John Lewis - (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician, a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lewis played a key role in the struggle for civil rights and to end segregation.
Notably, Lewis was instrumental in organizing student sit-ins, bus boycotts and non-violent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality. During a march of 600 people in Selma, Alabama in 1965, Lewis endured brutal beatings by angry mobs and suffered a fractured skull at the hands of Alabama State police.
A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis has represented Georgia's 5th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives since 1987.
Medgar Evers – (July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was a notable civil rights activist hailing from Mississippi.
Along with T.R. Howard, president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, Evers organized a boycott of service stations that denied blacks use of their restrooms. The boycotters distributed bumper stickers with the slogan "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom."
Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. When his application was rejected, Evers filed a lawsuit against the university and became the focus of a NAACP campaign to desegregate the school. That same year, due to his involvement, the NAACP's National Office suggested he become Mississippi’s first NAACP field secretary.
On June 12, 1963, Evers was assassinated by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith. Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors in front of a crowd of more than three thousand people.
Whitney M. Young, Jr. - (July 31, 1921 – March 11, 1971) was an American civil rights leader who spent most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States and turning the National Urban League from a relatively passive civil rights organization into one thataggressively fought for equitable access to socioeconomic opportunity for the historically disenfranchised.
In 1950, Young became president of the National Urban League's Omaha, Nebraska chapter. Through his position, he helped black workers earn jobs previously reserved 
for whites. Under his leadership, the Omaha chapter tripled its number of paying members.
Young later became the dean of social work at Atlanta University. While there, Young supported alumni in their boycott of the Georgia Conference of Social Welfare, an organization that had a poor record of placing African Americans in good jobs. In 1960, Young was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a postgraduate year at Harvard University. In the same year, he joined the NAACP and rose to become state president.
In 1961, at age 40, Young became Executive Director of the National Urban League. Within four years he expanded the organization from 38 employees to 1,600 employees; and from an annual budget of $325,000 to $6.1 million. He served as president of the organization from 1961 until his death in 1971.
Bayard Rustin - (March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was a key fixture behind the scenes of the Civil Rights Movement and the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He counseled Martin Luther King, Jr. on the techniques of nonviolent resistance. He became an advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes in the latter part of his career.
Rustin, born in West Chester, PA, moved to Harlem in 1937 to attend school. It was there that he became involved in efforts to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men who had been falsely accused of raping two white women.
In 1942, Rustin worked with colleagues and friends to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a pacifist civil rights organization. Rustin and Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. This was the first of the Freedom Rides to test the Supreme Court’s ruling banning racial discrimination in interstate travel.
After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, Rustin advocated closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party and its labor activist base. He was the founder of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and a regular columnist for the AFL-CIO newspaper.
Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins – Septima Clark (May 3, 1898–December 15, 1987) was an American educator and civil rights activist. Her work for equal access to education and civil rights for African Americans several decades before the rise of national awareness of racial inequality has led her to be known as the "Queen mother" or "Grandmother of the American Civil Rights Movement" in the United States.
Esau Jenkins (July 3, 1910 - October 1972) was the founder/overseer of Haut Gap Middle School, a school for African Americans in Johns Island, South Carolina. Jenkins was also a prominent leader of the civil rights movement in the Low country of South Carolina.
In 1954, Clark and Jenkins founded the South's first Citizenship School. The purpose was to teach illiterate blacks to read so that they could pass a required literacy test to vote. The first class was taught by Bernice Robinson, a beautician and Clark's cousin. Reading and voting were considered the springboards for blacks to use to spur a larger social movement. It has been said that the Citizenship schools played a critical role in the direction of the civil rights movement and building a base for social change.
Ella Baker - (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was a leading African American civil rights and human rights activist, beginning her work in the 1930s. She was a behind-the-scenes activist whose career spanned over five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, including: W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored young civil rights stalwarts including Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks and Bob Moses.
From 1929 to 1930, Baker served as an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News, and soon became an editorial assistant at the Negro National News. In 1930 George Schuyler, then a black journalist, founded the Young Negroes' Cooperative League (YNCL), which sought to develop black economic power through collective planning. Having befriended Schuyler, Baker joined in 1931 and later became the group’s national director.
In 1938 she began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Baker was hired in December 1940 as a secretary. She traveled widely, especially in the South, recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local campaigns. She was named director of branches in 1943, becoming the highest ranking woman in the organization.
In 1964 she helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. The group's aim was to challenge the national party to affirm the rights of African Americans to participate in party elections in the South. Though the MFDP delegation was not seated, its influence on the Democratic Party helped to elect many black leaders in Mississippi and forced a rule change to allow women and minorities to sit as delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
James Leonard Farmer, Jr. - (January 12, 1920 – July 9, 1999) was a civil rights activist, a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s, '50s and '60s, and the initiator and organizer of the 1961 Freedom Ride which eventually led to the desegregation of inter-state busing in the United States.
