SENGBE PIEH (later known as Joseph Cinqué) born in 1815 in what is now Sierra Leone. Cinqué was a West African man of the Mende tribe who was the most prominent defendant in the Amistad case, in which it was proved that he and 52 others had been victims of the illegal Atlantic slave trade.
RANDOLPH, ASA PHILIP born April 15, 1889 in Crescent City, Florida was a socialist in the labor movement and the US civil rights movement. Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokespersons for African-American civil rights. In 1941, he, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste proposed a March on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the armed forces. The March was cancelled after President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the Fair Employment Act. Randolph's efforts on behalf of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters were portrayed in the Robert Townsend film "10,000 Black Men Named George". All the African-American workers in the Pullman Company were addressed as "George" after George Pullman.
Organizations
CHINESE AMERICAN CITIZENS ALLIANCE (CACA) is a Chinese American political organization founded in 1895 in San Francisco, California to secure equal rights for Americans of Chinese ancestry. It was originally named the Native Sons of the Golden State and changed to its present name in 1904. The Chinese Times, founded in 1924, became the official newspaper of the Alliance. The Chinese American Citizens Alliance La Lodge Youth Council (YC) was formed in August 2001 and is a subsidiary of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance. It was created in response to the growing number of students seeking college entry counseling. Membership currently consists of high school students, college students, and recent college graduates residing in the West and East San Gabriel Valley.
THE STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC, pronounced "snick") was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It was founded to help organize the student sit-ins, to fight segregation in restaurants and other public areas. It emerged in April of 1960 from student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ella Baker had been the Southern Christian Leadership Conference director before helping form SNCC, but this did not mean SNCC was a branch of SCLC. Instead of being closely tied to SCLC or other groups such as the NAACP as a youth division, SNCC sought to stand on its own. Two hundred black students were present at the first meeting, including Stokely Carmichael from Howard University. He would later head SNCC's militant branch after the group split in two in the late 1960s. SNCC members were referred to as "shock troops of the revolution."
The SNCC eventually aimed to make changes in individual local communities rather than on a national scale, in the case of the SCLC. It was also the most militant of all of the black civil rights organizations which led to tensions with the peaceful SCLC despite its name including "Non-Violent". The SNCC was also committed, as were the other black organizations to convincing blacks to register to vote, as each organization realized that if the blacks didn't vote the government would not be representative of them. The SNCC ran a major campaign during the early 1960s in an attempt to get blacks to register to work.
SNCC played a leading role in the Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. In the later part of the 1960s, led by fiery leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, SNCC focused on Black Power, and then fighting against the Vietnam War. In 1969, SNCC officially changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee to reflect the broadening of its strategies. It passed out of existence in the 1970s.
GREENSBORO FOUR-- civil rights activists. On Feb. 1, 1960 four black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond, took seats at the segregated lunch counter of F. W. Woolworth's in Greensboro, N.C. They were refused service and sat peacefully until the store closed. They returned the next day, along with about 25 other students, and their requests were again denied. The Greensboro Four inspired similar sit-ins across the state and by the end of February; such protests were taking place across the South. Finally in July, Woolworth's integrated all of its stores. The four have become icons of the civil rights movement.
BLACK PANTHERS, U.S. African-American militant party, founded (1966) in Oakland, Calif., by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Originally adopting violent revolution as the only means of achieving black liberation during the late 1970s the party gradually lost most of its influence, ceasing to be an important force within the black community. The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded in Dallas, Tex., in 1989, is not related to the old group. The Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was an African American organization founded to promote civil rights and self-defense. It was active within the United States in the late 1960s into the 1970s.
The group was founded on the principles of its Ten-Point Program, a document that called for "Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace," as well as exemption from military service that would utilize African Americans to "fight and kill for other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America." While firmly grounded in Black Nationalism and begun as an organization that accepted African American membership exclusively, the party reconsidered itself as it grew to national prominence and became an iconic representative of the counterculture revolutions of the 1960s.
