Ralph David Abernathy Sr. -Baptist minister and NAACP officer since 1951, he was one of the main organizers of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and helped MLK Jr. found the SCLC in 1957. After King was killed, Abernathy became leader of the SCLC and directed the Poor People's March on Washington. HE served as pastor of Atlanta's West Hunter Street Baptist Church.
Clifford Alexander -graduate of Yale Law School, he became an aide to Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964. In 1967, he became the first African American chair of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC). During the Carter administration, he became the first African American secretary of the army (1977-1980).
Ella Jo Baker -Called the god-mother of the civil rights movement. She graduated from Shaw, then moved to New York and worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and helped found the Young Negroes Cooperative League. In 1940, Baker became a field secretary for the NAACP. In 1957 she went to the South to become the first executive secretary of the SCLC, and helped coordinate student sit0in activities for the SCLC. After 1960, she worked with the YWCA and Southern Conference Educational Fund, and helped organize SNCC. In 1964 she helped launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the all-white delegation to the 1964 presidential convention.
Marion Barry - Graduated from Fisk University. First national char of SNCC in 1960. In 1964 he organized protests against police brutality in Washington D.C. Elected to the Washington City Council in 1974 and ran successfully for mayor in 1979. Forced out in 1990 due to a drug conviction. He was elected to a fourth term as mayor in 1994.
Mary McLeod Bethune - In 1904, she founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial School, which became Bethune-Cookman College. She formed a close alliance with Elanor Roosevelt. She counseled President Franklin Roosevelt on African American issues and directed the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration. In 1974, a memorial to Bethune was unveiled in Lincoln Park, in Washington D.C.
Julian Bond - Achieved prominence as a journalist and as a founding member of SNCC (its first public affairs officer), Bond was elected to the Georgia State Legislature in 1965. He was denied his seat for a year due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. Served in Georgia State Senate from 1974 to 1986. In 1998 he was named the chair of the NAACP.
Carol E. Moseley Braun - Earned law degree from the University of Chicago. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, becoming the first African American woman to serve in that body. She made a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 elections.
Edward Brooke - Served as Massachusetts attorney general from 1962 to 1966, when he became the first African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
Blanche Kelso Bruce - Born into slavery in Virginia, he escaped during the Civil War and opened a school in Kansas. In 1868, he went to Mississippi, and joined the republican Party and served as a sheriff and tax collector. He was elected to the US Senate in 1875.
Ralph Johnson Bunche - headed Dept. of Political Science at Howard from 1928 to 1932. Took a position with United Nations in its earliest stages. He negotiated the a cease-fire in 1948's Arab-Israeli war, and was awarded the first ever Nobel Peace Prize to an African American.
Stokely Carmichael - Born in Trinidad. Joined civil rights movement at Howard. Headed voter registration project in Alabama in 1965. Built an all-black poltical organization, the Lowrides Country Freedom Organization. Became director of SNCC in May 1966 and a month later made his Black Power speech. Left SNCC in 1967 to join the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense and in 1968 became Prime Minister of that party. In 1973 he changed his name to Kwame Ture and moved to Ghana championing Pan-Africanism.
Shirley Anita Chisholm - Graduated from Brooklyn College and Columbia University. She began her political career as a state assembly representative in 1964 and in 1968 became the first African American woman to win election to the US House of Representatives. She was a Democratic presidential candidate in 1972. In 1993, Clinton offered Chisholm the post of ambassador to Jamaica, but she declined due to poor health.
John Conyers - Elected to US House of Representatives from Michigan in 1964. He was a leading sponsor of the legislation that created the national holiday in honor of MLK Jr.
Oscar Stanton DePriest - Chicago real-estate agent and Republican politician. He was the first African American member of the Chicago City Council in 1915. He entered the US Congress in 1929, the first back member of that body since Reconstruction and first ever from outside the South. In 1934 he was outseated by black Democrat Arthur A. Mitchell.
David Norman Dinkins - New York City's first black mayor.
William Edward Burghardt Dubois - One of the principal founders of the Niagara Movement and subsequent NAACP, and edited NAACP's newspaper Crisis for twenty-five years. He was an advocate of socialism from 1911 until his death. He joined the Communist party in 1961. The US government harassed him and he moved to Ghana at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah and edited Encylcopedia Africana He died there two years later. He also wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935) .
Marian Wright Edelman Began civil rights career working for Mississippi NAACP, helped organize the Poor People's March on Washington in 1968. She headed harvard's Center for Law and Education from 1971 to 1973. She wrote Families in Peril and The Measure of our Success . She is one of the biggest advocates of children's rights.
Medgar Evers - Sold insurance in Mississippi, led economic boycotts to fight discrimination and was NAACP field secretary in Mississippi in 1954. He was shot by Bryan De La Beckwith in his doorway. Beckwith was acquitted twice by all-white juries.
