See It: Faces of the Civil Rights Movement Pictures
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In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order that banned segregation in both the armed forces and civil service. Just two years earlier, Truman had, by executive order, commissioned the President's Committee on Civil Rights, which was charged with examining the state of civil rights in the U.S. The committee submitted its report, "To Secure These Rights," which shone segregation in a harsh light and made a host of recommendations to improve the lot of African Americans.
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Thurgood Marshall left indelible prints on the civil rights movement. Having taken a law degree from Howard University in 1933, Marshall built an impressive list of Supreme Court victories, where he represented the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and argued a number of civil rights cases. His crowning achievement arguing before the highest court in the land came in 1954, when he won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which made illegal racial segregation in public schools. Marshall would later serve as the first African-American Supreme Court associate justice. Next in our gallery is the chief justice of the United States who presided over Brown v. Board of Education and heard the arguments Marshall presented.
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Earl Warren was appointed chief justice of the United States in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. One of the Warren court's most important cases was Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court agreed with Thurgood Marshall and made unconstitutional the practice of racial segregation in public schools. The ruling also struck down Plessy v. Ferguson, a 1896 ruling that had allowed states to practice segregation. "Separate but equal" became an invalidated concept following the Brown decision, and Chief Justice Warren was instrumental in rallying the court's justices to a unanimous opinion. The ruling effectively kicked off the civil rights movement.
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Bayard Rustin was an influential civil rights activist during the 1950s and 1960s. Rustin organized the 1947 "journey of reconciliation," in which both blacks and whites shared public transportation, anticipating by more than a decade the "freedom rides" that would take place in the 1960s. Rustin was an early adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. and was among the founders in 1957 of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group that would become a civil rights movement cornerstone. He also was an instrumental organizer of the 1963 march on Washington, where King gave his historic "I have a dream" speech before several hundred thousand people. In our next photograph we'll see a young boy who never lived to see King's speech, having lost his life to the ugliness and violence of the times.
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In 1955, a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi. At a grocery store, he allegedly whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, who owned the store with her husband Roy. A few days later, young Till was kidnapped, severely beaten and shot dead. His body was dumped in a river. Roy Bryant and his half brother were charged with the murder, but they were acquitted without much deliberation by an all-white jury. Acquitted and safe behind the veil of double-jeopardy laws, the two men later boasted of the crime in a magazine interview. Some speculate that the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) was inspired by the murder of Emmett Till.
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Alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., you'd be hard pressed to find a name more universally associated with the civil rights movement than Rosa Parks. In the same year that young Emmett Till was murdered, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala. bus when a white man demanded it. Her simple act of nonviolent protest, and her subsequent arrest, touched off the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted more than a year and brought to the fore of the civil rights movement its organizer, Martin Luther King, Jr. Parks was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1999. Next, we'll learn more about the bus boycott and see a photo of Dr. King.
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It was a Baptist minister from Montgomery, Ala. who would give a powerful, poetic voice to the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an ordained minister with a doctorate from Boston University. He led the Montgomery bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks, winning that battle about a year later when the bus line ended its segregated operating practices. He went on to organize the Southern Leadership Conference, increasing his national prominence. A strong advocate of nonviolent protest, King was arrested many times throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He was at the forefront of the 1963 march on Washington, and his "I have a dream" speech before that massive crowd, in view of all of political Washington, is among history's most famous and moving speeches. He was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. King's life was cut short when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while in Memphis, Tenn., to show support for striking sanitation workers.
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Ralph Abernathy took over as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after Martin Luther King's death. Abernathy was also a Baptist minister and had helped King organize the Montgomery bus boycott. He was previously the treasurer and vice president of the SCLC.
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Fred Shuttlesworth was another activist who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, for which he later served as secretary. He was a key figure in the efforts to work toward the integration of Birmingham, Ala. schools as well as other public institutions. As far back as 1956, Shuttlesworth was active in civil rights, founding the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.
