin one of the most influential authors of his time. Other works include the play Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964); a volume of short stories, Going to Meet the Man (1964); and the novels If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), the story of a young black couple victimized by the judicial system, and Just above My Head (1979). Collections of essays include Nobody Knows My Name (1961), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Price of a Ticket (1985). His Collected Essays was published in 1998 and The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings in 2010.

Coretta Scott King

1927-2006, American civil-rights leader, b. Heiberger, Ala.; the wife (1953-68) of Martin Luther King , Jr. After her husband's assassination, she carried on his civil-rights work. She also campaigned to have his birthday commemorated as a national holiday, which was first observed in 1986, and established the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta. In the late 1990s she and other family members supported the unsuccessful efforts of James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of her husband, to win a new trial, believing that Martin Luther King was the victim of a conspiracy that may have included members of the U.S. government. In 1999 she and her family brought and won a wrongful death suit against Loyd Jowers, who claimed to have arranged King's assassination for a Mafia figure. Many experts, however, were not convinced by the evidence presented during the trial. She wrote My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969).

Stokely Carmichael

1941-98, African-American social activist, b. Trinidad. He lived in New York City from 1952 and graduated from Howard Univ. in 1964. Carmichael participated in the Congress of Racial Equality's freedom rides in 1961, and by 1964 was a field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Alabama. As SNCC chair in 1966, he ejected more moderate leaders and set off a storm of controversy by calling for black power, a concept he elaborated in a 1967 book (with C. Hamilton). He was also an anti-Vietnam War activist, and railed against both racial and economic injustice. His increasingly separatist politics isolated Carmichael from most of the civil-rights movement. He immigrated to Guinea in 1969 and spent the rest of his life there, calling himself a pan-African revolutionary but largely relegated to the political fringe. He changed his name to Kwame Ture, and was married briefly to the singer Miriam Makeba . His memoir Ready for Revolution was posthumously published in 2003.

WEB DuBois

A scholar, writer and political activist, W.E.B. Du Bois was a key founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W.E.B. Du Bois attended Harvard University and in 1895 became the first African-American to receive a doctorate from the school. He became a university professor, a prolific writer and a pioneering social scientist on the topic of black culture. Du Bois particularly disagreed with black leaders (such as Booker T. Washington) who urged blacks to blend in with white society; Du Bois championed global African unity and (especially in later years) separatism. He distilled his views in his famous 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. In 1909, Du Bois became a founding member of the NAACP, an organization promoting progress and social equality for blacks. Du Bois continued for decades as a strong public voice on behalf of African-Americans. In the 1950s, Du Bois clashed with the federal government over his support for labor, his public appreciations of the Soviet Union, and his demands that nuclear weapons be outlawed. He emigrated to Ghana in 1961 and became a citizen of that country shortly before his death in 1963. His memoir, The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois, was published posthumously in 1968.

Jesse Jackson

African-American political leader, clergyman, and civil-rights activist, b. Greenville, S.C. Raised in poverty, he attended the Chicago Theological Seminary (1963-65) and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968. Active in the civil-rights movement, he became a close associate of Martin Luther King , Jr. He served as executive director (1966-71) of Operation Breadbasket, a program of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that addressed the economic problems of African Americans in northern cities. In 1971 he founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), an organization to combat racism. Since 1986 he has been president of the National Rainbow Coalition, an independent political organization aimed at uniting disparate groups—racial minorities, the poor, peace activists, and environmentalists. In 1984 and 1988, Jackson, an effective public speaker, campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president, becoming the first African American to contend seriously for that office. He was elected (1990) as a nonvoting member of the Senate from the District of Columbia and has campaigned for its statehood. He has written Legal Lynching (1996), an attack on capital punishment .

Maya Angelou

African-American writer and performer, b. St. Louis, Mo., as Marguerite Johnson. She toured Europe and Africa in the musical Porgy and Bess (1954-55), then sang in New York City nightclubs, joined the Harlem Writers Guild, and took part in several off-Broadway productions, including Genet's The Blacks and her own Cabaret for Freedom (1960). During the 1960s she was active in the African-American political movement; she subsequently moved to Cairo where she edited The Arab Observer and then spent several years in Ghana as editor of the African Review. During the 1970s she appeared on Broadway, in several feature films, and in the TV miniseries Roots. Although she wrote poems, plays, and short stories, all in a lush and lyrical style that was both lauded and criticized, she is best known for her six autobiographical volumes (1970-2002), the first and most popular of which, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which tells of her childhood in the segregated South. Her several volumes of poetry include And I Still Rise (1978). Angelou read her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993. President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

Elijah Muhammad

American black-nationalist and religious leader, b. near Sandersville, Ga. Originally named Elijah Poole, he left home at 16 and worked at various jobs. In 1923 he settled in Detroit and became an automobile assembly-line worker. In 1931 he became a follower of Wali Farad, or W. D. Fard, who had established a Temple of Islam in Detroit. When Farad disappeared in 1934, Poole (now renamed Muhammad) assumed leadership of the movement that was to become known as the Black Muslims , officially the Nation of Islam. He was imprisoned during World War II for encouraging resistance to the draft. Muhammad called himself the Messenger of Allah and preached that the only salvation for black people in the United States lay in withdrawal into an autonomous state. He retained almost autocratic control over his movement. He greatly influenced Malcolm X , although Malcolm later left the Black Muslims. W. Deen Mohammed , his son, succeeded him as leader of the Nation of Islam.

