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TWO CENTURIES OF BLACK LEADERSHIP: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817)
Paul Cuffe, a free black from Massachusetts, was a ship owner and advocate of
sending free blacks voluntarily back to Africa. Cuffe's efforts helped
encourage the American Colonization Society to found settlements in what was
to become Liberia. Altogether, some 15,000 American blacks moved there
during the colonization effort.
Richard Allen (1760-1831)
Born a slave, Richard Allen began his career as a clergyman with the
conversion of his master. Shrewd and hardworking, Allen bought his freedom
and moved to Philadelphia. After being rebuffed at white churches, he formed
an independent black Methodist church. In 1816, he became the first bishop
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first national organization
of its kind. During this era, it was said, Allen's house was never shut
"against the friendless, homeless, penniless fugitive from the house of
bondage." Allen is also reported by his contemporaries to have had "greater
influence upon the colored people of the North than any other man of his
times."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
Born into slavery on a Maryland farm, Frederick Douglass became the foremost
African-American abolitionist in the United States. At the age of 21, he
escaped to Massachusetts where he become a lecturer for the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1847, Douglass founded a newspaper, The North Star, whose masthead read:
"Right is of no sex -- Truth is of no color -- God is the Father of us all,
and we are all Brethren."
During the Civil War, Douglass recruited black regiments for the North and
spoke eloquently for black suffrage and civil rights.
Sojourner Truth (Isabella) (1820-1883)
Born a slave in New York, Sojourner Truth escaped just before the state
abolished slavery. Becoming a preacher-prophet, she adopted the name
"Sojourner Truth." By 1843, she began touring America denouncing slavery and
championing equal rights for blacks and women before religious, abolitionist
and women's organizations.
Truth visited President Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1864, then
remained in Washington to help runaway slaves. Her last years were spent
urging Congress to allocate land and money for freed blacks in the West.
Harriet Tubman (c. 1821-1913)
Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Maryland. At age 25, she escaped to
freedom. She was to become the most famous conductor on the "Underground
Railroad," a secret network of hiding places where fugitive slaves found
sanctuary on their way north. All told, she made 19 trips back to the South,
helping more than 300 slaves escape to freedom.
During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the Union as a nurse, a spy and a
scout. At one time $40,000 was offered for her capture. Her later years were
given to establishing an old-age home for impoverished blacks.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
Booker Taliferro Washington, the most influential African-American leader at
the turn of the century was born a slave in Virginia and freed with the
Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1881, Washington became head of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute
in Alabama, where he advocated industrial and agricultural training for
African-Americans. Under his leadership the school became one of the
nation's leading black universities.
After delivering his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech in 1895, Washington
was recognized as the chief spokesman for black Americans. Advocating the
dignity of common labor, Washington steered blacks toward careers in
agriculture, mechanics and domestic service. In 1900, Washington organized
the National Negro Business league which emphasized skill, thrift an black
capitalism.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
A prominent author, editor and educator, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
obtained a doctorate from Harvard in 1895. In the course of his long career
-- as editor of the Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sociology professor and lecturer --
Du Bois embraced such differing ideologies as equalitarian democracy,
pan-Africanism, economic and cultural self-determinism, Marxism and
socialism. Throughout his life, he remained a steadfast critic of a society
which tolerated discrimination, and he advocated equal opportunity and
education as the keys to black advancement. In 1961, at age 93, Du Bois
moved to Ghana.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1869-1931)
The demand for the arrest and punishment of lynchers -- white vigilantes who
executed blacks became a major crusade at the turn of the century. An
outstanding figure in this movement was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who in 1895
compiled the first statistical pamphlet on lynching, The Red Record.
Wells taught school in Memphis, Tennessee, until she became editor and
part-owner of a newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, which circulated
throughout the Mississippi Delta. In 1892, after exposing those who had
lynched three young black businessmen in Memphis, her offices were
destroyed.
Fleeing to Chicago, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett. Both became active in
the National Equal Rights League.
A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979)
Asa Philip Randolph was one of the most influential labor and civil rights
leaders of the 20th century. In 1925, Randolph founded and was elected
president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which fought a
successful battle for recognition by the railroad companies.
In 1941, Randolph threatened President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a mass
march on Washington to protest the exclusion of blacks from jobs in defense
industries. This led to the establishment of the federal Fair Employment
Practices Committee. Randolph also encouraged President Harry S Truman to
desegregate the military in 1948.
As an elder statesman of the civil rights movement, he was a principal
organizer of the March on Washington in 1963.
Roy Wilkins(1901-1981)
Roy Wilkins joined the NAACP as assistant secretary in 1931 and became
executive director in 1955. Wilkins and more than 700 others were jailed in
the spring of 1963 after a mass demonstration against segregation in public
facilities in Jackson, Mississippi.
Early in his administration, President Lyndon B. Johnson conferred with
black leaders, including Wilkins, to enlist support for the civil rights
program begun under President John F. Kennedy.
Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993)
Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice,
attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Howard University Law School
in Washington, D.C. Admitted to the bar in 1933, he worked with the
Baltimore, Maryland, branch of the NAACP and later established its Legal
Defense Fund.
As chief attorney for the NAACP, Marshall earned a reputation as an
exceptional lawyer, winning 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Marshall's primary target was segregation in all its manifestations:
interstate travel, housing laws, voting rights and education. The most
celebrated of his victories, the landmark Brown v. the Topeka, Kansas Board
of Education in 1954, ended legal segregation in public schools.
