Martin Luther King Jr.
On Wednesday, August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King gave one of the most famous speeches in American History. Within this speech he reached out emotionally to those listening and preached about Racism and Segregation. He opened the eyes of American and used repetition of the famous line "I Have a Dream" to profess his ideas of how the world should be; Where all men and women are equals regardless of the color of their skin. After the Montgomery Bus Boycott , King's house was bombed. King was Later arrested. This forced the United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.
Jesse Jackson
Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. is an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.Jackson has been known for commanding public attention since he first started working for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr In 1965, Jackson participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches. Jackson was given significant roles in the SCLC. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC was closely associated with its first president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The SCLC had a large role in the American Civil Rights Movement. Jackson eventually created operation push. At its inception, Jackson planned to orient Operation PUSH toward politics and to pressure politicians to work to improve economic opportunities for blacks and poor people of all races.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". She is most known for her stand on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was an American bondwoman who escaped from slavery in the South to become a leading abolitionist before the American Civil War. She was born in Maryland in 1820, and successfully escaped in 1849. She returned many times to rescue both family members and non-relatives from the plantation system. She led hundreds to freedom in the North as the most famous "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. Still to this day she is a leader and hero of the Civil Rights Movement.
Frederick Douglass
After escaping from slavery, Frederick Douglass became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining recognition for his intelligent antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual ability to function as independent American citizens.Douglass joined several organizations, including a black church, and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. At one of these meetings, Douglass was unexpectedly invited to speak. In 1843, Douglass participated in the American Anti-Slavery Society's Hundred Conventions project, a six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the Eastern and Midwestern United States. During this tour at a lecture in Pendleton, Indiana, he was chased and beaten by an angry mob before being rescued by a local Quaker family, the Hardys. His hand was broken in the attack; it healed improperly and bothered him for the rest of his life.
Dred Scott
Dred Scott was an African-American slave in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as "the Dred Scott Decision." The case was based on the fact that although he and his wife Harriet Scott were slaves, they had lived with his master Dr. John Emerson in states and territories where slavery was illegal according to both state laws and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, including Illinois and Minnesota (which was then part of the Wisconsin Territory). The United States Supreme Court decided 7–2 against Scott, finding that neither he nor any other person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the United States, and therefore Scott could not bring suit in federal court under diversity of citizenship rules.