Muhammad Ali

American boxer, b. Louisville, Ky. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, he was a 1960 Olympic gold medalist. Shortly after upsetting Sonny Liston in 1964 to become world heavyweight champion, he formalized his association with the Nation of Islam (see Black Muslims ) and adopted the Muslim name Muhammad Ali. Controversial figure due to stances during the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s. After beating Liston, he defended his title nine times, brashly proclaiming himself the greatest of all time. In 1967 he refused induction into the armed services and became symbol of resistance to the Vietnam War. The boxing establishment stripped Ali of his title and prevented him from fighting until the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971 upheld his draft appeal on religious grounds. Before retiring in 1981 Ali compiled a 56-5 record and became the only man to ever win the heavyweight crown three times. His fights with Joe Frazier and George Foreman were among boxing's biggest events. In retirement, Ali was one of the most recognized world figures. The 1984 revelation that he suffered from Parkinson's disease renewed debate over the negative effects of boxing. His appearance at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, to light the Olympic flame, moved an international audience.

James Forman

American civil rights activist (born Oct. 4, 1928, Chicago, Ill.—died Jan. 10, 2005, Washington, D.C.), served as executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1961-66). In that position he was a pivotal figure in the struggle for racial equality, especially in the organization of the Freedom Rides in the South and of the 1963 March on Washington.

Ralph Abernathy

American civil-rights leader, b. Linden, Ala. A Baptist minister, he helped Martin Luther King , Jr., organize the Montgomery bus boycott (1955). He was treasurer, vice president, and, after King's assassination (1968), president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). An advocate of nonviolence as a means to social change, he led the Poor People's Campaign on Washington, D.C., after King's death. He resigned from the SCLC in 1977.

Jonathan Daniels

American newspaper editor and author, b. Raleigh, N.C. In 1925 he joined the staff of the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, edited by his father, Josephus Daniels. He edited the paper (1933-1942) while his father was ambassador to Mexico, and succeeded to the editorship after Josephus Daniels's death in 1948. The paper reflected his Southern liberal views. Daniels held various official posts, including administrative assistant to President F. D. Roosevelt (1943-45) and U.S. member (1947-53) of the United Nations subcommittee on prevention of discrimination and protection of minorities. He contributed widely to periodicals and wrote a novel, Clash of Angels (1930); reportorial books, A Southerner Discovers the South (1938) and Frontier on the Potomac (1946); a biography of Truman (1950); and several histories, including The Time Between the Wars: Armistice to Pearl Harbor (1966).

Adam Clayton Powell Jr

American politician and clergyman, b. New Haven, Conn. In 1937 he became pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, and he soon became known as a militant black leader. He was elected to the city council of New York in 1941, and was elected for the first time to the U.S. Congress in 1945. Although a Democrat, he campaigned for President Eisenhower in 1956. As chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor after 1960, he acquired a reputation for flamboyance and disregard of convention. In Mar., 1967, he was excluded by the House of Representatives, which had accused him of misuse of House funds, contempt of New York court orders concerning a 1963 libel judgment against him, and conduct unbecoming a member. He was overwhelmingly reelected in a special election in 1967 and again in 1968. He was seated in the 1969 Congress but fined $25,000 and deprived of his seniority. In June, 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his exclusion from the House had been unconstitutional. Powell was defeated for reelection in 1970.

Earl Warren

American public official and 14th chief justice of the United States (1953-69), b. Los Angeles. He graduated from the Univ. of California Law School in 1912. Admitted (1914) to the bar, he practiced in Oakland, Calif., and held several local offices. He served (1939-43) as state attorney general and was governor of California from 1943 to 1953. In 1948 he was the unsuccessful candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket headed by Thomas E. Dewey . In Oct., 1953, President Eisenhower appointed him chief justice to succeed Fred M. Vinson . One of the most dynamic of chief justices, Warren led the court toward a number of landmark decisions in the fields of civil rights and individual liberties. Among these were the unanimous 1954 decision, written by Warren, ending segregation in the nation's schools (see Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. ); the one man, one vote rulings, which opened the way for legislative and Congressional reapportionment; and decisions in criminal cases guaranteeing the right to counsel and protecting the accused from police abuses. In 1963-64, Warren headed the commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy (see Warren Commission ). He retired from the bench in 1969. His public papers were edited by H. M. Christman (1959).

Betty Friedan

American social reformer and feminist, b. Peoria, Ill. as Bettye Goldstein, educated at Smith College (B.A., 1942) and the Univ. of California at Berkeley. A suburban housewife and sometime writer, she published The Feminine Mystique (1963), attacking the then-popular notion that women could find fulfillment only as wives, childbearers, and homemakers. Widely read and extremely influential, the book played an important role in the creation of the modern feminist movement. In 1966 Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women and served as its president until 1970. She also helped organize the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1969 and the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. In The Second Stage (1981), she argued that feminists must reclaim the family and bring more men into the movement by addressing child care, parental leave, and flexible work schedules. In The Fountain of Age (1993) Friedan criticized the age mystique and society's frequently patronizing treatment of the elderly; she advocated new, positive roles for older citizens.

Fred Shuttlesworth

As pastor of Birmingham, Alabama's First Baptist Church, Shuttlesworth organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in 1956. He served as president of the group until 1969 and spearheaded the movement to integrate Birmingham's schools, offices, and public facilities. Shuttlesworth worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr., establishing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1958 and organizing the protests and actions in Birmingham during the spring of 1963. He was secretary of the SCLC from 1958 to 1970. He continues his campaign for racial and social justice as a minister in Cincinnati.

