Civil Rights Movement

Arguably the greatest African American trade unionist of the twentieth century, Asa Philip Randolph was the most important civil rights leader to emerge from the American labor movement.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was born November 29, 1908, in New Haven, Connecticut, and died April 4, 1972, in Miami, Florida. Even though Powell's father was the spiritual leader of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, he initially had no desire to follow in his footsteps.

The son and grandson of prominent African American ministers, each of whom bequeathed a legacy of activism in the cause of black civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, was the most influential leader of the American civil rights movement.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organization composed mainly of American blacks, but with many white members, whose goal is the end of racial discrimination and segregation.

Since that auspicious day in December 1955 when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, Rosa Parks has been the first lady of the civil rights movement in the United States.

The Congress of Racial Equality (core) was founded on the University of Chicago campus in 1942 as an outgrowth of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Founded on February 1, 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was created to encourage young activists to use sit-ins and nonviolent antisegregation protests during the Civil Rights Movement.

US jurist and civil-rights leader. As a prominent civil-rights lawyer, he frequently presided over landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954).