From Harriet Tubman to Diane Nash: Black Women of the Civil Rights Movement
“I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions… The time has come to say to you quite candidly, Mr. Randolph, that ‘tokenism’ is as offensive when applied to women as when applied to Negroes.”
--The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray to civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph following the Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington
On Aug. 28, 1963, Dorothy Irene Height took her place on the platform as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed thousands gathered on the Mall during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time, Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women, the organization founded in 1935 by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune to empower women of African descent; she held the post for 40 years. Yet Height is far from a household name. Historians have typically bestowed their attention on the “Big Six” civil rights leaders— King, Randolph, James Farmer, John Lewis, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.
However, the women of the movement struggled and sacrificed alongside their male peers. These organizers, lawyers, priests, mayors and social workers protested, litigated, marched, sang, and taught. They were beaten and arrested. And in their pursuit of equal justice under the law, they drew insight from their experiences as Black women in a society both racially segregated and blind to gender discrimination.
Here, we present a selection of images that document just a fraction of their achievements, accompanied by short biographical sketches. Images are organized by the subject’s birth year (1822 to 1938).
Harriet Tubman, 1822-1913
Pauline Copes-Johnson, Harriet Tubman's great grandniece, poses in front of the Tubman home in Auburn, N.Y., Feb. 13, 2004. (AP Photo/Kevin Rivoli)
Harriet Tubman was born a slave in early 1822 on the plantation of Anthony Thompson in Peter’s Neck, Dorchester County, Maryland. Her parents, also slaves, were Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross. As a child, she was rented out as a nursemaid, a trap-setter and a field hand. On September 17, 1849, fearing her family would be sold and separated, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia and freedom. According to Tubman herself, during the period 1850 to 1860 she made numerous trips into Maryland at great personal risk to bring out about 70 slaves, including her sister, three of her brothers, and her parents. By 1852, with the assistance of Thomas Garret, the Quaker abolitionist, she had effectively established the “Underground Railroad,” a series of stations in every abolitionist town where fleeing slaves were concealed by day and guided to their freedom in the northern states and Canada by night. Tubman’s home, in Auburn, New York, where she settled in 1853 with her parents, was one such station. She died in Auburn on March 13, 1913, at around 91 years of age.
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875-1955
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, president of Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Fla., January 1943. Photograph by Gordon Parks. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune at the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association) on Rhode Island Avenue, Washington, D.C., July 1942. Roger Smith, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was born near Maysville, S.C., on July 10, 1875, to former slaves Samuel and Patsy McLeod. Bethune graduated from Scotia Seminary in 1894 and went on to Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. As no church was willing to sponsor her for mission work, she shifted to teaching. In 1904, she opened a boarding school in Daytona Beach, Fla., the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls. The school merged with Cookman Institute for Boys to form the Bethune-Cookman College in 1923. Today, Bethune-Cookman University, a private historically black university, enrolls 2900 students and offers 43 degree programs. Bethune served as president of the school from 1923 to 1942 and from 1946 to 1947.
During the drive for female suffrage, Bethune led numerous voter registration drives. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and in 1935 became founding president of the National Council of Negro Women. She served as an adviser on race to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, creating the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, also known as the “Black Cabinet.” Roosevelt appointed her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration and in 1940, she became vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP), a post she held for the rest of her life. Bethune died of a heart attack in Daytona Beach on May 18, 1955, at age 79.
Ella Josephine Baker, 1903-86
Ella Baker, seated next to actress Ruby Dee, speaks on Jan. 3, 1968, the 25th anniversary of suffragist Jeanette Rankin’s last day in office as a member of the House from Montana. Rankin was the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. At the time this picture was made, Baker was serving as a consultant to the Southern Conference Educational Fund, raising money to support the workers of SNCC. (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), which she founded in April 1960. (AP Photo/Jack Harris)
Ella Josephine Baker, granddaughter of slaves, is often referred to as “the mother of the civil rights movement,” as she mentored many of the era’s leading activists, including Rosa Parks, Diane Nash, Bob Moses and John Lewis. The Rev. Pauli Murray became a lifelong friend.