Ella Baker

Baker was a driving force in the creation of the country's premier civil rights organizations. After graduating as valedictorian from North Carolina's Shaw University in 1927, Baker moved to New York City, where she encountered dire poverty, the result of the depression. She was a founding member of the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose members pooled funds to buy products and services at reduced cost. Baker joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1935 as a field secretary and later served as a national director. She scaled back her national responsibilities with the group in 1946 and worked at the local level to improve and integrate New York City's schools. In 1957 Baker and several Southern black ministers and activists established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a major force in organizing the civil rights movement. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as the group's first president and Baker as the director. She mainly worked behind the scenes, while King assumed the role as spokesman. Baker left the group in 1960, when she helped students organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at her alma mater, Shaw University. The committee gave young blacks a more organized voice in the civil rights movement.

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born a slave and deprived of any early education, but he still became America's leading black educator at the start of the 20th century. Booker T. Washington was the first teacher and principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Tuskegee became famous as a school for African-Americans, where Washington championed learning and job training as the path to black self-reliance and success in America. Well known as a powerful speaker, Washington also wrote the best-selling autobiography Up From Slavery in 1901, and advised Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft on race relations. His rather flaccid nickname of "The Great Accommodator" offers a clue as to why he was later criticized by W. E. B. Du Bois and the N.A.A.C.P., who rejected Washington's idea that blacks should accept an inferior status for the present as they worked to improve themselves for the future. Booker T. Washington was principal of Tuskegee Institute from 1881 until his death in 1915; it was originally called the Normal School for Colored Teachers and is now known as Tuskegee University.

Cesar Chavez

Cesar Chavez was a social activist of the 1960s, most famous for his work in helping to improve the lives of California farm workers. The son of migrant laborers, Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and later the United Farm Workers (UFW). He led a five-year nonviolent boycott against California grape growers, protesting poor working conditions and the use of pesticides harmful to farm workers. The boycott became a cause celebre and was finally successful in winning new rights for workers. In 1994, Cesar Chavez was posthumously awarded the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

David Halberstam

David Halberstam made his mark as a journalist during the early stages of the Vietnam War, working as a reporter for the New York Times. His criticism of the war angered American policy makers but established his reputation as a courageous and brilliant reporter, and earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Halberstam was also a prolific and successful author, and focused on a variety of topics including Vietnam (The Best and the Brightest), the American media (The Powers That Be) and sports (The Summer of '49). He was on his way to interview Y. A. Tittle, former quarterback for the New York Giants, when he was killed in a car accident.

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem became the voice and the face of feminism in the 1970s as a co-founder of Ms. magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus. A 1956 graduate of Smith College, Steinem spent two years on a fellowship in India and began a career in journalism. Settling in New York, her 1963 article "A Bunny's Tale" put her on the map -- it was an examination of the sexism in the Playboy Club, where she worked undercover as a "bunny." After freelancing for several years, Gloria Steinem was given a column in New York Magazine in 1968. She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971 and its first full issue hit the stands in early 1972. Since then, she's been a high profile advocate for equal rights for women, receiving both praise and criticism from other feminists as the movement has changed over the years. A lecturer and writer, her work includes the 1969 article "After Black Power, Women's Lib," and the books Marilyn (1986, about actress Marilyn Monroe) and Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992).

Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte is an African-American entertainer and producer who brought Jamaica's calypso beat to mainstream audiences and then used his fame to fight against racial and social inequality. He grew up in both Jamaica and the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. After serving in World War II, Belafonte set out to have a career in the theater in New York. His silky voice soon earned him a recording contract, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was a popular New York club performer and sometime television star. In 1953 he made his movie debut and turned in a Tony Award-winning performance in John Murray Anderson's Almanac. His version of "The Banana Boat Song" was a hit and started a brief calypso beat craze -- it was also the first million-selling album. One of the first African-American producers in television, Belafonte won an Emmy for 1959's Tonight with Belafonte and was a frequent guest on television variety shows throughout the 1960s and '70s. In addition to a long, successful singing and producing career, Belafonte is well-known as an advocate for human rights and has received awards from the Peace Corps and UNICEF. His film career includes Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957), Buck and the Preacher (1972, with Sidney Poitier) and Kansas City (1996).

Harry S. Truman

Harry Truman became president of the United States after the death of Franklin Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. President Truman led the U.S. through the end of World War II and made the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan. Roosevelt was already the longest-serving president in U.S. history when he chose Truman, then a senator from Missouri, to be his vice presidential candidate in 1944. Roosevelt died suddenly the next year, and Truman became the 33rd president and commander in chief of U.S. forces, just as war was winding down in both Europe and the Southeast Pacific. He made the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945, finally ending the war. Truman steered the U.S. through the post-war period with the no-nonsense Midwestern style and colorful harangues of Congress that are now his hallmark. (He placed on his desk a plaque reading "The buck stops here," a reference to the notion of avoiding responsibility by "passing the buck.") Truman was then re-elected in 1948, in a contest many expected him to lose to the Republican candidate, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York. (A famous photograph shows Truman holding up a premature edition of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman.") Truman tangled diplomatically with the Soviet Union in Berlin and elsewhere, founding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and setting the tone for the nearly five decades of the Cold War that followed. He gave up politics at the end of his second term, due in part to public discontent with the U.S. involvement in the Korean War. He was succeeded as president by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk was elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in 1977 and became the first openly homosexual elected official in California. Less than a year after taking office Milk was murdered -- along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone -- by Dan White, a political opponent and former member of the Board. Milk was a charismatic New Yorker who was a graduate of the University of Albany (1951) and a U.S. Navy veteran (discharged in 1955). He moved to San Francisco in 1972 and set up a camera shop in the city's Castro district, then quickly got involved in local politics. After two unsuccessful bids for a seat as a city supervisor (1973 and 1975), he made it into city politics as an appointee of Mayor George Moscone, then won the 1977 election for a seat (one of six) on the Board of Supervisors. Milk made national news -- he was an openly gay elected official at a time when homosexuality was not part of the public debate. The "Mayor of Castro" was a champion of urban neighborhoods and grassroots activism, but he's most famous for his role as a symbol for gay and lesbian rights. On 27 November 1978 he was killed by Dan White, a disgruntled former city supervisor who felt wronged by Moscone and Milk. White climbed through a window at City Hall and killed both men with a pistol. White's defense was his "diminished capacity" from depression, exacerbated by sugary junk food -- what became known as the "Twinkie defense" (after a popular snack food). White was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in jail, an outcome that caused a riot outside San Francisco's City Hall on 21 May 1979 (called the "White Night Riot"). Milk's legacy as a martyred hero has inspired books, plays and movies, including the Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and the Gus Van Sant film Milk (2008, starring Sean Penn as Milk and Josh Brolin as White).