James Farmer -in 1942 he and other Christian pacifists formed the Congress of Racial Equality. Became CORE's director in 1961. Resigned in 1966 to head a national literacy project. Joined the faculty of Mary Washington College in 1981.
Louis Farrakhan -Born in New York, raised in Boston. Joined Nation of Islam in 1955. Farrakhan formed his own Nation of Islam after the other one stopped being black nationalists. In 1995 he led a Million Man March. Made questionable comments about Jews.
James Forman -beaten during a freedom ride, joined SNCC, and published an autobiography entitled The Making of Black Revolutionaries .
Marcus Mosiah Garvey - Born in Jamaica. In 1914, he founded the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association). The UNIA purchased three ships, including the Black Star Line for the purpose of re-settling African Americans in Liberia. Funds disappeared and Garvey was blamed. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and served two years in prison. He returned to Jamaica as a national hero. In 1935 Garvey moved to England still clinging to Pan-African ideals until his death.
Fannie Lou Hamer -Joined SNCC in 1962 and tried to register to vote in Mississippi. She lost her job that she had held for forty years. She helped found the Mississippi Freedom Deomcratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She left SNCC as it embraced �Black Power� and helped to form the National Women's Political Caucus.
Jesse Jackson- Joined CORE at North Carolina A & T. Became a Baptist minister and took part in the SCLC's voting rights campaign in 1965. Allied with MLK Jr. from 1966 to 1971 and headed the SCLC's Operation Breadbasket. He founded PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in 1971. In 1984 and 1988 he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. His Rainbow Collection won nine state primaries in 1988 and received 7 million votes. In the 1980's, he negotiated the release of prisoners and hostages in the Middle East and Cuba and in the 1990s negotiated the release of three soldiers that were prisoners of war in Yugoslavia.
Maynard Jackson -Atlanta's first black mayor in 1973. Graduated from Morehouse. Served a third term as Atlanta's mayor from 1989 to 1993.
Barbara Jordan - Houston lawyer who became the first lady elected to the Texas State Senate (1966). In 1972, she was elected to the US House of Representatives. Known for her role in the Watergate hearings. Was awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.
Vernon Jordan - Field director for Georgia NAACP from 1961 to 1963. Was Bill Clinton's advisor during both terms.
Martin Luther King Jr. -Graduated from Morehouse. Became pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama. Headed SCLC in 1959 after writing a book on nonviolence entitled Stride Toward Freedom . He became co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church with MLK Sr. Delivered �I Have a Dream� speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Won Nobel Prize in 1964.Assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, TN.
John Lewis-A leader of the Nashville Student Movement during the early 1960's, Lewis was a leading figure in the freedom rides and represnted Georgia in the House of Representatives in the 1990's.
John Roy Lynch - Liberated from slavery in 1865, Lynch won election to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1869 and became speaker of the house in 1872. In 1873 he began the first of three terms as a U.S. Congressional representative. Lynch played an important role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In 1884, he delivered the keynote address at the Republican convention, marking the first time that an African American had filled that role for a major political party.
Malcolm X -While serving a term for burglary, he converted to Islam. In 1958 Malcolm X was the Nation of Islam's spokesperson. He left in 1964, and was killed in Febuary 1965.
Benjamin Mays -First African-American president of the Atlanta school board.
Floyd McKissick - First African-American to attend UNC law school.
Kweisi Mfume - Graduated from Morgan State. Was an educator and broadcaster before his election to Congress from Maryland's 7th district in 1987. In 1996, he resigned from Congress to become president and CEO of the NAACP.
Elijah Muhammad (Elijah Poole) - Son of a Georgia sharecropper. Moved to Detroit to work in an auto plant. 1931 he went to Islam. He was the chief aid of Wallace Ford. Ford disappeared and the Nation of Islam moved to Chicago. Opposed segregation saying �self-destruction, death, and nothing else�.
Huey Newton - In his teens, Newton moved from Louisiana to Oakland, California. He went to law school. In 1964 he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and did six months before being paroled. Disturbed by police brutality, with Bobby Seale, they began to challenge the failure of municipal authorities. The Black Panther Party of Self Defense was formed in October 1966. In 1967 Newton was accused of killing a police officer. After two years he was granted a retrial and freed after two hung juries. Newton continued to study and organize communities, and spending time in Cuba. On August 22, 1989 Newton was found dead in Oakland, in an unexplained shooting.
Edgar Daniel Nixon - Instrumental in Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He was nicknamed �Mr. Civil Rights�.
Eleanor Holmes Norton -Graduated from Yale law school in 1964. Served as the District of Columbia's delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1990's. President of National Black Leadership Roundtable.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. - In 1937, he succeeded his father as pastor at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. He pressured New York City to hire African-Americans. He was elected to the city council in 1941 and the US House of Representatives in 1945. Served 11 terms. He was elected to his seat in 1969, but was denied 22 years of seniority. In 1972, after an unsuccessful re-election campaign, he died from cancer.