Baker was born Dec. 13, 1903 in Norfolk, Va. to Blake and Georgianna Ross Baker. After the 1910 race riot there, her mother took the family back to her hometown near Littleton, N.C., while her father remained working in Norfolk. As a child, she heard her grandmother’s harrowing stories of slave life. Baker graduated as valedictorian in 1923 from Shaw University in Raleigh and moved to New York City in 1927.
In 1928, Baker joined the NAACP as assistant field secretary and in 1943 became national director of local branches, traveling throughout the South to organize at the grass roots level to end segregation, expand voter registration and advocate for full employment. In 1957, she joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta as executive director under the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She excelled at working behind the scenes, encouraging communities to lead themselves.
At odds with King on the nature of leadership and moved by the recent student sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., Baker seized the moment to recruit the next generation of activists. At Shaw University on April 17, 1960, she founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Employing the Gandhian principle of non-violent resistance, and imbued with the spirituality of the Black church, SNCC coordinated the 1961 Freedom Rides in tandem with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1964, SNCC helped organize Freedom Summer, an effort to highlight rampant racism in Mississippi and register Black voters. In August 1964, Baker accompanied a delegation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the all-white and all-male Mississippi Democratic Party.
Ella Baker died in New York City on Dec. 13, 1986, at the age of 83.
The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, 1910-85
On Jan. 8, 1977, in Washington’s National Cathedral, Bishop William F. Creighton (center) ordained civil rights leader and constitutional lawyer-scholar Pauli Murray to the Episcopal priesthood along with five other ordinands. Here, third from left, she joins in the concelebration of the Eucharist. (AP Photo).
Anna Pauline Murray was born Nov. 20, 1910 in Baltimore, Md., to Agnes Fitzgerald and William Henry Murray. With her mother’s death, she was sent to Durham, N.C., to live with her maternal grandparents. Murray attended Hunter College in New York, graduating in 1933 with a degree in English. Her application for graduate work in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was rejected because of her race.
In 1939, Murray took a job with the Workers' Defense League, a socialist organization that promotes labor rights. She became involved in the case of a Virginia sharecropper, Odell Walker, who had been sentenced to death in 1940 for killing his white landlord. Murray and her colleagues ultimately failed to prevent Walker’s execution, and having promised herself she would become a lawyer if she lost the case, she applied to Howard University Law School and was admitted on full scholarship in the fall of 1941.
As a member of the university chapter of the NAACP, she participated in lunch counter sit-ins in downtown Washington, D.C. After graduating, she sought to continue graduate work at Harvard Law School, but her application was turned down, this time because of her sex.
In 1956, Murray joined the law offices of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison in New York but left in 1960 to teach constitutional law in Ghana. Returning to the U.S., she enrolled at Yale Law School to pursue a doctorate, graduating in 1965. Two papers, “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex discrimination and Title VII,” and “Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy,” became highly influential. In 1966, she was among the co-founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in Washington, D.C. In 1968 she joined the faculty of Brandeis University where she remained until the death of her close friend, Renee Barlow, in 1973.
Although the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States had not yet approved the ordination of women to the priesthood, Murray enrolled at General Theological Seminary in New York in 1973, graduating with a master’s degree in divinity in 1976. On Jan. 8, 1977, Bishop William F. Creighton ordained her and five others to the priesthood at Washington’s National Cathedral. She served at the Church of the Atonement in Washington, D.C. and then at the Church of the Holy Nativity in Baltimore.
In addition to careers in law and the priesthood, Murray was also a poet and writer. Among her books are “States' Law on Race and Color” (1951), “Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family” (1956), “The Constitution and Government of Ghana” (1961), and an autobiography, “Song in a Weary Throat” (published posthumously in 1987). Murray died in Pittsburgh on July 1, 1985, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 74.