Fannie Lou Hamer

Her career as a civil rights activist started in 1962, when she helped the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to organize a voter registration drive in Ruleville, Miss., which challenged the state's laws that were designed to deny blacks the right to vote. She lost her job on the plantation as a result of her efforts and assumed the position as a field secretary for the SNCC. Hamer and other activists were arrested in June 1963 and severely beaten at a Montgomery County, Miss. jail by two black inmates, on orders from white police officers. Hamer suffered permanent injuries. The police officers were later found not guilty in federal district court in Jackson, Miss. In 1964 Hamer and other SNCC members established the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) after failed attempts to coordinate with the Mississippi Democratic Party. The group sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where they argued that the state's all-white delegation did not truly represent Mississippi. Hamer delivered a nationally televised speech to the convention's Credentials Committee, outlining the violence and discrimination against herself and other activists. Her speech was effective; the party offered voting rights to two MFDP delegates. Hamer refused them, however, calling the gesture insufficient.Hamer publisher her autobiography, To Praise Our Bridges, in 1967. She was one of the founders of the National Women's Political Caucus and organized on the local level for low-income housing, school desegregation, and day-care.

Dolores Huerta

Huerta grew up in California's agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where her mother owned a restaurant and a hotel that often let farm workers stay free. Huerta received a teaching degree from the University of the Pacific's Delta Community College. After teaching elementary school for a short time, Huerta left to work with farm workers. In 1955 Huerta was a founding member of the Stockton, Calif., chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), which opposed segregation and lobbied for better conditions for farm workers. After founding the Agricultural Workers Association in 1960, Huerta became a lobbyist in Sacramento. The following year, she fought for legislation making non-U.S. citizens eligible for pensions and public assistance. She also backed successful legislation that allowed people to vote and take driver's examinations in Spanish. In 1962 Huerta and activist Cesar Chavez founded the organization that later became the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). In 1973 the UFW began a nationwide consumer boycott of California grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wines. The boycott resulted in the California table-grape growers signing a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the UFW. Another boycott resulted in passage of the U.S. Agricultural Labor Relations Act, giving farm workers the right to organize and bargain for better wages and working conditions. Huerta, who has 11 children, 14 grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren, has continued her political and social activism in support of rights for immigrants and women.

James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray is the man who shot and killed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. King was killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, and police determined that James Earl Ray had shot him with a rifle from the window of a rented room across the street. Ray, who had a record as a petty criminal and was an escapee from a Missouri prison, disappeared but was captured in England two months later and charged with killing King. James Earl Ray pled guilty to the charge of murder in 1969 and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. However, he soon tried to take back his guilty plea, claiming to be innocent. By the 1990s his continued requests for a new trial had gained fresh life; a Memphis bar owner named Loyd Jowers even claimed that he participated in a plot to kill King. Dr. King's son Dexter met with Ray in 1997 and publicly supported him, and the next year Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a full review of the case. That review ended in 2000 with a finding that "no credible evidence" existed to support the claims of Jowers or the various other conspiracy theories. James Earl Ray died in prison in 1998.

James Meredith

James Meredith was one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement. In 1962 he became the first black student to successfully enroll at the University of Mississippi. The state's governor, Ross Barnett, vociferously opposed his enrollment, and the violence and rioting surrounding the incident caused President Kennedy to send 5,000 federal troops to restore the peace. Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1963 (he had entered the university as a transfer student from an all-black college). For a number of years, Meredith continued to work as a civil rights activist, most notably by leading the March Against Fear in 1966, a protest against voter registration intimidation. During the march, which began in Memphis, Tenn., and ended in Jackson, Miss., Meredith was shot and wounded, hospitalized, and then rejoined the march in its last days. He enrolled in Columbia University, where he received a law degree in 1968, and worked as a stock broker. At some point, his politics took a sharp swing to the right, and Meredith renounced his role in the civil rights movement, opposed the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and staunchly opposed affirmative action. From 1989 to 1991, he became an adviser to southern conservative Senator Jesse Helms.

John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination was one of the most shocking public events of the 20th century. John Kennedy served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, commanding the patrol boat PT-109 and leading his crew to rescue after the boat was sunk by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. A Democrat, "JFK" was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts' 11th district in 1946. In 1952 he moved up to the U.S. Senate, defeating Henry Cabot Lodge. John Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier on 12 September 1953; they had two children, Caroline (b. 1957) and John Jr. (b. 1960). (A third child, Patrick, was born on 7 August 1963 and died two days later.) JFK was elected to replace President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 (narrowly defeating Eisenhower's vice-president, Richard Nixon); he swept into office with a reputation for youthful charm, impatience, wit and vigor. John Kennedy's approach was sometimes called the New Frontier, a phrase he coined in his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic convention. John F. Kennedy was shot to death by sniper Lee Harvey Oswald during an open-car motorcade in Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963; two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by another man, Jack Ruby. John Kennedy was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson.

