Thurgood Marshall is best known for his achievements in the courts and for arguing the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. WHO IS THURGOOD? In 1967, Thurgood Marshall was nominated to the Supreme Court as the associate justice. He was the first African-American to hold the position, which he maintained for 24 years before retiring in 1991. Marshall attended Howard University and majored in law. As an advocate to the NAACP, he used the legal system to advocate for African American equality. He won the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, which proved that

Stokely Carmichael was an American civil rights activist, anti-war campaigner, and Pan-African revolutionary remembered fondly for popularizing the slogan “Black Power”. He is also known for leading the Black Panther Party and SNCC in the 1960s. He rose to fame as a participant, and subsequently as chairperson, of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), where he collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr. and other Southern activists to organize protests. Carmichael eventually abandoned nonviolent tactics, embracing “Black Power”, affiliating him with the Black Panther Party. He renamed himself Kwame Ture and lived the majority of his later life in Guinea, where he

Born on April 15, 1889, Asa Philip Randolph was an American labor leader, social activist, and socialist legislator. Randolph attempted to unite African American shipyard employees and elevator controllers, as well as co-founded a journal to increase wage demands during World War I. Later, he established the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters which became the first official African American labor organization in 1937. By the 1940s Randolph’s ability as an organizer had increased to such an extent that he became the main force in halting racial discrimination in government defense industries and desegregating the armed services, both of which were

Jamaican born “Marcus Garvey” was a Black activist and founder of the Pan-Africans movement which aimed to unite and interact with people of African origin around the world. He was a well-known civil rights leader who established the Black Star Line, a shipping enterprise, the Negro World Newspaper, and the UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association) a friendly organization of Black supremacists. They pushed for “separate – but – equal” rights for people of African heritage as an organization and aspired to build separate Black states around the world, most prominently in Liberia on Africa’s west coast. Marcus Garvey’s Early Life

On August 21, 1831, Nathanial “Nat” Turner (1800-1831) who was an enslaved man, led his people’s rebellion. A new wave of harsh legislation was triggered, preventing enslaved people from getting an education, moving around or gathering, after Turner’s actions ended up in the death of up to 200 Black people. The revolt reinforced the region’s anti-abolitionist views, which lasted until the American Civil War (1861–65). Somewhere around 55 to 65 people were killed by the rebels, which included 51 white people. The rebellion was quickly put down on August 23 at Belmont Plantation, but Turner, on the other hand, stayed

A Texas representative,  Barbara Jordan (1936-1996) became a public defender of the United States Constitution and a dominant figure in Democratic Party politics for two decades. She moved to the national stage from Houston’s African American Fifth Ward. She was the first Black woman elected to the Texas state senate and was later elected to Congress. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she delivered the pivotal opening address in Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings in 1974. After three terms in Congress, she left to become a professor and policy activist. Barbara Jordan’s Family, Childhood and Education In her parents’

Harriet Tubman was born on March 1822 in Araminta Rose. She was a political activist and abolitionist based in the United States. Harriet Green and Ben Rose, her parents, were enslaved. She was born into slavery as well before she escaped. She exploited an anti-slavery activist network to preserve certain houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she worked as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, she was an activist in the women’s suffrage campaign. Tubman’s maternal grandmother came to the United States on a slave ship from Africa.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African American civil rights activist. She was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. The United States Congress recognized her as “The First Lady of Civil Rights” and “The Mother of the Freedom Struggle.” On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, refused a bus driver’s order to relinquish a row of four seats in the colored section in favor of a white passenger once the white section was full. The Parks Act and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became iconic emblems of the civil rights movement.  She became an international symbol of

“Let’s all sit together, as human beings should.” Greensboro citizens The Greensboro Sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests against racial segregation, beginning on February 1, 1960 in a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was organized by SNCC, which had a large presence in the south. SNNC SNCC is an abbreviation for the “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” which was created in April 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was a driving force in the civil rights struggle. In 1961 and 1963, it planned the Freedom Rides and was instrumental in the March on Washington. It collaborated with the

W.E.B. Du Bois led the Niagara Movement, a group of Black intellectuals who advocated for complete political, civil, and social rights for African Americans. This approach contrasted sharply with Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist perspective presented in the Atlanta Compromise of 1895. The Niagara Movement was a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the summer of 1905, 29 prominent African Americans, including Du Bois, gathered privately in Fort Erie, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, and drafted a manifesto demanding full individual freedoms, the end of racial prejudice and the acknowledgment of human brotherhood. Subsequent yearly