Dorothy Irene Height, 1912-2010
Dorothy Height, right, president of the National Council of Negro Women and director of the Center for Racial Justice of the YWCA, listens as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addresses thousands of civil rights supporters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., Aug. 28, 1963. In a soaring oration, King proclaimed, “I have a dream.” (AP Photo)
Three of six leaders of African American organizations talk with reporters following their one hour meeting at the White House with President Lyndon B. Johnson, Nov. 19, 1964. They are, left to right: James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality; Whitney M. Young, Jr., executive director of the National Urban League; and Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women. (AP Photo)
In this June 4, 1965 photograph, Morris Dosewell (left), American Labor Council; Dorothy Height, National Council of Negro Women; Alexander Allen, Urban League; Basil Paterson, NAACP and Bayard Rustin, director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, walk together after a meeting with New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. in New York. (AP Photo).
Dorothy Irene Height, civil rights and women’s rights activist, was born March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Va., to Fannie Burroughs and James Height. In 1916, the family moved to Rankin, Pa. where Height attended integrated public schools. She received a full college scholarship after winning a national oratorical contest sponsored by the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. At New York University, she earned a bachelor’s degree in the School of Education in 1932 and a master’s in psychology in 1934.
In 1937, Height accepted a position as counselor at the Harlem Branch of the YWCA of New York City, beginning a 40-year career devoted to the integration of YWCA facilities and programs nationwide. At a meeting there of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), she met Mary McLeod Bethune (the council’s founder) and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. “That fall day,” Height remembered, “the redoubtable Mary McLeod Bethune put her hand on me. 'The freedom gates are half ajar,' she said. 'We must pry them fully open.' I have been committed to the calling ever since."
In 1957, Height became the president of the NCNW, a post she held until 1997. As the civil rights movement intensified, she worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, John Lewis and James Farmer, effectively making the “Big Six” the “Big Seven.” In 1963, she was one of the organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That August day, she and five Black female organizers were seated on the platform with King but were granted no speaking role.
Height received the Citizens Medal from President Ronald Reagan in 1989, the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1993, and the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton in 1994. In 1986 the YWCA and the NCNW sponsored the Dorothy Height Tribute Dinner to celebrate her decades of service. She received honorary degrees from numerous institutions, including New York University, Smith College, Harvard, and the Tuskegee Institute. In 1980, Barnard College apologized to Height for its admissions quota for Black applicants which had kept her from attending in 1929, awarding her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.
Dorothy Height died in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 2010, at age 98.
Rosa Parks, 1913-2005
Police Lt. D.H. Lackey takes the fingerprints of Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Ala., on Feb. 22, 1956, following her arrest for organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Two months earlier, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger as city law required. Parks’ activism launched the bus boycott, which lasted 13 months and brought national attention to a local Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (AP Photo/Gene Herrick)
Rosa Louise Parks was born on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. to Leona Edwards and James McCauley. She grew up on a farm in Pine Level, just outside Montgomery, and attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a segregated school twice burned by arsonists. She went on to a laboratory school run by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes but was unable to complete her degree until 1932. In 1933, she married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery.
In December 1943, Parks joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and was elected secretary, serving until 1957. In 1944, she investigated the gang rape of Recy Taylor, a Black woman from Abbeville, Ala. On Dec. 1, 1955, acting on carefully laid plans, Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man who asked her (legally) to do so. When she refused, she was arrested, jailed and fined. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Dec. 5, 1955-Dec. 20, 1956), spearheaded by a local Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The activism of Parks and King launched the modern civil rights movement one year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board overthrew Plessy and its doctrine of “separate but equal.” On Dec. 21, 1956, Montgomery buses were legally integrated under the federal ruling in Browder v. Gayle, which cited Brown v. Board as precedent.
Rosa Parks died in Detroit on Oct. 24, 2005, at age 92.