The group's political goals are often overshadowed by its confrontational and even militaristic tactics, and their suspicious regard of law enforcement agents, whom the Black Panthers perceived as a linchpin of oppression that could only be overcome by a willingness to take up armed self-defense. The Black Panther Party collapsed in the early 1970s, but party membership had actually started to decline during Huey Newton's 1968 manslaughter trial.
AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT (AIM) spearheaded in 1969 was co-founded by Anishinaabe Dennis Banks established to protect the traditional ways of Indian people and to engage in legal cases protecting treaty rights of Natives. The American Indian Movement (AIM) is a Native American activist organization in the United States.
AIM burst on the international scene with its seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 1972 and the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. AIM was cofounded in Minneapolis, MN on July 28, 1968 by Dennis Banks, Herb Powless, Clyde Bellecourt, Eddie Benton Banai, and many others in the Indian community, almost 200 in total. Russell Means was another early leader. The original mission included protecting indigenous people from police abuse, using CB radios and police scanners to get to the scenes of alleged crimes involving indigenous people before or as police arrived, for the purpose of documenting or preventing police brutality. In the decades since AIM's founding, the group has led protests advocating Indigenous American interests, inspired cultural renewal, monitored police activities and coordinated employment programs in cities and in rural reservation communities across the United States.
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL (born 1974 in Chicago, Illinois) is a popular Asian-American award-winning poet and professor, best known for her jovial and accessible reading style and lush descriptions of exotic foods and landscapes. Nezhukumatathil regularly draws upon her Filipino and Keralan background to give a unique perspective on love and loss, and of course, the land. She is the author of the poetry collection, Miracle Fruit (2003, winner of the Tupelo Press Prize).
NANYE-HI ("One Who Goes About"), known in English as Nancy Ward was born 1738 - 1822 or 1824 in the Cherokee town of Chota, a member of the Wolf Clan) was a Ghighua, or "Beloved Woman" of the Cherokee nation, which meant that she was allowed to sit in councils and to make decisions, along with the other Beloved Women, on pardons. She believed in peaceful coexistence with white people. As a Ghighua, Nanye-hi had the power to spare captives. In 1780, following a Cherokee attack on a white settlement on the Watauga River, she used that power to spare a Mrs. William (Lydia Russell) Bean, whom she took into her house and nursed back to health from injuries suffered in the battle. Mrs. Bean taught Nanye-hi how to weave, revolutionizing the Cherokee garments, which at the time were a combination of hides and cloth bought from traders. But this weaving revolution also changed the roles of women in the Cherokee society, as they took on the weaving and left men to do the planting, which had traditionally been a woman's job. Mrs. Bean also rescued two of her dairy cows from the settlement, and brought them to Nanye-hi. Nanye-hi learned to raise the cattle and to eat dairy products, which would sustain the Cherokee when hunting was bad. The combination of weaving and raising of animals turned the Cherokee from a communal agricultural society.
FLOYD MCKISSICK (born March 9, 1922 in Asheville, North Carolina) became the first black student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Law School. In 1966 he became leader of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, taking over from James Farmer. A supporter of Black Power, he turned CORE into a more radical movement
MALCOLM X, born Malcolm Little, also known as Detroit Red and Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (born May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska was a Muslim Minister and National Spokesman for the Nation of Islam. He was also founder of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. During his life, Malcolm went from being a drug dealer and burglar to one of the most prominent Black Nationalist leaders in the United States; he was considered by some as a martyr of Islam and a champion of equality.
LUE GIM GONG (呂金功, pinyin: Lu Jingong) (born 1859 in Canton, China) was an immigrant from China and a horticulturalist. Known as "The Citrus Wizard," he is remembered for his contribution to the orange-growing industry in Florida.