Joseph Hayne Rainey - A former slave who deserted from the Confederate Navy during the Civil War. He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1871. He was the first African American to serve as a US congressional representative. During his eight years in the House, he called for equal rights for African and Chinese Americans.
Asa Phillip Randolph- Head and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph established the idea of a March on Washington.
Hiram Rhoades Revels -A minister and educator in Mississippi, he was appointed to fill an empty Senate seat in 1870. He was the first African American senator. He later became President of Alcorn State University.
Fred Shuttlesworth - former pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. Organized Christian Movement for Human Rights in 1956 and served as its president until 1969. Helped create SCLC. Called �the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South� by MLK Jr.
Carl Stokes - First. African American mayor of a major U.S. City. He was a Cleveland lawyer and elected to the Ohio State Legislature in 1962, before becoming mayor of Cleveland in 1967. Stokes was also a correspondent for NBC News. In 1983, he became a judge in the Cleveland Municipal Court, and then a U.S. Ambassador to the Seychelles.
Mary Church Terrell - A gradaute of Oberlin, Terrell started her civil rights activities in Washington D.C., where her husband was a judge. In 1892 she helped organize the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, and in 1896 served as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women. She played a role in the founding of the NAACP and led the Washington chapter for years. She wrote newspaper articles and an autobiography entitled A Colored Women in a White World.
William Monroe Trotter - Founded Boston Guardian with George W. Forbes. Helped create the Niagara Movement in 1905, then split ways with the NAACP and formed the National Equal Rights League as an alternative to the white dominated NAACP. He opposed the film Birth of a Nation and criticized the Wilson and Coolidge administration's racial policies and opposed the Treaty of Versailles.
Booker Taliaferro Washingon -Born into slavery, graduated from Hampton in 1875. Founded Tuskegee in 1881. Hit it big nationally in 1895 with Atlanta Compromise speech. Sat with President Theodore Roosevelt and approved black appointees to federal jobs. His failure to protest Roosevelt's harsh treatment of black soldiers in the Brownsville Affair of 1906 damaged his reputation in the African American community. He was the first African American to appear on a stamp.
Harold Washington - The son of a Chicago stockyard worker and Democratice Party precinct captain, he served in the army during WW II and earned a degree from Roosevelt University. Washington led the third ward and became a member of the Illinois Black Legislative Caucus and the US House of Representatives from 1980 to 1982. He upset two white candidates to become the first mayor of Chicago. A year after winning a second term he suffered a fatal heart attack while sitting at his desk.
Robert C. Weaver -Graduated from Harvard. Was a prominent member of Roosevelt's Black Cabinet. In 1966 he became head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, becoming the first African American to hold a cabinet post.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett - Following an impoverished childhood in Mississippi, she attended Rust College and became a teacher and journalist in Memphis. Her attacks on segregation in the Memphis Free Speech, of which she was part owner, caused her to lose her teaching job. She then became an anti-lynching campaigner, writing for the New York Age and organizing anti-lynching organizations in New York, Boston, Washington, and other cities. Wells-Barnett also founded the first African American women's suffrage group helped found the NAACP.
Lawrence Douglas Wilder After earning a law degree from Howard in 1959, Wilder practiced law in Richmond, Virginia, for 10 years and then ran successfully for the Virginia State Senate, becoming the first African American to serve in that body. During his 16 years as a senator, he supported numerous civil rights initiatives. Wilder was elected lieutenant governor in 1985 and governor in 1989, becoming the first elected black governor in U.S. History. He retired from Virginia politics after serving one term and returned to private law practice. He served as mayor of Richmond.
Roy Ottaway Wilkins A native of Minnesota, he was a journalist and became involved in NAACP activities. In 1934 he succceded WEB Dubois as editor of The Crisis.Wilkins opposed direct action, which clashed with MLK Jr.
Hosea Williams -Worked for the US Dept. of Agriculture in the 1950s. Joined NAACP in Savannah, GA. Led to desegregation of Savannah facilities and led a march in 1987 protesting KKK activity.
Andrew Jackson Young - Became ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Became executive director of the SCLC in 1964. In 1972, he was elected to the US House of Representatives. Young became the nation's first African American ambassador to the United Nation's, under Jimmy Carter. In 1981, he became mayor of Atlanta. There is recent controversy with a statement about keeping money away from �Arabs, Jews, etc.� and within the African American community.
Whitney Moore Young Jr. - Worked for Urban League in 1948. Served as dean of the School of Social Work at Atlanta University and studied at Harvard. He became executive director of the Urban League in 1961 until 1971. Helped to shape LBJ's War on Poverty programs.
From the African American Desk Reference (1999).