Civil Rights Leaders

Activists, organizers, and reformers who led the long American struggle to extend equal rights to all citizens.

Author of The Feminine Mystique and Founder of Second-Wave Feminism, 1921–2006

Booker T. Washington

Educator, founder of Tuskegee Institute, and architect of the Atlanta Compromise

Labor organizer who won rights for America's farmworkers

Civil War nurse and founder of the American Red Cross

Reformer who transformed the treatment of the mentally ill in America

Enslaved man whose lawsuit for freedom produced the Supreme Court's most condemned decision

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Suffragist, abolitionist, and primary architect of the American women's rights movement

Labor Leader, Socialist Presidential Candidate, and Prisoner of Conscience, 1855–1926

Fannie Lou Hamer

Sharecropper, Voting Rights Activist, and Voice of the Mississippi Freedom Movement, 1917–1977

Frederick Douglass

Abolitionist, orator, and the 19th century's most powerful voice against American slavery

Journalist and activist who became the defining public voice of second-wave American feminism

Abolitionist, Union spy, and conductor of the Underground Railroad

Co-founder of the Black Panther Party and Revolutionary of the Black Power Era, 1942–1989

Journalist, anti-lynching crusader, and one of the founders of the NAACP

Jackie Robinson

The Man Who Broke Baseball's Color Line, 1919–1972

Social reformer, Nobel laureate, and founder of Hull House

Four Gold Medals at Hitler's Olympics, 1913–1980

Militant abolitionist who brought the war over slavery to a boil

The civil rights era's most uncompromising voice for Black self-determination and human dignity

Margaret Sanger

Birth control pioneer whose crusade for reproductive rights is inseparable from her eugenicist ideology

Martin Luther King Jr.

Baptist minister who led the American civil rights movement

NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi, Assassinated June 12, 1963

The fearless organizer once called "the most dangerous woman in America"

Robert F. Kennedy

Attorney General, Senator, and presidential candidate assassinated in 1968

Civil rights activist whose 1955 arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Founder of the American Federation of Labor and father of the U.S. labor movement

Sojourner Truth

Abolitionist, suffragist, and orator who escaped slavery to become its most forceful living refutation

Susan B. Anthony

The suffragist whose half-century of organizing made the 19th Amendment possible

Thurgood Marshall

The lawyer who dismantled segregation in court and became the first Black Supreme Court Justice

Sociologist, co-founder of the NAACP, and theorist of Black identity in America

William Lloyd Garrison

Publisher, abolitionist, and the loudest moral voice against American slavery