THE LITTLE ROCK NINE, as they later came to be called, were the first black teenagers to attend all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. These remarkable young African-American students challenged segregation in the Deep South and won. Although Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in schools, many racist school systems defied the law by intimidating and threatening black students-Central High School was a notorious example.
The students referred to as the Little Rock Nine were:
1) Ernest Green (born September 22, 1941),to Ernest G. Green, Sr. and Lothaire S. Green. Following his brush with national fame, Green attended Michigan State University as the beneficiary of a scholarship provided by an anonymous donor. While at Michigan State, he continued to engage in activism and protests supporting the Civil Rights movement. He later learned that the anonymous donor was John A. Hannah, the president of Michigan State, and ironically, an occasional target of protests by Civil Rights activists including Green. Green graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1962 and a Master of Arts in 1964. In 1965, he received an apprenticeship in building trades from the Adolph Institute, a program designed to help minority women in the South with career development issues. From 1968 to 1976, he served as Director of the A. Philip Randolph Education Fund. From 1977 to 1981, he served as an Assistant Secretary of Labor during Jimmy Carter's administration. Since 1981, he has been employed as a private consultant. From 1981 to 1985 he was a partner with Green and Herman; from 1985 to 1986 he owned E. Green and Associates from, since 1985 has been with Lehman Brothers.
2) Elizabeth Eckford- born 1942. In 1958 Elizabeth Eckford moved to St. Louis where she achieved the necessary qualifications to study for a B.A. in history. After graduating she became the first African American in St. Louis to work in a bank in a non-janitorial position. Eckford returned to Little Rock in the 1960s and worked in the public schools as a substitute teacher. In 1996, seven of the Little Rock Nine, including Elizabeth Eckford, appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. They came face to face with a few of the white students who tormented them as well as one student who befriended them. On the morning of January 1, 2003, Elizabeth Eckford's son Erin Eckford was shot and killed by police in Little Rock.
3) Jefferson Thomas- born in 1942 was one of the Little Rock Nine. He graduated from Central High School in 1960. He is now an accountant with the U.S. Department of Defense.
4) Terrence Roberts- born 1941 in Little Rock, Arkansas gained national prominence as one of the Little Rock Nine. After one year at Little Rock Central High School, he moved to Los Angeles with his family and completed high school. He earned a doctoral degree and now teaches at University of California and Antioch University. He is also a clinical psychologist.
5) Carlotta Walls Lanier was the youngest member of the "Little Rock Nine" the nine African American students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. She returned her senior year in 1959. She now lives in Englewood, Colorado, and is involved in real estate.
6) Minnijean Brown-Trickey. On September 25, 1957, under the gaze of 1,200 armed soldiers and a worldwide audience, Minnijean Brown Trickey faced down an angry mob and helped to desegregate Central High. She was later expelled from Little Rock Central High School in 1958 for several reasons, among them an incident in which she allegedly dumped a bowl of chili on a white student in the cafeteria who had been harassing her. This seminal event in American history was just the beginning of Minnijean's long career as a crusader for civil rights. She has spent her life fighting for the rights of minority groups and the dispossessed. For her work, she has received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the Wolf Award, the Spingarn Medal, and many other citations and awards. Minnijean Brown Trickey's life has been a powerful example of what one person can do to make the world a better place. Under the Clinton administration, she served for a time as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior responsible for diversity.
7) Gloria Ray Karlmark born Gloria Ray in 1942 was 15 when she attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School. During her life, Karlmark served as an executive officer for a Dutch company and publisher of a European computer magazine. She now resides in the Netherlands.
8) Thelma Mothershed-Wair was the youngest to begin going to Central High. She has a heart problem, which in turn made it harder for her to adjust. Wair graduated from Soutnern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill with a bachelor's degree in home economics and earned a master's in Guidance & Counseling and an Administrative Certificate in Education from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville in 1970 and 1985, respectively. Wair served as an educator in the East St. Louis School System for 28 years before retiring in 1994 from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.