John Lewis

John Lewis was a lawyer who devoted his life to helping prisoners and clients who coul not pay him, and fighting for the rights of American Indians and the Yanomami people of Brazil. He was born in Manhattan, his father a leader of Bears, Stearns on Wall Street and a prominent philanthropist. John attended Harvard University and Columbia Law School. He purposefully left his privileged way of life giving away his money to clients in need and different causes throughout his life. Lewis worked at the Legal Aid Society, as a legal secretary for Judge Elliot Wilk, and then opened a private practice so he could take on clients who could not afford to pay him. He also worked at the United Nations fighting for the rights of the Yanomami people in Brazil. One of his major concerns was rights of American Indians. Lewis donated more than $1 million to the Indian Law Resource Center.

Medgar Evers

Medgar Wiley Evers was a black civil rights activist murdered in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi. A World War II veteran and a graduate of Alcorn College, Evers began working in 1952 for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). From his home in Jackson, Evers traveled Mississippi trying to encourage voter registration and working to enforce federally-mandated integration laws. On June 12, 1963, hours after President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech condemning segregation, Evers was shot in the back by a high-powered rifle while returning home. He crawled to the house and collapsed in front of his wife and three children; he died an hour later. The rifle found at the scene belonged to Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the all-white Citizens' Council, a statewide group opposed to racial integration. De La Beckwith was tried twice, but both trials ended with a hung jury and he was released. Nearly thirty years later, thanks to the persistence of Evers's widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, the case was reopened. De La Beckwith was tried and convicted in 1994, with the conviction upheld by the state Supreme Court in 1997; he was imprisoned and died in 2001. Evers-Williams published For Us, The Living in 1967, and Beckwith's trial was the basis for the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi (starring Whoopi Goldberg).

Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon Baines Johnson replaced the assassinated John F. Kennedy as United States president and oversaw major social reforms and the expansion of the Vietnam War. Known as a politician's politician, "LBJ" was a senator from Texas who'd been a powerful member of the Democratic party for two decades when he challenged young Senator Kennedy for the presidential nomination in 1960. (Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower was stepping down after eight years.) Kennedy got the nod, then picked Johnson as his running mate. Kennedy beat Republican candidate (and Eisenhower's vice-president) Richard M. Nixon, and Johnson became vice-president in 1961. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald on 22 November 1963 and Johnson succeeded to the presidency. Easily re-elected over staunch conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964, LBJ was able to pass sweeping social legislation including the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. His decision to escalate American involvement in Vietnam, however, proved to be extremely unpopular. He chose not to seek another term and retired in 1969; he was succeeded by none other than Richard Nixon.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an African-American clergyman who advocated social change through non-violent means. A powerful speaker and a man of great spiritual strength, he shaped the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s before his assassination in 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama from 1954-59. There he led blacks in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, an action inspired by the arrest of Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on a public bus. Racial segregation on city buses was ruled unconstitutional in 1956; the boycott ended in success, and King had become a national figure. King returned to his home town of Atlanta, Georgia in 1959 and became co-pastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a position he held until his death. On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, King organized a march on Washington, D.C. that drew 200,000 people demanding equal rights for minorities. Martin Luther King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming at the time the youngest recipient ever. His writings included Stride Toward Freedom (1958, a history of the Montgomery bus boycott), Why We Can't Wait (1963) and Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community (1967). King was shot to death in 1968 while visiting Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a prison escapee with a shady past, confessed to the killing in March of 1969, was convicted and then sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray later recanted but was never successful in getting a new trial and died in jail in 1998.

Huey Newton

Newton, with Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Illiterate when he graduated from high school, Newton taught himself how to read and enrolled in Oakland, California's Merritt College and studied law at the San Francisco School of Law. He met Seale at Merritt, and in 1966 they formed the Black Panthers as an alternative to the nonviolent civil rights movement. The Panthers called on all blacks to arm themselves for the liberation struggle. The militant party engaged in several high-profile, violent confrontations with police. In 1967, Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for killing a policeman. After three mistrials, Newton was cleared in 1971. That same year he announced the Panthers would embrace a nonviolent strategy and shift their focus to offering community services to African Americans. In 1974, he fled to Cuba to avoid drug and murder charges. He returned three years later, and two trials ended with hung juries. Newton earned a Ph.D. in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. He was shot and killed in Oakland in 1989.

Lorraine Hansberry

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway -- 1959's Raisin in the Sun. She was from Chicago, and her family's story was the basis for her famous play. When Hansberry was a young girl, her family, with the help of lawyers with the NAACP, broke through the strict segregation laws in 1937 and moved into an all-white neighborhood. The ensuing legal battle ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court (Hansberry v. Lee), but her father's victory in the case proved to Hansberry that fighting racial injustice the legal way was a slow process. She moved to New York in 1950 and went to work for Paul Robeson's newspaper, Freedom, and was a colleague and student of W.E.B. Du Bois. After her fame from Raisin in the Sun (which was nominated for four Tony Awards), she used her celebrity to advance civil rights, joining other artists and writers such as Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and James Baldwin. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34, and her unfinished writings, diaries and letters were collected and published posthumously as Young, Gifted and Black.