Daisy Bates, 1914-99
Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas state conference of the NAACP, answers reporters’ questions during a news conference at CUNY’s Finley Hall in New York City on Nov. 1, 1957. Bates said she would arrive at her home in Little Rock, Ark., by plane on November 4 despite a Little Rock city council order calling for the arrest of NAACP officers. The arrest order stemmed from a city council order for the NAACP to turn over its private files to the local government. The Supreme Court in Bates v. Little Rock (1960) struck down the law, saying it violated both the First and Fourteenth amendments. (AP Photo/John Rooney)
Little Rock Central High School students give thanks at an early Thanksgiving dinner at the home of NAACP state president Daisy and L.C. Bates in Little Rock, Ark., Monday, Nov. 25, 1957. The nine students named numerous reasons for being thankful despite their ordeal during the integration crisis. From left to right: Thelma Mothershed, Mr. and Mrs. Bates, Jefferson Thomas and Elizabeth Eckford. (AP Photo/Ferd Kaufman)
President Clinton sits in front of Daisy Bates during a candlelight service Saturday evening, Sept. 27, 1997, at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. The ceremony commemorated the 40th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School. (AP Photo/Cliff Schiappa)
Civil rights activist and newspaper publisher Daisy Lee Gatson Bates was born Nov. 11, 1914, in Huttig, Ark., to Hezakiah Gatson and Millie Riley. After three white men murdered her mother, she lived with family friends and attended segregated public schools.
In 1942, she married journalist Lucius Christopher (L.C.) Bates. At the time they met, they envisioned starting their own newspaper in Little Rock. May 9, 1941, marked the appearance of the first issue of the weekly Arkansas State Press, an African American newspaper that championed civil rights.
The couple was active in the Arkansas Conference of NAACP branches, and Daisy Bates was elected president of the state conference in 1952. In that capacity, she mentored the nine students who attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock on Sept. 4, 1957. When rioting prevented their return until Sept. 25 under the protection of the federalized Arkansas National Guard, the Bates home served as headquarters for the students, who took meals there and sought moral and personal support. Bates’ account of the ordeal, “The Long Shadow of Little Rock,” was published in 1962.
As a result of the Bates’ activism, the Arkansas State Press lost advertising revenue and the paper closed in 1959. Bates worked in Washington for the Democratic National Committee and for anti-poverty programs during the Johnson administration. Returning to Arkansas, she worked in community development in Desha County.
Bates received numerous awards, including a commendation from the Arkansas General Assembly. In 1958, she and the Little Rock Nine were awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal by the NAACP. Daisy Bates died in Little Rock on Nov. 4, 1999, at age 84.
Fannie Lou Hamer, 1917-77
On Jan. 4, 1965, the opening day of the 89th United States Congress, Capitol Police blocked three members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) from the chamber. Annie Devine (left), Fannie Lou Hamer and Victoria Gray. The women were members of the party established in 1964 to challenge segregationists in the national Democratic party and had hoped to be seated in the House of Representatives in place of three Mississippi members-elect. "You have no floor privileges," Capitol police chief Carl Schamp told them. (AP Photo/Dick Strobel)
In this Sept. 17, 1965 photograph, Fannie Lou Hamer, of Ruleville, Miss., speaks to Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sympathizers outside the Capitol in Washington after the House of Representatives rejected a challenger to the 1964 election of five Mississippi representatives. (AP Photo/William J. Smith)
Fannie Lou Hamer testifies on April 10, 1967 before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty in Jackson, Miss. at the Heidelberg Hotel. To Hamer’s right is another witness, Rev. J.C. Killingsworth. Unita Blackwell, mayor of Mayersville, Miss., is seated to Hamer’s right but not pictured. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell)
Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper’s daughter, was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Miss., the 20th and last child of Lou Ella and James Townsend. She left school at an early age to help support her family picking cotton. In 1944, she married Perry Hamer and they worked on the plantation owned by W. D. Marlow. Throughout her life, she used her remarkable voice, “the voice of freedom,” raised in hymns and spirituals, to calm the agitated crowds around her.
