National Civil Rights Day

Martin Luther King Jr

(January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) born Michael King Jr. An American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.

Harriet Tubman

(c.March 1822 – March 10, 1913) Born Araminta Ross, an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends,[4] using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai (born 12 July 1997) is a Pakistani female education activist, and producer of film and television. She is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, receiving the Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17, and is the second Pakistani and the only Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Yousafzai is a human rights advocate for the education of women and children in her native district, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan's "most prominent citizen".

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

(February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American civil rights activist. She is best known for her refusal to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in defiance of Jim Crow racial segregation laws, in 1955, which sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. She is sometimes known as the "mother of the civil rights movement".

Elizabeth Freeman

Also known as Mumbet, was one of the first enslaved African Americans to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. Freeman was fighting for her freedom in the state where the legalization of slavery in early America first derives from. The northern United States, along with the south, engaged in harsh treatment of Black people, with Massachusetts even considering “slavery as a way of life” until 1788

Malcolm X

Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African American revolutionary and human rights activist who founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI) and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He was also a prominent figure during the civil rights movement until his assassination by members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1965. A spokesman and minister for the Nation of Islam from 1952 until 1964, after which he left, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the African American community. A controversial figure accused of preaching violence, Malcolm X is also a celebrated figure with Black people and Muslims worldwide for his pursuit of racial justice.

Ella Baker

(December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of the SNCC. Biographer Barbara Ransby calls Baker "one of the most important American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement". She is known for her critiques of both racism in American culture and sexism in the civil rights movement.

Thaddeus Stevens

(April 4, 1792 – August 11, 1868) An American politician and lawyer who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, being one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s. A fierce opponent of slavery and discrimination against black Americans, Stevens sought to secure their rights during Reconstruction, leading the opposition to U.S. President Andrew Johnson. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the American Civil War, he played a leading role, focusing his attention on defeating the Confederacy, financing the war with new taxes and borrowing, crushing the power of slave owners, ending slavery, and securing equal rights for the freedmen

Malcolm X

Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African American revolutionary and human rights activist who founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI) and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He was also a prominent figure during the civil rights movement until his assassination by members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1965. A spokesman and minister for the Nation of Islam from 1952 until 1964, after which he left, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the African American community. A controversial figure accused of preaching violence, Malcolm X is also a celebrated figure with Black people and Muslims worldwide for his pursuit of racial justice.

Julian Bond

Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.

Bond was elected to serve four terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and later he was elected to serve six terms in the Georgia State Senate, serving a total of twenty years in both legislative chambers. Following his career in the legislature, he was a professor of history at the University of Virginia from 1990 to 2012. From 1998 to 2010, he was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Edison Tomimaro Uno

A Japanese American civil rights advocate, best known for opposing laws used to implement the mass detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and for his role in the early stages of the movement for redress after the war. To many Japanese American activists, Uno was the father of the redress movement.

Uno was born in 1929 in Los Angeles, California. He was the son of George and Riki Uno. In 1942, Uno was interned with his parents and siblings at the Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado. Not long after, he was transferred to the Crystal City Internment Camp in Texas, where he remained for the duration of World War II.