Alice Paul

Raised a Quaker, Paul graduated from Swarthmore College in 1905 and studied at the New York School of Social Work. From 1906 to 1909, Paul was a social worker in England. She was also jailed three times for her suffragist efforts. Paul received an MA in 1907, and a Ph.D., in absentia, from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1912 she became head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association's congressional committee. But she left the group a year later to help form the more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. In 1917 the organization joined the Woman's Party to create the National Woman's Party. Paul was jailed three more times for her militancy. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, she earned a law degree from Washington College of Law, and MA and Ph.D. degrees from American University. In 1923, Paul wrote an equal rights amendment to the Constitution and introduced it in Congress. The measure failed and Paul began supporting the League of Nations. In 1938 she founded the World Party for Equal Rights for Women, known as the World Women's Party. She represented the party at the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva. She was elected to chair the National Woman's Party in 1942, and continued to lobby for an equal rights amendment. Paul successfully lobbied for wording on gender equality to be included in the preamble to the United Nations Charter and in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Mahatma Gandhi

Revered in India as the "Father of the Nation," Mohandas K. Gandhi is also a worldwide icon of non-violent political resistance. Mohandas Gandhi was born in India and studied law in England, then spent 20 years defending the rights of immigrants in South Africa. He returned to India in 1914, eventually becoming the leader of the Indian National Congress. At the time, India was part of the British Empire, and Gandhi urged non-violence and civil disobedience as a means to independence. His public acts of defiance landed him in jail many times as the struggle continued through World War II. Gandhi participated in the postwar negotiations with Britain that led to India becoming a fully independent country on August 15, 1947. He was shot to death on January 30, 1949 by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a Hindu extremist who felt that Gandhi was an obstacle to Hindu political power. An advocate of simple living, Gandhi ate a vegetarian diet and made his own clothes; his personal spinning wheel became a symbol of his uncluttered lifestyle. After his death, Gandhi's teachings of change through non-violence influenced other social activists, including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, was published in 1927. His birthday, October 2nd, is a national holiday in India.

Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy was a candidate for U.S. president when he was assassinated in 1968. His death was doubly shocking because his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, had also been assassinated five years earlier. Robert was the seventh of nine children of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. He left Harvard to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war he completed his degree, then earned a law degree from the University of Virginia. In the 1950s he was counsel to a U.S. Senate committee investigating labor unions, leading to his well-known feud with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. But Kennedy's political career is more closely associated with his brother, John; he managed JFK's successful campaigns for the U.S. Senate (1952) and the presidency (1960), and then served as Attorney General in the JFK administration. After his brother's 1963 assassination, Robert Kennedy served briefly with the Lyndon Johnson administration, then successfully ran for senator from New York. (This win was often recalled in 2000 when another New York "outsider," Hillary Clinton, similarly won a senate race there.) In early 1968 Kennedy declared his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. He was shot by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, just after delivering a speech to supporters upon winning the California primary. He died early the next morning. Kennedy's book Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis was published posthumously in 1969.

Russell Means

Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota, served as the first national director of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and became one of the organization's best-known spokespeople. Means was one of the Indian activists who in 1969 occupied San Francisco's Alcatraz Island in a landmark AIM-led protest that lasted 19 months; in 1973, he helped lead the AIM takeover of Wounded Knee. Both events brought worldwide attention to the injustices and privation faced by American Indians past and present. As an actor, Means has appeared in such films as The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Natural Born Killers (1994) and provided the voice of Powhatan in 1995's Pocahontas. In 2004, Means ran for president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, but was defeated by Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman to be elected to that office.

Bobby Seale

Seale, with Huey Newton, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. After serving in the Air Force, Seale attended Oakland's Merritt College and was moved to radicalism after hearing Malcolm X speak. Seale and Newton formed the Black Panthers as an alternative to the nonviolent civil rights movement. The Panthers called on all blacks to arm themselves for the liberation struggle. The militant party engaged in several high-profile, violent confrontations with police. Seale was one of the "Chicago Eight" charged and convicted of conspiracy to violently disrupt the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (conviction later overturned) and was a codefendant in a Connecticut case charging murder of Alex Rackley, an alleged informer on the party. He was acquitted in 1971. That same year he abandoned militancy and endorsed a nonviolent strategy that focused on providing community services to African Americans.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth began life as a slave and ended it as a celebrated anti-slavery activist. Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York and was sold several times before escaping to freedom with an infant daughter in 1827. She worked as a housekeeper, lived in a religious commune, and eventually became a traveling speaker and preacher. Prompted by religious feelings, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843. Although she could not read or write, Sojourner Truth was a captivating speaker: she reportedly stood nearly six feet tall and was a spirited evangelist who spoke out for women's rights and against slavery. Her memoir The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (as told to author Olive Gilbert) was published in 1850 and helped establish her more widely in the public mind. The next year, at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, she gave her famous speech, "Ain't I A Woman," a short but stirring challenge to the notion that men were superior to women. During the Civil War she worked to support black Union soldiers, and after the war she continued to travel and preach on spiritual topics and as an advocate for the rights of blacks and women.

Marcus Garvey

Through his public speeches and his newspaper Negro World, Marcus Garvey became one of the most influential black leaders of the early 20th century. Born and raised in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey travelled in Central and South America, then moved to England to continue his education. In 1914 he started the Universal Negro Improvement Association and began speaking out publicly in favor of worldwide black unity and an end to colonialism. He moved to the United States in 1916 and helped start a steamship company, the Black Star Line. It was both a business venture and a part of his "back to Africa" plan for Americans of African descent -- the notion that African-Americans should return to Africa and set up their own new country there. Marcus Garvey was always a controversial figure: he favored fiery rhetoric and elaborate uniforms, and was considered a dangerous character by some established politicians. Garvey was jailed in 1925 after being convicted of mail fraud (related to the sale of stock in the Black Star line), but his sentence was reduced and he was deported to Jamaica two years later. Marcus Garvey eventually moved back to London, England, where he died in 1940. His body was returned to Jamaica in 1964.

