Other biographies from the Civil Rights Era

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Bayard Rustin and the Rise and Decline of the Black Protest Movement
By Stephen Steinberg, New Politics, Summer 1997. A reflection based on Jervis Anderson's biography: Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen. Rustin's being a witness against evil led him to passivity and thus being drawn into a coalition politics that betrayed the struggle for social change.
Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975): Black Nationalist, Nation of Islam Spiritual Leader
Posted in the soc.culture.african newsgroup, 18 February 2003. In 1932 Elijah Muhammad went to Chicago where he established the Nation of Islam's Temple, Number Two, which soon became the largest. He returned to Chicago where he organized his own movement, in which Elijah (Poole) Muhammad became known as Allah's Messenger. This movement soon became known as the Black Muslims.
Thurgood Marshall and the FBI
By Randall Kennedy, IntellectualCapital.com, Thursday 5 December 1996. Marshall conferred with the Bureau on several occasions in connection with his efforts to combat communist efforts to infiltrate the NAACP. Article, a defense of Marshall, avoids the issue of how Marshall's anti-communism contributed to ithe NAACP's subsequent decline.
L. Alex Wilson: A Reporter Who Refused to Run
By Hank Klibanoff, Media Studies Journal, Spring/Summer 2000. L. Alex Wilson led a team of newsmen who reported on the Little Rock school integration. The Black press and the civil rights struggle. Wilson's life.
Imari Obadele: The Father of the Modern Reparations Movement
By Robert C. Smith, Africana.com, 1 June 2000. Revived interest in reparations seldom mentions Imari Obadele, the individual who probably should be described as the father of the modern reparations movement. It is not surprising that coverage downplays the powerful tradition of nationalism in the black community's politics.
Review of Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois
Reviewed by William Jelani Cobb, Africana, 12 February 2001. Graham Du Bois is one of those remarkable figures who somehow slipped beneath the radar of history. Her identities as musician, composer, author, playwright, intellectual and Pan-Africanist were obscured by one other role'that of spouse to W.E.B. Du Bois.
Review of Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson
Reviewed for H-Women by Marian Mollin, Department of History, Virginia Tech, 24 September 2000. Fleming’s book carefully recounts the short but full life of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, who joined the civil rights movement in 1960 as a young Spelman College coed and who played a critical role in the development and evolution of SNCC
A Freedom-Movement Casualty, Living Confined
By Rick Bragg, New York Times, 31 July 1997. In what history refers to as the Albany Movement, an 18-year-old college freshman named Ola Mae Quarterman defied the racism that gripped southern Georgia in 1962. When a driver ordered her to the back of a bus.
He Never Waited on the Democrats: James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
By David Swanson, Counterpunch, 5–6 February 2005 Jim Forman and Martin Luther King Jr., two allies and rivals in the most dramatic and effective social movement of this country's last century still have much to teach us. Although Forman is much less well known, he in particular may have set an example that we need right now.
Blacks hope for best as Feds reopen bombing case
By Elizabeth Wine, Reuters, 22 July 1997. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth believes only one man was convicted for the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four young black girls in 1963 because of collusion between the FBI, local law enforcement and the Klan.
Groups Pay Homage To Hosea Williams
The Guardian (UK), Tuesday 21 November 2000. In 1965, Williams had been at the helm of the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Ala. Police with clubs, tear gas and dogs attacked peaceful protesters seeking voting rights.
FBI sought dirt on Martin Luther King Jr.'s successor
By David Pace, AP, 11 July 1999. FBI tried until 1974 to dirty Ralph David Abernathy's reputation as they had tried to Martin Luther King's before. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover hoped to discredit Abernathy when he became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Death of Judge Tuttle: A Hero Of Desegregation
By Jack Bass, The Atlanta Journal and Consitution, 25 June 1996. The white district judge who played a vital role in the history of desegregation in the South.
Ella Baker
By Lisa Y. Sullivan, Social Policy, Winter 1999. Ella Josephine Baker's five decades of work as a community organizer. A pivotal, behind-the-scenes figure in progressive African-American politics until her death in 1986, she was involved with nearly 50 organizations, coalitions, or support networks over the course of her life.
A Tribute to Mawina Kouyate
Press release, 9 September 2002. Sista Mawina Kouyate will forever be remembered for her Revolutionary African personality, her revolutionary love and her revolutionary commitment to humanity and especially to the African masses. After the battlefield of Tenants Rights she moved into the Pan African Movement and joined the AAPRP in 1973.
Tyree Scott: 1939–2003—fighter for oppressed workers
By Jim McMahan, Workers World, 24 July 2003. Scott was a civil rights and labor leader, beginning in the late 1960s, who became a Marxist-Leninist in the struggle against capital. Those who may think affirmative action was handed out on a platter by the courts don't realize how many arrests, threats, beatings and jailings workers like Scott took to get those jobs.
The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise
By David Margolick, op-ed contributor, The New York Times, 23 September 2007. I don't get involved in politics, he once said, I just blow my horn. His experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. In response to Little Rock, in a national article, he blasts the government.