On Aug. 31, 1962, Hamer led 17 volunteers to register to vote at the Indianola, Miss., courthouse. When she was fined by police and harassed, Marlow threw her off the land, forcing her to return to Ruleville, her childhood home. Bob Moses, SNCC field secretary, took note of her courageous advocacy and her voice and invited Hamer to Fisk University that fall where she became a SNCC member and community organizer.
On June 9, 1963, Hamer and others were returning by bus from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina when they stopped in Winona, Miss., to use a washroom and restaurant. Five were immediately arrested and brought to the county jail where they were beaten by white policemen and Black prisoners, who had been forced to participate in the abuse. Hamer was beaten nearly to death, suffering permanent kidney damage.
In recounting her torture, Hamer came to national prominence. As co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), she attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. On Aug. 22, 1964, she addressed the Credential Committee, demanding that her all white and all male state delegation be integrated and describing in detail the vicious attacks upon her. Her audience sat in stunned silence. It still took four more years before the Democratic Party adopted a clause requiring equality of representation from states delegations, and four more before Hamer was elected as a national party delegate from Mississippi.
Throughout the 1970s, Hamer worked to create economic opportunities in Sunflower County. She established a “pig bank” that provided free pigs to farmers. She launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which bought land for collective farming, ensuring employment opportunities.
Fannie Lou Hamer died of breast cancer at age 59 on March 14, 1977. On her tombstone are the words she often spoke, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Gloria Richardson, 1922—
Gloria Richardson, head of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) and a member of the national SNCC board, pushes a National Guardsman's bayonet aside as she moves among a crowd of African Americans to convince them to disperse, Cambridge, Md., July 21, 1963. Peaceful sit-ins had turned violent on July 18, prompting Maryland Gov. J. Millard Tawes to declare martial law. (AP Photo)
Gloria Richardson, left, a leader in the Cambridge, Md., civil rights movement, Dr. Rosa L. Gragg of the National Association of Colored Woman's Clubs and Diane Nash Bevel, right, representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), are interviewed as they leave the White House in Washington, D.C., July 9, 1963. President John F. Kennedy asked 300 representatives of women’s organizations to back his civil rights program. At a two-hour meeting, the president outlined a three-point program to help solve the racial problem. (AP Photo/Henry Burroughs)
National Guard troops with up-thrust bayonets stopped integrationists kneeling in prayer as approximately 100 made a peaceful attempt in Cambridge, Md. on May 13, 1964 to challenge the no demonstration edict of the military commander. Gloria Richardson (in white sweater above third soldier from left) was in the march after being freed on bail. The Civil Rights Act would be signed weeks later by President Johnson on July 2, 1964. (AP Photo)
Gloria St. Clair Hayes, the first woman to lead a grassroots civil rights organization outside the Deep South, was born on May 6, 1922, to John Richardson and Mabel St. Clair Hayes in Cambridge, Md. on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. When Richardson was 6, the family moved to Baltimore where the St. Clair family (free people of color since before the Civil War) was prominent in business and politics.
Richardson entered Howard University when she was 16 and during her years in Washington began to protest segregation at the lunch counter of the local Woolworth’s drug store. She graduated in 1942 with a degree in sociology and returned to Cambridge to find work. That proved difficult, and she turned her attention toward her family, to protesting the segregation of public accommodations and to promoting the welfare of Blacks in the predominantly Black Second Ward. She married Harry Richardson, a teacher.
In 1962, Richardson attended the Atlanta meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960 by Ella Baker. She joined the SNCC board and, back in Cambridge, was asked to form the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC). CNAC advocated for desegregation and for equality in employment, housing, education and health care. In pursuit of these goals, Richardson advocated violence in self-defense when necessary.