Strom Thurmond

U.S. senator from South Carolina (1954-2003), b. Edgefield, S.C. He read law while teaching school (1923-29) and was admitted to the bar in 1930. Thurmond was elected (1932) a state senator and became (1938) a circuit-court judge. After serving in World War II, he was elected (1946) governor of South Carolina. In 1948, Thurmond was nominated for president by the States' Rights Democrats ( Dixiecrats ), southerners who bolted the Democratic party in opposition to President Truman 's civil-rights program; he won 39 electoral votes. In 1954 he was a successful write-in candidate for U.S. Senate. In 1957 he staged the longest filibuster in Senate history, speaking for over 24 hours against a civil-rights bill. Thurmond switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in 1964, and later chaired the Senate judiciary (1981-87) and armed services (1995-99) committees. In 1996 he became the oldest sitting, and in 1997 the longest serving, U.S. senator in history (Robert Byrd surpassed him as the latter in 2006). The posthumous revelation in 2003 that he had a daughter in 1925 with an African-American maid and that he and his child had had a warm relationship proved a thought-provoking footnote to his career.

Robert E. Lee Baker

an african american civil rights activist from mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the university of mississippi before being shot and killed in june 1963.

George Wallace

he was active in the Alabama Democratic party, serving in the state assembly (1947-53) and as a district court judge (1953-59). In 1962 he won election as governor as an avowed segregationist, and promised to defy federal orders to integrate Alabama schools. In June, 1963, Wallace blocked two black students from entering the Univ. of Alabama, but capitulated when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama national guard. Prevented by state law from succeeding himself as governor in 1966, Wallace had his wife, Lurleen Burns Wallace, 1926-68, run successfully in his place. As a leading opponent of the civil-rights movement, Wallace campaigned for president in 1968 on a third-party ticket, capitalizing on racist and anti-Washington attitudes in both North and South to energize many. In 1970, he was reelected governor of Alabama. In 1972, he entered the Democratic presidential primaries; his campaign ended abruptly on May 15, when an assassination attempt by Arthur H. Bremer left him paralyzed below the waist. In 1974 Wallace was overwhelmingly reelected governor, and in 1976 he made another unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination. He later moved to reconcile with African Americans and recanted white supremacist positions, and in 1982 he was again elected governor, this time with the support of many black Alabamans; he retired in 1987.

Paule Marshall

is an American author, best known for her 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a Macarthur Fellowship Grant. Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, NY, to Adriana Viola Clement Burke and Sam Burke. Marshall's father had migrated from Barbados to New York in 1919 and, during her childhood, deserted the family to join a quasi-religious cult, leaving his wife to raise their children by herself.[2] Smitten with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Marshall changed her given name from Pauline to Paule (with a silent e) when she was 12 or 13.[3] Marshall attended Girls' High School in Bedstuy and subsequently enrolled in Hunter College with plans of becoming a social worker. She took ill during college and took a year off, during which time she decided to major in English Literature,[4] eventually earning her Bachelor of Arts at Brooklyn College in 1953 and her master's degree at Hunter College in 1955.[5][unreliable source?] After graduating college, Marshall wrote for Our World, the acclaimed nationally distributed magazine edited for African-American readers, which she credited with teaching her discipline in writing and eventually aiding her in writing her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones.[6][7] In 1950 she married psychologist Kenneth Marshall; they divorced in 1963. In the 1970s she married Nourry Menard, a Haitian businessman.[8]Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose, her novel Brown Girl, Brownstones being published in 1959. Brown Girl, Brownstones tells the story of Selina Boyce, a girl growing up in a small black immigrant community.[5] Selina is caught between her mother, who wants to conform to the ideals of her new home and make the American dream come true, and her father, who longs to go back to Barbados.[5] The dominant themes in the novel - travel, migration, psychic fracture and striving for wholeness - are important structuring elements in her later works as well.[5]She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and the same year published Soul Clap Hands and Sing, a collection of four novellas that won her the National Institute of Arts Award.[8] In 1965, she was chosen by Langston Hughes to accompany him on a State Department-sponsored world tour, on which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career.[9] She subsequently published the novels The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), which the New York Times Book Review called "one of the four or five most impressive novels ever written by a black American",[10] and Praisesong for the Widow (1983), the latter winning the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1984.[11]Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University.[12] In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. Now retired, she lives in Richmond, Virginia.She is a MacArthur Fellow and is a past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994.Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001.Her memoir, Triangular Road, was published in 2009.[13] n 2010, Paule Marshall won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.[14]

Judith Heumann

is an American disability rights activist. An internationally recognized leader in the disability community, Heumann is a lifelong civil rights advocate for people with disabilities. Her work with governments and non governmental organizations (NGOs) has produced significant contributions since the 1970s to the development of human rights legislation and policies benefiting children and adults with disabilities. Through her work in the World Bank and the State Department, Heumann led the mainstreaming of disability rights into international development. Her contributions extended the international reach of the independent living movement.

Paul Johnson

is an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author. While associated with the political left in his early career, he is now a conservative popular historian. Johnson was educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist writing for and later editing the New Statesman magazine. A prolific writer, Johnson has written over 40 books and contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers. His sons include the journalist Daniel Johnson, founder of Standpoint, and the businessman Luke Johnson, former chairman of Channel 4.

Susan B. Anthony

is one of America's most famous activists for women's rights. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, and she spent the better part of her life trying to win voting rights for women in the United States. Anthony managed to register and vote in Monroe County, New York in 1872, mostly because local officials didn't want to risk a lawsuit. She was arrested at her house and hauled to jail (she said when the arresting officer paid the cab it was "the first cents worth I ever had from Uncle Sam."). Anthony was tried and convicted after the judge directed the (all male) jury to find her guilty of voting illegally. She was fined $100. Anthony refused to pay the fine, and the state didn't bother to collect it. In 1920, 14 years after Anthony's death, American women finally won the vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment. Susan B. Anthony also campaigned on social issues, including the abolition of slavery and the abolition of alcohol. Congress honored Anthony in 1979 by putting her portrait on a new one-dollar coin. The coin was produced in 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1999.

