Mary Church Terrell

"Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep."

 Mary Eliza Church was born on September 23, 1863 to free, middle-class parents in Memphis, Tennessee. She attended elementary and high school in the north, and received a bachelor's degree in the classics from Oberlin College in 1884, serving as editor of the Oberlin Review and being named class poet. She was one of the first African American women in the country to earn a college degree. She then taught at Wilberforce College in Xenia, Ohio and at M Street High School (now Dunbar High) in Washington DC before returning to Oberlin for a master's degree. She then studied in Europe for two years, and when she returned she married Robert H. Terrell, her supervisor at M Street.

Married women were not allowed to teach at the time, and she became active in women's suffrage and civil rights movements, writing and lecturing throughout the south and the east.  In 1896 she became president of the newly-founded National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She served on the Washington DC Board of Education from 1895 through 1906, the first African American woman in the country to hold such a position. In 1904 she was invited to participate at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, and she gave her speech in German and French as well as English.

Along with Ida Wells-Barnett, Terrell was one of the two African American women signing the call that led to the formation of the NAACP in 1909. She was also a founder and charter member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. During World War I she worked with the War Camp Community Service, providing recreation and demobilization help for African American servicemen. After the war she was a delegate to the International Peace Conference in London. When the 19th amendment gave women the vote she was elected president of the Women's Republican League during Harding's campaign in 1920.

Terrell continued her public appearances for civil rights with the goal of educating the white population about the discrimination, lynching and disenfranchisement of African Americans. In 1950 at the age of 86 she participated in a sit-in at Thompson's Cafeteria in Washington, and was part of a lawsuit filed when the group was not served. Three years later the Supreme Court in their favor, which was the beginning of desegregation in Washington. She died July 24, 1954 at the age of 90 in Annapolis, Maryland.

Troy Davis

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing to which we black are wise:

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes.

                             --Langston Hughes

Unless there is a last-minute intervention, Troy Davis will be put to death tonight at 7:00 EDT by the State of Georgia. In 1991 Davis was found guilty of the first degree murder of police officer Mark McPhail. Two years earlier McPhail was shot in a parking lot while working as a security guard at a Burger King. Since then, seven of nine eye-witnesses have recanted their testimony. There is no physical evidence -- fingerprints, weapons, or DNA -- linking Davis to the crime. Three of the jurors who voted for the death penalty now believe they were mistaken. Witnesses claim to have heard Davis's original accuser, Sylvester "Redd" Coles, confess to the murder.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups have made appeals on behalf of Davis. So have former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former FBI Director William Sessions. Yesterday, NAACP National President Ben Jealous issued this statement urging supporters to fast and gather this evening.

Click here for petition information, email addresses and phone numbers to contact, or for the most current information check Twitter or Facebook using the hashtags #TooMuchDoubt or #TroyDavis. 

Below is a message Troy Davis wrote to his supporters on September 10.

 To All:

I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime. 

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail. 

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist. 

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country. 

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing, 

“I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!” 

Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!  

Update: Troy Davis died at 11:08 PM EDT. His last words were to his executioners, "May God bless your souls." NAACP President Ben Jealous had this reaction.

Sources: Time Magazine, Wikipedia

Mary Burnett Talbert

“The hour has come in America for every woman, white and black, to save the name of her beloved country from shame by demanding that the barbarous custom of lynching and burning at the stake be stopped now and forever."

Mary Burnett Talbert was born September 18, 1866 in Oberlin, Ohio and graduated from Oberlin College in 1886 with a degree in literature. She taught at Bethel University in Little Rock for one year and then became assistant prinicipal of  Little Rock's Union High School, the first African American woman in the country to be an assistant principal.

In 1891 she married William Talbert and moved with him to his home town of Buffalo. She was a founding member of Buffalo's Phyllis Wheatley Club in 1899, the city's first affiliate with the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, which organized efforts to include an African American exhibit in the Buffalo's Pan American Exhibition of 1901 and to protest a plantation exhibit.

Meetings to organize the Niagara Movement were held in Talbert's home in 1905. She was also a founding member of the NAACP in 1909, forming a Buffalo chapter the next year and later serving as a national board member and anti-lynching committee chair. She was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1921, the first woman to receive this honor.

Talbert also worked to stop lynchings through the NACWC, which she served as national president from 1916 to 1920. During this time she was a delegate to the International Council of Women in Norway, and spoke throughout Europe about the conditions facing African Americans in the United States. Other priorities of the NACWC under her leadership were women's suffrage, prison reform, and restoration of the Frederick Douglass Home.

In addition to public speaking, Talbert wrote essays on a variety of topics, including the Achievements of African Americans in Twentieth Century Negro Literature. She died on October 15, 1923 at the age of 57.

Wyatt Tee Walker

‘‘One of the keenest minds of the nonviolent revolution.’’ ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Civil rights leader, pastor and musicologist Wyatt Tee Walker was born August 16, 1929 in Brockton, Massachusetts and attended Virginia Union University, earning  a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics and a master's in divinity. It was at this time he met Martin Luther King, Jr. at an inter-seminary meeting while King was at Crozier Theological Seminary.