In 1942, Farmer and a group of students co-founded the Committee of Racial Equality, later known as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization that sought to bring an end to racial segregation in America through active nonviolence. Farmer was the organization's first leader, serving as the national chairman from 1942 to 1944.
In 1961 Farmer, who was working for the NAACP, was reelected as the national director of CORE, at a time when the civil rights movement was gaining power. He immediately planned a repeat of CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a trip of eight white and eight black men challenging segregation in transportation in the Upper South. This time, however, the group planned to journey through the Deep South. Farmer coined a new name for the trip: the Freedom Ride.
Horace Julian Bond - (born January 14, 1940) is an American social activist and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement, politician, professor and writer. While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during theearly 1960s, he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He also served as the first president of the SouthernPoverty Law Center. Bond was elected to both houses of the Georgia Legislature, where he served a total of 20 years.
From 1965 to 1975, Bond was elected for four terms as a Democratic member in the Georgia House. It was there that he organized the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus. During the 1968 Presidential election, Bond became the first African American to be proposed as a major-party candidate for Vice President of the United States.
Bond has been chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1998.
Asa Philip Randolph – (April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979) was a prominent fixture in American civil rights history. Randolph founded the March on Washington movement and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a landmark for labor and particularly for African-American labor organizing.
The creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first serious effort to form a labor institution for the employees of the Pullman Company, a major employer of African-Americans. In 1934, membership in the union rose to more than 7,000 members. After years of bitter struggle, the Pullman Company finally began to negotiate with the Brotherhood in 1935, and agreed to a contract with them in 1937, winning $2,000,000 in pay increases for employees, a shorter workweek, and compensation for overtime. This was seen as a major success for labor organizations in the United States.
Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokesmen for African-American civil rights. In 1941, he worked with Bayard Rustin and A. J. Muste to plan the march on Washington protesting racial discrimination in war industries and the segregation of the American Armed forces. However, the march was cancelled after President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, or the Fair Employment Act.
In 1950, Randolph, Roy Wilkins (Executive Secretary of the NAACP) and Arnold Aronson (a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council) founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). LCCR has since become the nation's premier civil rights coalition, and has coordinated the national legislative campaign on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.
Victoria Gray Adams (November 5, 1926 – August 12, 2006) was an American civil rights activist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was one of the founding members of the influential Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
In 1962, Adams, a teacher and leader of voter education courses, became field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).Two years later, she decided to run against Senator John Stennis, a long-standing Mississippi Democrat. She announced that she and others from the tiny Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, of which she was a founding member, would challenge the power of white segregationist politicians like Stennis. The time had come, she said, to pay attention “to the Negro in Mississippi, who had not even had the leavings from the American political table.”
That same year, Adams helped open the Freedom Schools that pushed for civil rights in Mississippi.
Fred Shuttlesworth - (born March 18, 1922) is a former civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961.
Stuttlesworth became Membership Chairman of the Alabama state chapter of the NAACP in 1956, Alabama formally outlawed it from operating within the state. In May, 1956 Shuttlesworth helped establish the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to take up the work formerly done by the NAACP.
The ACMHR raised almost all of its funds from local sources at mass meetings. It used both litigation and direct action to pursue its goals. ACHMR sued the city when authorities ignored the organization’s call to hire black police officers. When the United States Supreme Court ruled in December, 1956 that bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama was unconstitutional, Shuttlesworth announced that the ACMHR would challenge segregation laws in Birmingham.
Shuttlesworth participated in the sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in 1960 and took part in the organization of the Freedom Rides in 1961. In 1964 he traveled to St. Augustine, Florida to participate in marches and widely publicized beach wade-ins that led directly to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Ralph Abernathy - (March 11, 1926 – April 17, 1990) was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century, a minister, civil rights leader and a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Abernathy began his professional career in 1950, when he was appointed Personnel Director at Alabama State University and later assumed the position of Dean of Men and Professor of Social Studies and Mathematics. During this period, he hosted a radio show and became the first black man on radio in Montgomery. In February 1952, he was called as the Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church, the largest black church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he served for ten years.
In the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, Abernathy, the young pastor of the largest black church First Baptist Church and a College Professor, distributed flyers asking the Negro Citizens of Montgomery to stay off of the buses for what would become the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
On December 1, 1955 in response to the arrest of his NAACP co-worker, Rosa Parks, Abernathy and his dearest friend, Dr. Martin Luther King, organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Co-Founded the American Civil Rights Movement. The Montgomery Improvement Association led the successful 381 days transit boycott that challenged “Jim Crow” Segregation laws and ended Alabama’s bus segregation, which heralded the beginning of a Movement.
Abernathy worked with King and other ministers to create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and later served as SCLC’s first Financial Secretary / Treasurer and Vice President At-Large. Abernathy assumed the presidency upon the death of then-president King. Following King's assassination, Abernathy took up the leadership of the SCLC Poor People's Campaign and led the March on Washington that had been planned for May 1968.
Abernathy was awarded five Honorary Doctorate degrees during his lifetime.
