Daisy Bates (1914–1999) was the president of the Arkansas NAACP who fought to force the state of Arkansas to comply with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered...

Eugene "Bull" Connor (1897–1973) was a police chief in Alabama during the anti-segregation protests in downtown Birmingham.In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a series of nonv...

Medgar Evers (1925–1963) was the field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP until his death in 1963.On June 12th, 1963, a sniper shot and killed Black civil rights leader Evers in the driveway of h...

Orval Faubus (1910–1994) was the Democratic Governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967, famously known for his vigorous stand against the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957.In 1...

Charles Houston (1895–1950) was a Black veteran of World War I and in the early 1930s, one of the few African Americans to graduate from Harvard Law School. He led the legal team of the NAACP, de...

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) was the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama who rose to prominence in the movement for civil rights. He remains to this day a s...

Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) was a student of Charles Houston, special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He followed in his mentor's footsteps an...

James Meredith (1933–) was a student at the all-Black Jackson State College who became the first Black student to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi.In September 1962, the National...

Mamie (Till) Mobley (1921–2003), also known as Mamie Bradley, was the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy brutally murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. She spent the years follow...

Irene Morgan (1917–2007) was a young African-American woman who, in 1944, refused to give up her seat to a white couple on a Greyhound bus leaving from Virginia.In the summer of 1944, Morgan, a y...

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) was a Swedish social scientist, who in 1944 published An American Dilemma, a book encapsulating a five-year study sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation.Gunnar Myrdal's s...

Rosa Parks (1913–2005) was a seamstress and a dedicated member of the NAACP when she was arrested and jailed for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus. Par...

A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) was the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union who in 1941, proposed a March on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the expanding war in...

Jo Ann Robinson (1912–1992) was an English professor at an all-Black college who, as part of the Women's Political Council (WPC), helped plan and launch the Montgomery bus boycott.During the Chri...

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an early advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and one of the key organizers of the 1963 March on...

Emmett Till (1941–1955) was a young African-American boy from Chicago who in the summer of 1955 was murdered by two white Mississippi men who claimed he had whistled at a white woman.Till's murde...

Mose Wright (1890–1973) was a Mississippi sharecropper and the great uncle of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy brutally murdered in the summer of 1955.Emmett Till was staying in Mose Wright's hom...