Marshall was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1962 by President
Kennedy. He then became the first black to become solicitor general of the
United States. In 1967, President Johnson named him the first black Supreme
Court justice. He served until 1991, remaining an unceasing advocate for the
equality of all Americans.
James Farmer (1920-1994)
In 1942, James Farmer founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) during
a sit-in at a Chicago restaurant that refused to serve blacks. Farmer
directed the organization toward nonviolent protest - sit-ins, boycotts,
marches and Freedom Rides. These early demonstrations, protesting
segregation in public facilities, were met with hostility and violence. By
the 1950s, as a result of direct action by CORE and the NAACP, public
facilities in the North opened to blacks.
In 1961, Farmer traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of a new round
of Freedom Rides. Other civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King
Jr., joined the cause as it gathered momentum.
As black militancy gained strength within CORE, Farmer resigned as national
director in 1966 and turned to teaching. During the Nixon administration he
was assistant secretary of health, education and welfare.
Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1921-1971)
Following a distinguished career as a teacher, Whitney Moore Young Jr. was
named executive director of the National Urban League in 1961. The league
was formed in 1910 to improve the living conditions and employment
opportunities for urban blacks.
Young was one of the black leaders who advised President Johnson on the
landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Young served on numerous private and
federal commissions related to social welfare. Elements of his "domestic
Marshall Plan" were incorporated in the federal antipoverty program during
the 1960s.
Benjamin Hooks (1925- )
Throughout his career Benjamin Hooks, a lawyer and ordained Baptist
minister, has addressed a range of political, economic and social problems
confronting African-Americans and other minorities. In 1965, he was
appointed a Memphis Criminal Court judge.
He gained further prominence when he was named to the Federal Communications
Commission in 1972. The first black to serve on the commission, he was
instrumental in paving the way for blacks to own and operate radio and
television stations.
In 1977, Hooks became executive director of the NAACP, the nation's oldest
and largest civil rights organization, a post he held until early 1993.
Malcolm X (1925-1965)
The life and philosophy of Malcolm X have profoundly influenced the thinking
of black Americans. Born Malcolm Little, Malcolm X spent much of his
childhood in foster homes and state institutions. Arrested at the age of 21,
he was given a 10-year sentence. While in jail, he became interested in the
Nation of Islam, the Black Muslim sect led by Elijah Muhammad, who advocated
separation of the races. Paroled in 1952, he adopted the name Malcolm X, and
became a leader of the Black Muslim movement.
His eloquence drew a strong following but his popularity and forceful
personality led to disputes and ultimately his expulsion from the movement
in 1963. He then founded his own organization.
Following a pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm modified his views and accepted the
possibility of working with people of diverse ethnic backgrounds. He was
assassinated in 1965 during a speech in New York City. Malcolm X's influence
has grown since his death, largely through his autobiography and, most
recently, a film.
Ralph Abernathy (1926-1990)
Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest associate, was a prominent
figure in the civil rights movement for three decades. In 1955, he helped
organize the association to supervise a city-wide bus boycott in Montgomery,
Alabama. following the arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat
to a white passenger.
In 1957, a group of Southern black ministers from 11 states met with King
and Abernathy to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), King was elected president and Abernathy, secretary-treasurer. Under
their leadership. the SCLC organized nonviolent marches, sit-ins, boycotts,
prayer pilgrimages and voter registration drives protesting segregation in
the South. After King's death, Abernathy became president of the SCLC,
heading it until 1973.
Andrew Young (1932- )
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Andrew Jackson Young graduated from Howard
University and later was ordained as a minister.
While working on a voter-registration project, he met Martin Luther King Jr.
and joined the SCLC where he became one of King's most trusted aides. He was
active in desegregation campaigns in Birmingham, Alabama, and Chicago,
Illinois, and in the 1963 March on Washington. Young became SCLC executive
director in 1964 and, after King's death, executive vice president under
Ralph Abernathy.
Elected to Congress in 1972, he was reelected twice. President Jimmy Carter
named him ambassador to the United Nations in 1977. In 1981, he was elected
mayor of Atlanta and was reelected overwhelmingly in 1985. Young is
co-chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the 1996 Olympic Games.
Colin Powell (1937- ) Secretary Of State
General Colin Powell was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in
1989, making him the highest-ranking black officer in U.S. history.
Powell served two tours in Vietnam in the 1960s. He worked with the deputy
secretary of defense in the late 1970s and became senior military assistant
to the secretary of defense in 1983. After commanding the V Corps in
Frankfurt, Germany, Powell was named President Reagan's assistant for
national security affairs in 1987.
Known for his thorough preparation and professionalism, Powell played a
major role in the 1991 Gulf War to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and
the restructuring of the U.S. military following the end of the Cold War.
Jesse Jackson (1941- )
Jesse Louis Jackson, the most prominent black leader in the United States
today, was a college student when he became a field director for CORE. In
1966 Jackson was chosen by Martin Luther King Jr. to head the SCLC's
Operation Breadbasket, which sought to create job opportunities for blacks
in Chicago, Illinois.
Ordained a Baptist minister in 1968. Jackson left the SCLC in 1971 to found
Operation PUSH People United to Save (later Serve) Humanity -- in Chicago.
PUSH worked to open up job opportunities for blacks and encouraged
black-owned business.
In 1983, Jackson launched a nationwide voter registration drive; a year
later he declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Jackson expanded his political following through a "Rainbow Coalition" of
blacks, Hispanics and disadvantaged whites, and won even wider support for
his presidential candidacy in 1988.
In recent years, Jackson has remained a highly visible and eloquent advocate
for a wide range of civil rights and human rights issues.
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