Black Civil Rights Leaders
Notable Civil Rights Leaders
The civil rights movement in the United States is a bit hard to pin down in terms of time. The struggle for Black Americans' human rights stretches back to the country's earliest days, and in some ways people would say it continues on today. The traditional timeline says that the movement started in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, and ends in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These years generally coincide with the gradual overturning of Jim Crow Laws, the rise of the Black power movement, and the passing of important bills like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The timeline we use begins after World War II to add some context, but covers the usual important milestones like the freedom riders, sit-ins, the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and the Selma marches. You can click here to see the timeline, or here for more Black history.
Or, if you want to see some of Dr. King's most important speeches and letters, like his I Have a Dream speech delivered in Washington, D.C., or his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, click here.
The biographies here are for famous leaders from that era, including members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (or NAACP).
The Little Rock Nine pictured with Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas NAACP. Browse more African-American biographies by category:
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- Ralph Abernathy, civil rights leader
- Ella Baker, civil rights activist
- Amira Baraka, American poet, playwright, and political activist
- Daisy Bates, civil rights leader
- Black Panthers, U.S. Black militant party
- Julian Bond, U.S. civil rights leader
- Stokely Carmichael, radical civil rights leader
- Shirley Chisholm, U.S. Congresswoman
- Kenneth B. Clark, civil rights leader
- Eldridge Cleaver, American social activist
- Claudette Colvin, activist
- Angela Davis, political activist, author
- Medgar Evers, civil rights leader
- Myrlie Evers-Williams, civil rights leader
- James Farmer, civil rights leader
- Marcus Garvey, Black nationalist leader
- Greensboro Four, civil rights activists
- Fannie Lou (Townsend) Hamer, civil rights activist
- Height, Dorothy, activist
- Benjamin Hooks, American Black leader
- Charles Hamilton Houston, civil rights lawyer
- Roy Innis, civil rights leader
- Jesse Jackson, political leader, clergyman, and civil-rights activist
- James Weldon Johnson, civil rights leader
- Coretta Scott King, American civil rights leader
- Martin Luther King, Jr., American clergyman and civil rights leader
- Yolanda King, civil rights leader
- John R. Lewis, civil rights leader
- Little Rock Nine, first Black teenagers to attend all-white Central High School
- Loving, Mildred, activist
- Malcolm X, militant Black leader
- Thurgood Marshall, lawyer and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
- Floyd McKissick, U.S. lawyer and civil-rights leader
- James Meredith, civil-rights leader, author
- Kweisi Mfume, U.S. Representative and NAACP CEO
- Benjamin Franklin Muhammad, civil-rights and religious leader
- Elijah Muhammad, Black nationalist leader
- Huey Newton, Black activist
- Rosa Parks, American civil rights activist
- John L. Phillips, American judge
- A. Philip Randolph, U.S. labor leader
- Bayard Rustin, civil rights activist
- Bobby Seale, Black activist
- Fred Shuttlesworth, civil rights activist
- Nina Simone, civil rights activist
- C. K. (Charles Kenzie) Steele, civil rights activist
- Moorfield Storey, civil rights leader
- Mary Church Terrell, civil rights activist
- Walter White, American leader
- Roy Wilkins, American social reformer and civil rights leader
- Andrew Young, African American leader, clergyman, and public official
- Whitney M. Young, Jr., social reformer
Biographies of Famous African Americans Black Religious Leaders
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