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Walter Francis White was a civil rights leader who was head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for more than 20 years. Born in Atlanta in 1893, White graduated college in 1918 and soon joined the NAACP. White was a driving force behind many of the legal challenges brought during segregation, including Brown v. Board of Education. He wrote of his work in civil rights in his autobiography A Man Called White (1948).
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Ella Baker started her activist work in the 1930s and never looked back, spending the next 50 years working on civil rights with such groups as the NAACP, for which she was secretary and, ultimately, national director. Like some of the other leaders we've seen so far, she helped establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She was its first director and Martin Luther King, Jr. its first president. Baker left the SCLC in 1960 to head back to Shaw University, her alma mater, in North Carolina, to help students there form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
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The "Little Rock Nine," as they were later called was a group of nine students who fought to attend the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. It was 1957, and while Brown v. Board of Education had made it illegal to practice segregation in public schools, some schools, such as Central, found other ways around the issue. They would intimidate students and threaten physical violence. The nine students even received death threats. Hard as it is to believe today, the Arkansas governor ordered the national guard to prevent the students from attending the school. That order was quickly trumped by President Eisenhower, however, who called in troops of his own to make sure the students were allowed to attend. The next peson in our gallery was of great help to these nine brave students.
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Daisy Bates helped mentor and guide the Little Rock Nine. She was no stranger to civil rights activism herself, having founded in 1941 with her husband the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper that was a strong voice for civil rights. She would later use the paper to expose schools, like Arkansas's Central High, that were still segregated after Brown v. Board of Education.
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A voter registration drive in Ruleville, Miss., challenging that state's voting laws, was the start of Fannie Lou Hamer's career as a civil rights activist. She worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Ella Baker's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the registration drive, losing her plantation job as a result. Undeterred, she went to work for the SNCC as field secretary. She helped establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention in order to point out that the Mississippi Democratic Party was not exactly representing its state accurately, given its delegation was all-white. Next, we'll see one of Fannie Lou Hamer's mentors.
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Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, Mississippi's strongest civil rights organization during the 1950s. He was a mentor to activists such as Medgar Evers (who we'll see a bit later) and Fannie Lou Hamer. Howard was a surgeon working in Mound Bayou, Miss. when he became involved in the civil rights movement. He was highly active, and visible, during the trial of the men accused of murdering Emmett Till, searching for evidence, speaking out about the crime and using his home as a way station for those who wanted to help. He later became president of the National Medical Association.
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Stokely Carmichael worked in Alabama as a field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964. Once he rose to chair of the organization by 1966, he began to reject the moderate, nonviolent approach of the group, using instead the term "black power" and setting off controversy in the process. Later to become what the Black Panthers called its "Honorary Prime Minister," Carmichael's less than peaceful rhetoric set him apart from the civil rights movement proper. He moved permanently to Guinea in 1969, changing his name to Kwame Ture and calling himself a pan-African revolutionary.
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One of the earliest titans of the civil rights movement, James Farmer founded the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. The civil rights organization advocated nonviolent protest methods, making it the first rights group taking such an approach. Farmer led the organization of the freedom rides and in 1998 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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In 1962, James Meredith was the first black person to study at the University of Mississippi. Echoing the obstacles faced by the Little Rock Nine, Mississippi's governor strongly opposed Meredith's enrollment at the school, and the riotous uproar that followed only subsided when President Kennedy dispatched troops to the area to restore order. After graduating from the university, Meredith spent years working on civil rights issues. During a 1966 protest march over voting rights issues, Meredith was shot and wounded. He got treated for the injury, and with great determination was able to get back to marching with his group, which had begun marching in Memphis and finished up in Jackson.
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Asa Phillip Randolph helped organize the 1963 march on Washington and was also a key player early on in the labor movement, leading the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Earlier in his career, Randolph was able to convince President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to desegregate U.S. supply factories that were up and running during the World War II effort.
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Medgar Evers was an influential civil rights activist, a World War II veteran who would one day be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. He was an NAACP field secretary in Jackson, Miss. and fought against segregation at that state's university, helping young student James Meredith with his fight there as well. Evers was yet another civil rights activist who paid for his work with his life. He was assassinated in 1963 by a white supremacist.