Malcolm X

militant black leader in the United States, also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, b. Malcolm Little in Omaha, Neb. A petty criminal in Boston and Harlem, he was convicted of burglary (1946) and sent to prison, where he read widely and was introduced to the Black Muslims , joining the group and becoming a Muslim minister upon his release in 1952. A charismatic and eloquent spokesman for the doctrines of black nationalism and black separatism, he quickly became very prominent, establishing many new temples in the North, Midwest, and California, and acquiring a following perhaps equaling that of the movement's leader, Elijah Muhammad . In 1963 Malcolm was suspended by Muhammad after a speech in which Malcolm suggested that President Kennedy's assassination was a matter of the chickens coming home to roost. He then formed a rival organization of his own, the Muslim Mosque, Inc. In 1964, after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he announced his conversion to orthodox Sunni Islam and his new belief that there could be brotherhood between black and white. In his Organization of Afro-American Unity, formed after his return, the tone was still that of militant black nationalism but no longer of separation. In Feb., 1965, he was shot and killed in a public auditorium in New York City. His assassins were vaguely identified as Black Muslims, but this remains a matter of controversy.

Hector Perez Garcia

was a Mexican-American physician, surgeon, World War II veteran, civil rights advocate, and founder of the American G.I. Forum. As a result of the national prominence he earned through his work on behalf of Hispanic Americans, he was instrumental in the appointment of Vicente T. Ximenes, a Mexican American and American G.I. Forum charter member, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1966.[1] Garcia was named as alternate representative to the United Nations in 1967, was appointed to the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1968, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1984; and was named to the Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II in 1990. In 1998, he was posthumously awarded the Aguila Azteca, Mexico's highest award for foreigners, in a ceremony in Corpus Christi.

James Reeb

was an American Unitarian Universalist minister, pastor and activist during the Civil rights movement in Washington, D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts. While participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches actions in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he was murdered by white segregationists, dying of head injuries in the hospital two days after being severely beaten.

Theophilus "Bull" Connor

was an American politician who served as an elected Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, for more than two decades. He strongly opposed activities of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Under the city commission government, Connor had responsibility for administrative oversight of the Birmingham Fire Department and the Birmingham Police Department, which also had their own chiefs. Connor enforced legal racial segregation and denied civil rights to black citizens, especially during the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Birmingham campaign of 1963. He became an international symbol of institutional racism. Bull Connor directed the use of fire hoses and police attack dogs against civil rights activists; child protestors were also subject to these attacks.[2][3] National media broadcast these tactics on national television, horrifying much of the nation. The outrages served as catalysts for major social and legal change in the Southern United States and contributed to passage by the United States Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Bernice "Bunny" Sandler

was an American women's rights activist born in New York.[2][3][4] Sandler is best known for being instrumental in the creation of Title IX, a portion of the Education Amendments of 1972, in conjunction with Representatives Edith Green (D-OR) and Patsy Mink (D-HI) and Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) in the 1970s. She has been called "the Godmother of Title IX" by The New York Times. Sandler wrote extensively about sexual and peer harassment towards women on campus, coining the terms "gang rape" and "the chilly campus climate". She received numerous awards and honors for her work on women's rights and was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 2010, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2013. Some of her papers are currently held in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Bernard Lee

was an English actor, best known for his role as M in the first eleven Eon-produced James Bond films. Lee's film career spanned the years 1934 to 1979, though he had appeared on stage from the age of six. He was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Lee appeared in over one hundred films, as well as on stage and in television dramatisations. He was known for his roles as authority figures, often playing military characters or policemen in films such as The Third Man, The Blue Lamp, The Battle of the River Plate, and Whistle Down the Wind. He died of stomach cancer in 1981, aged 73.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

was the most famous U.S. Army general of World War II and the 34th president of the United States. A career Army man, "Ike" rose to the level of five-star general and oversaw the Allied forces in Europe, including the famous D-Day invasion of France in 1944. After the war he served briefly as president of Columbia University, then was chosen over Robert A. Taft as the Republican candidate for U.S. president in 1952. He won handily in 1952 and again in 1956, defeating Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson both times. His administration is remembered as peaceful and prosperous, despite the rise of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and China. His wife, Mamie, was known as a good hostess who was happy to stay out of politics. Eisenhower was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, who defeated Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, in the elections of 1960. Eisenhower survived a half-dozen heart attacks over 15 years before succumbing to a final attack in 1969.

Pollie Ann Myers Hudson

was, along with Autherine Lucy, the first African American admitted to the University of Alabama in 1952. Myers created the plan of applying for admission and convinced Lucy to apply with Myers. Lucy later said, "I thought she was joking at first, I really did." Myers and Hudson first applied on September 19, 1952. They were accepted, at first. But then the University backtracked once they became aware of the applicants' race. Myers died in Detroit in 2003.On September 24, 1952 Hudson, and close friend Autherine Lucy, applied to the University of Alabama without indicating their race and were accepted. The idea had been hatched by Hudson, who convinced the hesitant Lucy to go along with the plot.[6] Lucy later said, "I thought she was joking at first, I really did."[7] The newspaper, the Birmingham World, which Hudson worked at, celebrated their admission on the front page. Realizing who the applicants were, the University soon began to backtrack. On October 10, 1955 the Supreme Court ordered the University to admit the two women.[8] Over three years later, the University allowed Lucy to attend on the condition that Myers could not. They claimed that Myers could not attend the school due to the fact that she had married after she had become pregnant out of wedlock.