On July 18, 1963, after peaceful sit-ins turned violent, Democratic Maryland Gov. J. Millard Tawes declared martial law in Cambridge. When Cambridge Mayor Calvin Mowbray asked Richardson to halt the demonstrations in exchange for an end to the arrests of Black protesters, Richardson declined to do so. On June 11, rioting erupted and Tawes called in the National Guard.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy negotiated a deal (known as the “Treaty of Cambridge”) that ordered equal access to public accommodations in Cambridge in return for a one-year moratorium on demonstrations. Gloria Richardson was a signatory to the treaty, but she had never agreed to end the demonstrations. It was only the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that began to resolve these issues at the local level.
Richardson resigned from CNAC in the summer of 1964. Divorced from her first husband, she married photographer Frank Dandridge and moved to New York where she worked for the City’s Department of Aging and National Council for Negro Women.
Clara Luper, 1923-2011
In this Nov. 16, 1971 photograph, Oklahoma civil rights leader, Clara Luper, announces her candidacy for the U.S. Senate at a rally on Oklahoma City’s east side. She was unsuccessful in her bid. Luper retired from teaching in 1991 but continued to dedicate her life to promoting racial and gender equality. (AP Photo)
From the NAACP Freedom Center in Oklahoma City, civil rights activists Marilyn Hildreth, left, and her mother, Clara Luper, watch the ceremonies leading up to the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Jan. 20, 2009. Luper led the Katz Drug Store lunch counter sit-ins in 1958, after her daughter (at age eight) gave her the idea to sit down at Katz’s and order Cokes. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
Clara Shepard Luper, who launched the first lunch counter sit-ins two years before the Greensboro sit-ins gained national attention, was born in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma to Ezell and Isabell Shepard on May 3, 1923. She attended Langston University, an all-Black institution, receiving her B.A. in mathematics in 1944. In 1951, she became the first Black student to enroll in the history department at the University of Oklahoma, where she received her M.A. in 1951.
Luper taught history at Oklahoma City high schools for more than 41 years. In 1957, she became the sponsor of the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council, holding council meetings at her home where her three children imbibed their mother’s dedication to the civil rights movement.
It was eight-year old Marilyn who thought up the idea of going downtown to Katz drugstore and sitting down at the lunch counter to be served. On Aug. 19, 1958, Luper and thirteen Youth Council students, ages six to 17, with their sponsors, entered Katz’s, sat down and ordered Cokes. Waitresses ignored them; diners spit on them. Nevertheless, Luper returned with the students every Saturday for several weeks. One day, they were served. Buoyed by success, they repeated the sit-ins throughout the city, eventually desegregating more than 100 establishments.
But it would take years of sit-ins, marches and boycotts, and for Luper, 26 arrests, before the Oklahoma City Council passed an ordinance in 1964 outlawing discrimination in public accommodations because of race, religion or color. It was adopted two days after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In August 1969, Luper served as spokesperson for the Oklahoma City Sanitation Strike, which lasted until Nov. 6, 1969. She ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1972. In 1979, she published her memoir, Behold the Walls, and later founded Black Voices Magazine. From 1960 to 1980, Luper hosted a radio talk show in Oklahoma City with her son, Calvin. Luper continued to speak on racial justice issues until her retirement in 2008. She died at her home on June 8, 2011, at the age of 88.
Unita Blackwell, 1933-2019
Unita Blackwell, Mayor of Mayersville, Miss., center, receives the 1984 Fannie Lou Hamer award on April 19, 1984 in St. Louis, Mo. The award was presented during the convention of the National Conference of Black Mayors. Johnny Ford, Mayor of Tuskegee, Ala. and President of National Black Mayors, right, is joined by Centreville, Ill. Mayor Riley Owens in making the presentation. (AP Photo/James A. Finley)
In this April 27, 2001 file photo, Mayersville, Miss., Mayor Unita Blackwell stands beside a historical marker describing the establishment of the community in the Delta. Blackwell, a civil rights activist, worked tirelessly to bring basic improvements to Mayersville during her long tenure from 1976 to 2001. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Unita Blackwell, left, the first Black woman mayor in the state of Mississippi, shows an audience of 55 and older ambassadors to the Grain of America, a group that deals with aging in the U.S., the gold minted coin given to her in recognition of her pioneering struggles for voting rights, Tuesday, July 25, 2006, in Greenville, Miss. Crystal Douglas, right, is part of a group of schoolchildren who provided entertainment for the group.