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Dorothy Height was an early force in the leadership circles of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), fighting to desegregate that organization throughout the country. She was on the podium in Washington, D.C. when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech, and, though she kept a low public profile, led the National Council of Negro Women for four decades. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.
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Although his presidency provided many flashpoints for American citizens, particularly his prosecution of the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson inarguably left a mark upon the civil rights movement by signing the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made explicitly forbidden the practice of racial discrimination in schools, the voting booth and the halls of public facilities. The legislation finally gave the government a tangible means of enforcing the desegregation practices that were struck down by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.
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In August of 1964, three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss. were investigating the burning of a black church when they were arrested on flimsy charges, jailed and then released -- right into the waiting arms of a group of Ku Klux Klansmen. The KKK men beat to death the three workers, who had been working to register black voters in Mississippi. One of the three was Andrew Goodman, a young man from New York who was just 20 years old. We'll see the two other men who were slain with Goodman in our next pictures.
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James Chaney was a 21-year-old civil rights worker slain by the KKK in 1964 in Mississippi.
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Michael Schwerner was 24, also from New York -- killed along with Andrew Goodman and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Miss. in 1964.
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Malcolm Little, born in Omaha, Neb., would one day become Malcolm X, a Black Muslim minister and activist. His high profile may even have eclipsed that of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Black Muslims. In 1963, he ran afoul of Muhammad when he said President Kennedy's assassination had been "chickens coming home to roost." After going on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, Malcolm converted to orthodox Islam and formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity. His tone remained militant, but he no longer sought separatism. He was shot and killed in a public hall in New York in 1965.
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Viola Liuzzo was a civil rights activist from Michigan who was shot and killed by KKK members following her participation in the marches from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in 1965. After the third march's conclusion in Montgomery, Liuzzo was bring some of the marchers back to Selma by car when another car pulled up alongside her and opened fire.
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Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party, along with Bobby Seale, in 1966. The Black Panthers were a militant group that urged black separatism and nationalism, setting them in stark contrast with the more mainstream vein of the civil rights movement. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter of an Oakland, Calif. police officer during a clash in 1967. An appeals court later overturned the verdict and the case was tried twice more, resulting in mistrials. The case against Newton was ultimately dropped in 1971. Newton would have further scrapes with the law, even taking exile in Cuba, but he emerged without facing jail time. He earned a doctorate in social philosophy in 1980. However, in 1989, he was shot and killed in Oakland by a former Black Panther Party member.
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Bobby Seale co-founded the Black Panther Party with Huey Newton. Seale served in the U.S. Air Force and got a degree from Merritt College in Oakland, Calif. A speech by Malcolm X steered him toward black separatism, and Seale was involved in several confrontations with police, most notably at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where Seale was one of the "Chicago Eight" put on trial -- and later acquitted -- for conspiracy to bring violence to the convention. Seale would ultimately drop his militant stance and advocate nonviolent methods for addressing the struggle of African Americans.
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Eldridge Cleaver was a member of the Black Panther Party and was considered the group's spokesperson in 1966, also editing the Panthers' newspaper. He published the essay collection Soul on Ice in 1968, written a few years earlier when he was in Folsom State Penitentiary following a conviction on sexual assault charges. The book became an influential work and won high praise. Cleaver parted ways with Huey Newton over Black Panther Party tactics. He began to push for increasingly violent forms of resistance, while Newton argued for more peaceful methods. After a shootout with police in Oakland, Calif., Cleaver fled to a life in exile in places as varied as Cuba, France and Algeria. The charge of attempted murder, from which he had fled the country, was ultimately reduced to assault and probation, and Cleaver returned to the U.S. By the mid-1970s, he had renounced his violent past, penning the essay collection Soul on Fire in 1978.
Now that you've seen some of the heroes of the American Civil Rights Movement, check out our world-famous peacemakers pictures.
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