Upon graduation in 1953, Walker became pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. He became involved in local civil rights issues, serving as president of the Petersburg NAACP chapter and as founder and president of the Virginia branch of the Congress of Racial Equality. He organized the Petersburg Improvement Association, modeled after the Montgomery Improvement Association, a grassroots organization fighting segregation. Walker was jailed in 1958 the first of seventeen times for leading efforts to integrate the Petersburg Public Library, deliberately choosing to try to check out a biography of Robert E. Lee.

Police dogs attack Walter Gadsden in Birmingham

Walker was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Convention in 1957, and in 1960 King asked him to come to Atlanta to serve as its executive director. He proved to be an excellent administrator, coordinating staff, raising money, and raising the new organization to national prominence alongside the older NAACP and CORE.

He was the primary strategist for "Project C", the implementation of the Birmingham Campaign in 1963 that called for marches, sit-ins and boycotts of local businesses, with an eye for detail that included counting the number of stools at each lunch counter. The violent reaction of Commission of Public Safety Bull Connor, using dogs and fire hoses to subdue the protesters, brought national attention to the SCLC's efforts as did King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Taylor left the SCLC to for the Negro Heritage Library, working with school boards to expand public school curricula and library resources to reflect African American history and culture. In 1967 he was called to serve as senior pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. King conducted his official installation and preached that Sunday's sermon on March 24, 1968, eleven days before he was assassinated.

Taylor returned to school to earn a doctorate in 1975 from Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, specializing in African American sacred music. He published Somebody's Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change, the first of his eleven books, in 1979. He has served as an urban affairs consultant to Governor Nelson Rockefeller and on the American Committee on Africa, an anti-apartheid group.

Taylor retired in 2004 and now lives in Virginia. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Vernon Jordan

"There is a definition of black America but no definition of white America. And we are just as mixed up in views, needs, and aspirations as any other group of people. It's never been monolithic. There's always been dissent. There's always been a difference of opinion, and a difference of approach. And that's healthy."

Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr. was born August 15, 1935 in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 1957 and earned a law degree from Howard University in 1960. He joined the law firm of Donald L. Hollowell in Atlanta, where Constance Baker Motley also worked. The firm won a suit in Federal court against the University of Georgia over the enrollment of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, and Jordan gained national coverage escorting Hunter to the admissions office past a mob of white protesters.

Jordan later served as Georgia NAACP Field Director, as Director of the Southern Regional Council's Voter Education Project and as Executive Director of the United Negro College Fund. In 1970 he was named President of the National Urban League, where he originated the annual State of Black America reports.

On May 29, 1980 Jordan was shot by Joseph Paul Franklin in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Franklin was acquitted of attempted murder in 1982 but later confessed to the shooting.

After recovering from his injuries, Jordan resigned from the Urban League and joined the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. He was part of President Bill Clinton's transition team in 1992-1993 and continued to serve as an adviser to Clinton, a close friend. In 2000 he became Senior Managing Director of Lazard Freres & Co., LLC, an investment banking firm. He serves on a number of corporate boards.

"What I know about this world is that white people will take care of themselves. And what I have learned is that if you are where they are on an equal basis, they cannot take care of themselves without taking care of you."

Jordan was awarded the 2001 NAACP Spingarn Medal. He is a member of Omega Psi Phi and Sigma Pi Phi fraternities.

Ralph Bunche

"And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world." ~ Ralph Bunche, A World View of Race

Ralph Johnson Bunche was born in Detroit on August 7, 1903 [some sources put the date as August 8 and the year as 1904]. He later lived in Toledo, Ohio, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, before attending Jefferson High School in Los Angeles while living with his maternal grandmother. He was valedictorian of his class at Jefferson High School and was awarded an athletic scholarship to UCLA. While working as a janitor to cover living expenses, he again graduated at the top of his class with with a degree in international relations and was awarded a scholarship to Harvard where he earned a master's degree in political science, followed by a doctorate while teaching at Howard University.

From 1928 through 1950 Bunche chaired the department of Political Science at Howard. During World War II he worked in the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of CIA) as a senior analyst on colonial affairs, and in the State Department under Alger Hiss.  He was part of the Dunbarton Oaks Conference in 1944 which led to the creation of the United Nations and was instrumental in drafting both the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights.


Bunche was then assigned to the UN Special Committee on Palestine and became the chief mediatiator upon the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden. He negotiated an armistice between Israel and the Arab States in August 1949 which led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.

Bunche continued his diplomatic career in crisis spots such as the Suez Canal (1956), the Congo (1960) and Cyprus (1964), rising to the position of Undersecretary General of the UN. Domestically he served on the New York City Board of Education, the Harvard Board of Overseers and the NAACP Board of Directors. 


He passed away on December 9, 1971 in New York City at the age of 68.

Juanita Craft

Civil rights advocate Juanita Craft helped form 182 NAACP branches during her 11 years as Texas State Field Organizer. She also served the Dallas NAACP as membership chair and youth leader, and was given the organization's Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award for 50 years of service. She led efforts to integrate the University of North Texas, University of Texas Law School, the Texas State Fair, and the Dallas Independent School District. She was the first African American woman in Dallas county to vote, and served later as Democratic Precinct Chair. She also served two terms on the Dallas City Council.

Mrs. Craft was born February 9, 1902 in Round Rock near Austin. She attended Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University) and later received a teaching certificate from Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson College). Her home (left) is now part of Dallas' Wheatley Place Historical District. A recreation center, post office, and park have been named in her honor.