Unsung Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement

General Overview

We've all heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X--each a household name for their involvement with the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. But have you heard of Nannie Helen Burroughs who fired up the crowd in 1900 with her impassioned “How the Sisters Are Hindered From Helping”? How about Pauli Murray who became the first Black woman ordained an Episcopalian priest, or Ella Baker, or Claudette Colvin who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus nine months before Rosa Parks? Even though they stayed out of the limelight or predated the 1960s, the contributions of these individuals were just as important in fueling the movement as were the legendary historical figures we learned about in school. Come celebrate these “other heroes” in the fight for equality.

Recommended Media

Nannie Burroughs

Nannie Helen Burroughs was born in Orange, Virginia on May 2, 1879 to parents John and Jennie Burroughs. Young Burroughs attended school in Washington, D.C., and then moved to Kentucky where she attended Eckstein-Norton University and eventually received an honorary M.A. degree in 1907. Despite the absence of a college degree, Burroughs sought a teaching position in Washington, D.C. When she did not receive it, she moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and became associate editor of The Christian Banner, a Baptist newspaper. Burroughs returned to Washington, D.C. where, despite receiving a high rating on the civil service exam, she was refused a position in the public school system. Burroughs took a series of temporary jobs including office building janitor and bookkeeper for a small manufacturing firm, hoping to eventually become a teacher in Washington, D.C. She then accepted a position in Louisville as secretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention. In 1907 Burroughs, supported by the National Baptist Convention, began planning the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. The school opened in 1909 with 26-year-old Burroughs as its first president. Burroughs adopted the motto “We specialize in the wholly impossible” for the school, which taught courses at the high school and junior college levels. She led her small faculty in training students through a curriculum that emphasized both vocational and professional skills. Her students were to become self-sufficient wage earners and “expert homemakers.” Unlike most of her contemporaries, Burroughs believed that industrial and classical education were compatible. She also became an early advocate of African American history, requiring each of her students to pass that course before graduation. Burroughs was a demanding principal. According to observers, she was such a purist that she was physically pained when she encountered grammatical errors made by her students. Nannie Helen Burroughs never married. She devoted her life to the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls and remained its principal until her death in 1961. Three years later the institution she founded was renamed the Nannie Burroughs School. © https://blackpast.org/aah/burroughs-nannie-helen-1883-1961 Retrieved 16 January 2019

Ella Baker

Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses. Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She has been ranked as "One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the Civil Rights Movement," known for her critiques not only of racism within American culture but also of sexism and classism within the Civil Rights Movement. © https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker Retrieved 16 January 2019

Pauli Murray

Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (1910–1985) was an American civil rights activist who became a lawyer, women's rights activist, Episcopal priest, and author. Drawn to the ministry, Murray was the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest (1977), in the first year that any women were ordained by that church. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was virtually orphaned when young, and she was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. At the age of 16, she moved to New York City to attend Hunter College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer. She enrolled in the law school at Howard University, where she also became aware of sexism. She called it "Jane Crow", alluding to the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. Murray graduated first in her class, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She earned a master's degree in law at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book, States' Laws on Race and Color, the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray served on the 1961–1963 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, being appointed by John F. Kennedy. In 1966 she was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg named Murray as a coauthor of a brief on the 1971 case Reed v. Reed, in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. This case articulated the "failure of the courts to recognize sex discrimination for what it is and its common features with other types of arbitrary discrimination." Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University. In 1973, Murray left academia for activities associated with the Episcopal Church. She became an ordained priest in 1977, among the first generation of women priests. Murray struggled in her adult life with issues related to her sexual and gender identity, describing herself as having an "inverted sex instinct". She had a brief, annulled marriage to a man and several deep relationships with women. In her younger years, she occasionally passed as a teenage boy. A 2017 biographer retroactively classified her as transgender. © https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_Murray Retrieved 16 January 2019

Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin, (born March 17, 1912, West Chester, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died August 24, 1987, New York, New York), was an American civil rights activist who was an adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., and who was the main organizer of the March on Washington in 1963. After finishing high school, Rustin held odd jobs, traveled widely, and obtained five years of university schooling at the City College of New York and other institutions without taking a degree. Rustin became a foe of racial segregation and a lifelong believer in pacifist agitation. He worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nondenominational religious organization, from 1941 to 1953, and he organized the New York branch of another reformist group, the Congress on Racial Equality, in 1941. In the 1950s Rustin became a close adviser to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and he was the chief organizer of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin was the chief organizer of the March on Washington (August 1963), a massive demonstration to rally support for civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress. In 1964 he directed a one-day student boycott of New York City’s public schools in protest against racial imbalances in that system. Rustin subsequently served as president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a civil rights organization in New York City, from 1966 to 1979. In 2013 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. © https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bayard-Rustin Retrieved 16 January 2019

Mamie Till-Mobley

Mamie Till-Mobley (November 23, 1921 – January 6, 2003) was the mother of Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, at the age of 14, after being accused of flirting with a white cashier woman, Carolyn Bryant, at the grocery store. For her son's funeral in Chicago, Mamie Till insisted that the casket containing his body be left open, because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby." Born in Mississippi, Till-Mobley moved with her parents to the Chicago area during the Great Migration. After her son's murder, she became an educator and activist in the Civil Rights Movement. A large part of her work centered around education. She worked throughout her life to help children living in poverty. Her activism in this field alone lasted over 40 years. Specifically, she spent 23 years teaching in the Chicago public school system. She also established a group called "The Emmett Till Players," which worked with school children outside of the classroom. The members learned and performed famous speeches by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. The group still performs to this day. She also spent a great deal of time contributing to knowledge production. She was frequently interviewed for documentary films and began working on a book which was later published after she died. © https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamie_Till Retrieved 16 January 2019

Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin was born on September 5, 1939, in Montgomery, Alabama. Months before Rosa Parks, Colvin stood up against segregation in Alabama in 1955, when she was only 15 years old. She also served as a plaintiff in the landmark legal case Browder v. Gayle, which helped end the practice of segregation on Montgomery public buses. Growing up in one of Montgomery's poorer neighborhoods, Colvin studied hard at school. She earned mostly A’s in her classes and even aspired to become president one day. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was riding home on a city bus after school when a bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused, saying, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare; it's my constitutional right." Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground. "I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other—saying, 'Sit down girl!' I was glued to my seat," she later told Newsweek. Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws. For several hours, she sat in jail, completely terrified. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," Colvin later said. After her minister paid her bail, she went home where she and her family stayed up all night out of concern for possible retaliation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People briefly considered using Colvin's case to challenge the segregation laws, but they decided against it because of her age. She also had become pregnant (Note: She had been raped by a married man after the bus incident. Dr. Thierfelder) and they thought an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle. Her son, Raymond, was born in March 1956. In court, Colvin opposed the segregation law by declaring herself not guilty. The court, however, ruled against her, and put her on probation. Despite the light sentence, Colvin could not escape the court of public opinion. The once-quiet student was branded a troublemaker by some, and she had to drop out of college. Her reputation also made it impossible for her to find a job. Despite her personal challenges, Colvin became one of the four plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case, along with Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith. The decision in the 1956 case, which had been filed by Fred Gray and Charles D. Langford on behalf of aforementioned African-American women, ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. Two years later, Colvin moved to New York City, where she had her second son, Randy, and worked as a nurse's aide at a Manhattan nursing home. Much of the writing on civil rights history in Montgomery has focused on the arrest of Rosa Parks, another woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, nine months after Colvin. While Parks has been heralded as a civil rights heroine, the story of Claudette Colvin has received little notice. Some have tried to change that. Rita Dove penned the poem "Claudette Colvin Goes to Work," which later became a song. Phillip Hoose also wrote about her in the young adult biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. While her role in the fight to end segregation in Montgomery may not be widely recognized, Colvin helped advance civil rights efforts in the city. "Claudette gave all of us moral courage. If she had not done what she did, I am not sure that we would have been able to mount the support for Mrs. Parks," her former attorney, Fred Gray, told Newsweek. © https://www.biography.com/people/claudette-colvin-11378 Retrieved 16 January 2016
Maude Ballou
Maude Ballou (1925-2019): The “Daredevil” Who Served as MLK’s Right-Hand Woman In 1955, Maude Ballou—a young mother who had studied business and literature in college and was program director of the first Black radio station in Montgomery, Alabama—was approached by her husband’s friend, a young minister and activist named Martin Luther King, Jr., to be the personal secretary. After agreeing, Ballou became the Rev. Dr. King’s right-hand woman from 1955 until 1960, years of great unrest and transforming events that included the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the publication of King’s first book, Stride Towards Freedom, and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Peace in Washington, D.C. Her work placed Ballou in enormous danger. In 1957, she was listed as number 21 on the Montgomery Improvement Association's list of “persons and churches most vulnerable to violent attacks.” (King was at the top of the list.) Her children’s lives were threatened, and KKK members watched her at work through the windows of the church. But Ballou just kept on working. “I was a daredevil, I guess,” she told The Washington Post in 2015. “I didn’t have time to worry about what might happen, or what had happened, or what would happen,” said Ballou, who went on to serve as a teacher and college administrator. “We were very busy doing things, knowing that anything could happen, and we just kept going.” Ballou passed away on August 26, 2019. She was 93 years old.
Diane Nash
Diane Nash (born 1938): Freedom Rider and Nonviolent Student Activist for Desegregation A native of Chicago, Diane Nash hadn’t experienced the shock of desegregation within the Jim Crow South until she attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The “Whites Only” signs scattered throughout Nashville inspired Nash to become the chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in 1960, where she organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout Nashville. Nash kept the group’s commitment to nonviolence front and center at the sit-ins, which proved very effective in ending the discriminatory practices within the restaurants. The following year, Nash took over responsibility for the Freedom Rides, a protest against segregated bus terminals that took place on Greyhound buses from Washington D.C. to Virginia. The Freedom Rides, which were initially organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), encountered a mob of angry segregationists as they entered Anniston, Alabama, and were brutally beaten and unable to finish the route. SNCC—under the direction of Nash— continued the protest from Birmingham, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi. Before setting off with a group of 10 students from Nashville, Nash received a call from John Seigenthaler, assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy Jr., who tried to persuade her to end the Freedom Rides, insisting the bloodshed would only continue if they persisted. Nash, unshaken by the stance of the White House, told Seigenthaler that they knew the risks involved and had already prepared their wills before continuing the Freedom Rides. Nash later moved back to Chicago and went on to serve as an advocate for fair housing practices. Her contributions to the success of Civil Rights movement have been increasingly recognized in the years since. In 1995, historian David Halberstam described Nash as “bright, focused, utterly fearless, with an unerring instinct for the correct tactical move at each increment of the crisis.”
Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King (1927–2006): Human Rights Activist, Pacifist, Musician In 1968, just days after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his wife, Coretta Scott King, took his place at a sanitation workers’ protest in Memphis. A few weeks later, she kicked off his planned Poor People Campaign. She had long been politically active, but her husband’s death galvanized her activism. King earned a bachelor’s degree in Music and Education from Antioch College, and had met her future husband while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In the early years of the civil rights movement, she hosted a series of popular “Freedom Concerts,” raising thousands of dollars for the movement. After her husband’s assassination, King campaigned tirelessly to make his birthday a national holiday, and raised millions to establish the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. An avowed feminist, she was active in the National Organization for Women, and was an early advocate for LBGTQ rights. During the 1980s, she was a vigorous opponent of apartheid. King understood that she would be remembered as a widow and human rights activist, but, as she once said, she hoped to be thought of a different way: “as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else, yet unique in my own way…much like everyone else.”