Early in my organizing career, I believed there was only one way for me to shake the foundation of my community: bellowing into a megaphone at protests. Civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and the Black power fist were the only representations of activism that I’d ever seen. This is what I knew, so I didn’t quite understand that there was any other way to change the state of your community.
But organizing is so much more than what we see. It’s an umbrella term for the many aspects of change we all can be a part of in our communities. I now understand that activism is a celebration of each person’s ability to influence the world in their own way.
So in the spirit of learning more about the many modes of protest that have impacted history, I decided to dedicate this Black History Month to understanding less-recognized community leaders. As a freshman at Howard University, I stumbled upon the Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. The history archive highlights 700 Black community leaders who influenced Black culture.
Here are a few Black activists that caught my attention:
1. Ella Baker (1903-1986)
Ella Baker got involved in organizing at age 24 after graduating from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1927. She worked with organizations that supported women’s rights, especially for Black women, and economic justice for impoverished people. In 1940 she became a field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In February 1960, after she saw what students faced at the famous Greensboro sit-ins, Baker dedicated her mission to young, emerging activists in the movement.
That spring, she organized the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization formed to give younger Black students a voice in the civil rights movement that became a staple of the justice-minded efforts that occurred throughout the 1960s.
In 1964 she and college organizers working with Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) helped coordinate the Freedom Summer. For months, groups of Black and white civil rights activists intentionally violated Jim Crow laws by riding interstate buses between Southern states. Some were attacked by white mobs, or arrested. Their goal was to draw national attention to the overt racism taking place in states like Mississippi, and to register Black voters in the region who were subjected to widespread disenfranchisement.
2. Pauli Murray (1910-1985)
Pauli Murray was the only woman in her law school class at Howard University. Her true impact on Black history and society is her writing and her creativity.
In 1943, at age 32, Murray published two pieces on civil rights explaining race relations in America. She coined the term “Jane Crow,” a derivative of Jim Crow — post-Reconstruction laws implemented throughout the country, but especially in the South, that legalized segregation and discrimination against Black people — as discrimination based on gender. Murray also wrote the book States’ Laws on Race and Color, which relayed her overall theories about race and influenced segregation laws throughout the United States. Her work was used in the famous 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, which led to the desegregation of public schools.
3. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)
Fannie Lou Hamer was born a sharecropper in Mississippi. Like many organizers, she was able to use her personal story and trauma to connect with the people around her.
Hamer became active in her community after she attended a 1962 SNCC meeting. For the first time, she was informed that she had the right to register and vote through the 15th Amendment, a federal mandate that was being circumvented through state-level Jim Crow laws. Hamer was outraged that Black people were still facing voter discrimination in the South, being forced to pay a poll tax and take literacy tests.
That year, Hamer organized a group of 17 people to travel to Indianola, Mississippi, to register and vote. They were met by white officers surrounding the courthouse. As soon as they stepped into the building, many were given literacy tests based on outrageous information any basic citizen would struggle with; Hamer, for example, was told to read and interpret a difficult section of the Mississippi Constitution.
Hamer and other organizers could not register that day, and the group was targeted by police after their act of protest. Hamer was fired from her job. Most of her property was confiscated and she faced death threats, forcing her to move to a different city. This didn’t stop her, though; it pushed her harder to strive for freedom.
In June 1963, Hamer was finally able to register to vote. On her way back from a conference in South Carolina, she and a few other Black women were arrested for sitting in the “whites only” bus station at Charleston. She and several others were brutally beaten by police officers.
“If I fall, I’ll fall five feet, four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off,” was one of her mantras, and that mindset is what pushed her to become a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an organization that pushed for voter registration in her home state, in 1964. She gave speeches at the Democratic National Conventions in 1964, 1968, and 1972.
4. Elaine Brown (1943-today)
Elaine Brown found activism while giving piano lessons in the Watts housing projects of Los Angeles, California, in the 1960s. That experience helped awaken her to injustice, especially in poor neighborhoods.
She began writing articles for the radical Black Congress newspaper, Harambee. She then became involved in the Black Panther Party and helped establish the first Free Breakfast for Children program, which ran from 1969 to 1970, reportedly feeding more than 20,000 California students in the process.
In 1974, Brown became the first and only woman to take over as chair of the Black Panther Party. This was an especially groundbreaking moment, as back then, women were rarely, if ever, elected as leaders of social justice organizations. While in her position, Brown helped elect and elevate Black women leaders who displayed leadership potential. Her striving for leadership went even beyond the Black Panther Party; in 1973 she ran for City Council of Oakland. Although she was not elected, she encouraged the young Black population to be more active within the community, increasing membership of the Black Panther Party.
5. Larry Thomas
During the later years of the civil rights movement, Larry Thomas became an unconventional change-maker in Cleveland, Ohio, where, as a young veteran, he worked with Black youth.
He lived in a community based out of a broken-down building that a church left behind after moving to the suburbs. Thomas used the building to create the Black Unity Community Center, which provided free lunches and health care for families who lived in housing projects. The mission was to “try and tell people who they are, what they are, where they have been, and where they can go through exposing them to their culture.” As an organizer, he brought together a group of people who cared for the betterment of the entire Black community.
Thomas also focused on environmental issues within the community. He was part of a neighborhood improvement council. He understood that factories and oil companies would usually set up in Black neighborhoods, leaving their residents more affected by pollution. He advocated for clean air and for a better lifestyle for his people.
6. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950)
The founder of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson, once said, “We should emphasize not Negro history, but the Negro in history.”
As a Black scholar, Woodson dedicated his life to the study of Black resistance, culture, and power. He believed people would continue to undermine the impact of African descendants on American history if it was not properly documented. Woodson founded The Journal of Negro History, which served as the core for many Black-history research programs, as well as a place to interpret and correct the work of white scholars who misunderstood and incorrectly analyzed slavery and Black culture. He was celebrated for his great interpretation of Black history in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro, which aimed to teach Black students and parents to reject the common perceptions of Black history. He thought it was important that we, as Black people, take back our narrative by literally holding it in our own hands.
Woodson believed that Black History Month, which he founded in February 1926 as “Negro History Week,” should not merely be represented by a few influential leaders; it should be a celebration of a community that was always capable of finding creative ways to fight against injustice.
Editor's note: This story was first published on February 27, 2019.
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