(AP Photo/Delta Democrat Times, Bill Johnson)
Unita Zelma Blackwell, great-granddaughter of slaves and daughter of sharecroppers, was born on March 18, 1933, in Lula, Miss. As a teenager, Blackwell married and lived in Florida where she worked in the fields. She and her family returned to Mississippi in 1962, settling in Mayersville in Issaquena County. At age 50, she returned to school, receiving a master’s degree in regional planning from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1992, she was one of 33 recipients of a $350,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Blackwell’s political awakening occurred during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964. She served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which brought hundreds of college students to Mississippi to register Blacks to vote. Many of the student activists stayed at her home. Blackwell also tried to register, but because of the rigged literacy tests was unsuccessful. Along with fellow activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, Blackwell was part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation that challenged seating of the state's all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
A turning point in Blackwell’s advocacy for Issaquena County came in 1967 when a group of U.S. senators, including Robert F. Kennedy of New York, came to Mississippi to hold hearings on poverty. Blackwell testified to the primitive conditions in her county, where the lack of adequate housing, education and jobs forced younger residents to leave.
In 1976, Blackwell was elected mayor of Mayersville, serving until 2001. She had one employee and earned $6,000 per year. During her tenure, she established a utility district to provide clean water, indoor plumbing, and sewage services—a first for the town. She pushed to have Mayersville incorporated. She paved its dozen streets. She attracted federal housing so families could leave their wooden shacks. But she kept the shack standing next to her brick house to remind her where she had come from.
Blackwell was president of the National Conference of Black Mayors from 1990 to 1992. She was a fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government during 1991 and 1992. Unita Blackwell died in Biloxi, Miss., on May 13, 2019, at age 86.
Myrlie Evers-Williams, 1933-
James H. Meredith, the first black man to enroll in the University of Mississippi, left, sits with Myrlie Evers, widow of civil rights and NAACP leader Medgar Evers, and Evers' brother Charles Evers, Aug. 16, 1963, in Jackson, Miss. Medgar Evers was assassinated on June 9, 1963. (AP Photo/Jim Bourdier)
Myrlie Evers, 1965. (AP Photo)
Standing amid members of the Legislative Black Caucus, Myrlie Evers-Williams, wife of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, waves to House members honoring her for her lifelong work for civil rights and social justice, Monday, March 28, 2011 at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss. She and Charles Evers, former mayor of Fayette and the brother of Medgar Evers, were honored by the Mississippi Legislature in separate presentations. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Myrlie Evers-Williams delivers the invocation at the U.S. Capitol during the inauguration of Barack Obama to the presidency in Washington,
Monday, Jan. 21, 2013. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Myrlie Louise Beasley was born in Vicksburg, Miss. on March 17, 1933 to James Van Dyke and Mildred Washington Beasley. She graduated from Magnolia High School in 1950 and enrolled at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lorman, majoring in education with a minor in music. She married classmate Medgar Evers in 1951 and they moved to Mound Bayou where both had jobs at the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Co.
When Medgar Evers was appointed Mississippi field secretary of the NAACP in 1954, the couple moved to Jackson. They were active in efforts to end segregation throughout the Mississippi Delta, and their work was met with violence. An unknown arsonist firebombed the Evers home in late May 1963, but Evers and several hundred demonstrators continued to picket white-owned businesses in Jackson.
On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers was assassinated by white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith of Greenwood, Miss. The NAACP posthumously awarded Evers its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, on July 4, 1963. It was accepted on his behalf by Myrlie Evers.
