Amy Matilda Williams Cassey was born in New York City on August 14, 1808, to Sarah and Rev. Peter H. Williams Jr., a leading Episcopalian minister. Raised in New York City, Williams was a member of an elite family. The Williams family, Rev. Peter Williams … Read MoreAmy Matilda Williams Cassey (1808-1856)
James Charles Evers, known as Charles, was born on September 11, 1922 in Decatur, Mississippi to parents Jesse Wright and James Evers. Growing up in Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow, Evers witnessed the effects of racial discrimination and prejudice firsthand. At the age … Read MoreJames Charles Evers (1922-2020)
Born into poverty and racial segregation in Meridian, Mississippi in 1912, Ted Watkins became a civil rights and union activist and led an anti-poverty agency in Los Angeles, the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC). Watkins left Mississippi as a young man to avoid a … Read MoreTed Watkins (1912-1993)
Born on January 20, 1903 in Pender, Nebraska to John Miller, a former slave, and Nora Herbaugh, a white Midwesterner, Miller was, at his death in 1967, considered one of the leading civil rights attorneys in the United States, particularly in the field of housing … Read MoreLoren Miller (1903-1967)
Open housing was one of the most prominent goals of the Seattle, Washington civil rights movement in the 1960s. Up to the early 1960s African Americans in Seattle were almost completely restricted to housing in the Central District of the city. Housing restrictions were not … Read MoreRev. Mance Jackson (1931-2007)
Moranda Smith was a union organizer and rank-and-file leader of tobacco workers in North Carolina, who throughout the 1940s initiated a challenge to the racial discrimination, disfranchisement, and economic exploitation of workers in the South. The first African-American woman to sit on an international union’s … Read MoreMoranda Smith (1915-1950)
Miriam Matthews was the first African American librarian in the Los Angeles Public Library system. Hired in 1927, she served in the library until her retirement in 1960 where she was instrumental in preserving the history and cultural heritage of black Angelenos. Miriam Matthews was … Read MoreMiriam Matthews (1905–2003)
Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tyron, North Carolina in 1933, Nina Simone began playing the family piano at the age of three. Her mother Mary Kate Waymon, a minister and choir director at a Methodist church in Tyron, interpreted her daughter’s gift as a God-given … Read MoreNina Simone (1933-2003)
Andrew J. Young (not related to Martin Luther King’s lieutenant and Southern Christian Leadership Conference member of the same name) was a civil rights activist in Seattle during the middle part of the twentieth century. A lawyer, Young first reached prominence when he served as … Read MoreAndrew Young (Seattle)
Lodie Biggs, one of the few black professional women in pre-World War II Seattle, was also a significant political activist in the 1920s and 1930s. She was also involved with the transformation of the Seattle branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored … Read MoreLodie Biggs (?-?)
