Ned Cobb
(1885-1973) Born in 1885, Ned Cobb was a tenant farmer in Alabama in the early 1900s. As a cotton farmer, Cobb fought against unfair treatment of tenant farmers by forming a tenant farmers union. According to James R. Grossman, in the opening decades of the twentieth century Cobb clawed his way up the ladder from wage laborer to sharecropper, cash renter, and finally owner. Grossman explains that often the value of the land farmed by farmers in Alabama at the time was less than the value of the crops grown on it. In Cobb's case, the crop was cotton. So when farmers had to borrow money to pay for expenses, bankers or merchants loaned money based on the value of the crop rather than the land. So once the crop was sold after harvest, bankers and merchants took payment out of the cash produced by the crop. As a result, farmers were often forced to grow cash crops on all their land rather than use part of it to grow food for their own families. This forced them to go back to the same merchants to borrow more just to feed their families. The resulting cycle made it nearly impossible to ever rise above the poverty level.

W.E.B. Du Bois
(1868-1963) This brilliant African-American intellectual and activist, whose parents had been slaves, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and educated at Fisk University and at Harvard, where he earned his Ph. D., in 1895. While professor of history and economics at Atlanta University, Du Bois opposed Booker T. Washington's accommodationist stance toward segregation. He helped launch the Niagara Movement for racial equality in 1905 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. He served at the director of publicity and research for the NAACP for twenty-four years. An avowed Marxist, Du Bois used his position as head of the department of sociology at Atlanta University in the 1930s and 1940s to push for integration and full racial equality. In 1961, he renounced his American citizenship and spent his remaining years in Ghana, Africa.

Ralph Ellison
(1914-1994) Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1914. As a child in the Southwest, Ellison heard many stories about the frontier. With so much of the American frontier still undeveloped, the possibilities for Ellison must have seemed endless. He would later characterize his attitude through the words of his most famous character, the narrator of his 1952 novel Invisible Man, who spoke of the United States as a place of "infinite possibilities." In his close-knit African-American community, Ellison fell in love with the language and the music that was his heritage.

John Hope
(1868-1936) John Hope was born on June 2, 1868, in Augusta, Georgia near the beginning of Reconstruction. He is remembered as an educator and an early 20th century civil rights leader. He served as President of Atlanta University and was a founder of the Niagara Movement.

Zora Neale Hurston
(1901-1960) Zora Neale Hurston's birth date has caused a decades-long dispute. While the author herself claimed to have been born in Eatonville, Florida, on January 7, 1901, other records show her birthplace as Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891. From the age of three, Hurston did live in Eatonville, north of Orlando. She later described Eatonville as America's first incorporated all-black community. It acted as a basis for locales in Hurston's stories and novels, most of which used an all-black community as a setting. Never a proponent of integration, Hurston co-opted in her writings white power for blacks by creating all-black cultures in which her characters claimed ultimate control over their lives. Although Hurston's confrontation of the Jim Crow culture in the United States differed greatly from that of many of her contemporaries, her courage and talent would inspire the best African American writers of the latter twentieth century.

Alex Manly
(1866-1944) Alex Manly was an African-American newspaper owner and editor in Wilmington, North Carolina. His newspaper, The Wilmington Record, became the focus of racial tensions when Manly wrote and published an editorial in August of 1898.

Thurgood Marshall
(1908-1993) Thurgood Marshall was born twelve years after the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, a Supreme Court case that established the "separate but equal" doctrine. Arguing the case of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954, he convinced the nine justices to strike down the Plessy decision and end racial segregation in public schools.

Isaiah Montgomery
(1847-1924) Isaiah Montgomery was born May 21, 1847 in Davis Bend, Mississippi on the plantation of Joseph Davis, older brother of Jefferson Davis who would become president of the Confederacy. His father was business manager of the plantation, a prominent position for a slave. As a servant in the Davis household, Isaiah had access to the family library and received an extensive education from Davis. At the end of the Civil War, the Montgomerys bought the plantation from Davis, and held it until 1881.

Booker T.Washington
(1856-1915) Born a slave on a Virginia plantation, he worked his way though the Hampton, Virginia Normal and Agricultural Institute as a janitor. After teaching at Hampton for several years, he became head of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute at Tuskegee, Alabama in 1881. At his death, Tuskegee Institute had become America's most well known institution of higher education, enrolling 1500 students. Among its benefactors were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. As the nation's most influential black leader in the 1890s, Washington championed a policy of accommodation to segregation and Jim Crow. In return he asked that whites supply African Americans with quality vocational training and protect their lives and property. These sentiments, which he expressed in a famous speech, known as 'The Atlanta Compromise,' at the Cottons States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, endeared him to moderate whites in the North and South. For the next two decades, virtually all funds spent on African-American education in the South were controlled by him, and he exerted great influence on Presidents--virtually dictating political patronage for African Americans. He also dominated much of the black press in the nation. Opposed by African-American radicals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington's position began to fall from favor among educated blacks after the turn of the century. During this time, Washington secretly funded anti-segregation campaigns. A skilled writer, his book Up From Slavery (1901) is considered a classic American autobiography.

Ida B. Wells
(1862-1931) Born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells raised her four orphaned brothers and then became a schoolteacher in Memphis, Tennessee, where she purchased and edited a newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech. Outraged by the lynching of three black grocers in Memphis in 1892, Wells devoted her life to a crusade against lynching, lecturing and writing profusely while organizing anti-lynching societies throughout the nation. Her pamphlet, A Red Record (1895), presented a systematic study of lynching, debunking the myth that the murdered victims were rapists and black criminals. She opposed segregated schools in Chicago and helped form the first African-American Women's suffrage organization in the nation. A public attack on her character inspired thousands of African-American women to convene in her defense in Boston in July 1895, forming the National Federation of Afro-American Women. This group soon merged with hundreds of other women's clubs to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).

Walter White
(1893-1955) Walter White, an African American with blond hair and blue eyes, was born on July 1, 1893 in Atlanta Georgia. He experienced the brutality of racism when, at age 13, he confronted a mob of whites who threatened to invade his home. White graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 and two years later, became an executive secretary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1931 he became chief executive of the organization, a position he held until his death in 1955.