After her husband’s death, Evers and her children moved to Claremont, Calif., where she enrolled at Pomona College, graduating with a degree in sociology in 1968. In 1967, she co-authored an account of her life with Medgar Evers, “For Us, the Living” and in 1970 ran unsuccessfully for Congress. From 1973 until 1975, she worked for Selligman and Latz, an advertising firm, as vice president for advertising and publicity, later moving to Atlantic Richfield, Co., where she served as vice president for community affairs. In 1976, she married Walter Williams, a labor organizer and civil rights activist.
In 1987, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley appointed Evers-Williams commissioner for the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, a post she held until 1991. After her election to the board of directors of the NAACP in 1995, Evers-Williams worked to improve the NAACP’s image and retire its debt. Leaving the NAACP in 1998, she established the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson (later renamed the Medgar and Myrlie Evers-Williams Institute) to increase educational and economic development opportunities for the needy.
Evers-Williams returned to Mississippi in 2012 to serve as a scholar-in-residence at Alcorn State University. In January 2013, she became the first woman and lay person to deliver the invocation at a presidential inauguration -- the second inaugural of President Barack Obama. Her autobiography, “Watch Me Fly,” was published in 1999.
Diane Nash, 1938-
Illinois Senator Charles H. Perch (right), chairman of the platform committee of the Republican Party, discusses civil rights at a platform committee meeting in Chicago on July 20, 1960. With him are, left to right, Walter Bradford, Chicago; Diane J. Nash, of Nashville, Tenn., and Bernard Lee, of Montgomery, Ala. (AP Photo)
The Rev. Al Sharpton, right, presents plaques to activists and former Freedom Riders Diane Nash and Carol Ruth Silver, left, during a Tribute to Freedom Riders at the Major League Baseball Beacon Awards Banquet. Ceremonies, which took place on the MLB's Civil Rights Game Weekend, Saturday, May 14, 2011, in the Omni Hotel, Atlanta. (AP Photo/Paul Abell)
Diane Judith Nash was born in Chicago on May 15, 1938, to Leon and Dorothy Bolton Nash. She graduated in 1956 from Hyde Park High School and enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C. After a year, she transferred to Fisk University, majoring in English.
In Nashville, Nash experienced for the first time the social wounds of racism, from segregation to muttered taunts on city streets. Her life quickly changed. She and other Fisk students began attending the workshops in civil disobedience conducted by the Rev. James Lawson, the Methodist minister, missionary and activist who had studied satyagraha, the philosophy of non-violent resistance preached and practiced by Mohandas K. Gandhi in his campaign to free India from British rule.
Thus inspired, the students began applying Gandhian tactics, engaging in sit-ins at local lunch counters. And they were successful. On May 10, 1960, Nashville became the first southern city to desegregate its lunch counters.
Nash attended the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), coordinated by Ella Baker at Shaw University in Raleigh over Easter weekend in April 1960. In May, Nash began organizing the Freedom Rides from Birmingham to Jackson, later taking charge of the direct-action wing of SNCC; the second wing was devoted to voter registration.
During the summer of 1961, Nash married activist James Bevel, who had been a classmate at Fisk. They moved to Jackson, Miss., where Nash continued to teach workshops in nonviolence. In 1962, she became a field staff organizer for the SCLC. In early 1963, the SCLC, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Bevel and Nash, began organizing the Birmingham Campaign. They recruited both adults and students for peaceful marches to the mayor’s office to protest the city’s notorious racial divisions. Thousands were arrested. Photographers captured the use of high-pressure water hoses and police dogs by Birmingham police officers. These images galvanized a nation, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in hiring and public services across the United States.
Nash and Bevel also worked with King and John Lewis on strategy for the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 that pressed for the right of Blacks to vote. Beginning in the late 1960s, Nash taught in the Chicago public schools and directed her activism toward fair housing and other issues, including the Vietnam War and the women’s liberation movement.
Text by Valerie Komor, AP Corporate Archives.