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.

Constance Baker Motley

"A lioness who braved great danger to use the laws of this land to fight racial bigotry" ~ DeWayne Wickham

Constance Baker Motley was born September 14, 1921 in New Haven, Conneticut, where her father was the chef at Yale's Skull & Bones Club and her mother was a founding member of the NAACP chapter. At the age of 15 she decided to become a civil rights attorney after being turned away from a whites-only swimming pool. While in high school she was president of the NAACP Youth Council and secretary of the Adult Community Center. Unable to afford college, her community service background led to a job with the National Youth Commission after having spent several months after graduation as a domestic worker.

While speaking at the Dixwell Community House, a local African American center, she came to the attention of local philanthropist Clarence Blakeslee, the primary donor of the center. Impressed by her intelligence and commitment, he offered to pay for her education. Motley first enrolled in Fisk University in Memphis, then transferred to New York University where she earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1943. She then attended the Columbia University School of Law, graduating in 1946.

With James Meredith

While still in law school, Motley began clerking for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Her early duties centered on discrimination in the military during and after World War II, and she worked on hundreds of court-martial cases brought to the NAACP. As the LDEF began focusing on education, she worked on Sweatt v. Painter, and wrote the briefs for Brown v. Board of Education.

After the successful Brown decision, she continued to work on school desegregation cases including those of Autherine Lucy, Charlayne Hunter Gault, and James Meredith. In Meredith v. Fair she became the first African American woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. Throughout her twenty-year career with the LDEF she appeared before the Supreme Court ten times, winning nine and having the tenth -- a case involving minority representation on juries -- overturned in her favor twenty years later.

Motley was elected to the New York State Senate in 1964, and a year later was chosen by the New York City Council to fill a one-year vacancy as Manhattan Borough President. President Johnson appointed her U. S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York in 1966. She was the first African American woman on the Federal bench, and became Chief Judge in 1982 and Senior Judge in 1986. President Clinton gave her the Presedential Citizens' Medal in 2001, and she received the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 2003. She died in New York city on September 28, 2005 at the age of 84.

Roy Wilkins

"A towering figure in American history and during the time he headed the NAACP. It was during this crucial period that the association was faced with some of its most serious challenges and the whole landscape of the black condition in America was changed, radically, for the better." ~ Benjamin Hooks

Roy Wilkins was born August 30, 1901 in St. Louis and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1923 with a degree in sociology. While in college he was night editor for the student newspaper Minnesota Daily and reporter for the St. Paul Appeal. After graduation he took a job at The Call in Kansas City, soon becoming managing editor.

His lifetime work with the NAACP began in 1931 as assistant secretary under Walter White. When W. E. B. DuBois resigned in 1934, Wilkins replaced DuBois as editor of Crisis magazine, a position he held until 1949. He then became administrator of internal affairs, and in 1955 was elected Executive Secretary, the highest staff position, a title changed to Executive Director in 1964.

Wilkins worked to advance civil rights through legislation, frequently testifying before congressional hearings and conferring with presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. He was one of the organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, was named to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1967, and chaired the U. S. Delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights in 1968. He was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1964 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1967.

During a time of increasing militancy, Wilkins was known as a moderate, conciliatory leader, expressing this opinion in The New York Times:

The Negro has to be a superb diplomat and a great strategist. He has to parlay what actual power he has along with the good will of the white majority. He has to devise and pursue those philosophies and activities which will least alienate the white majority opinion. And that doesn't mean that the Negro has to indulge in bootlicking. But he must gain the sympathy of the large majority of the American public. He must also seek to make an identification with the American tradition.

Criticism of his conservative approach came from other civil rights leaders such as DuBois, Daisy Bates and Fred Shuttlesworth, especially in regard to his cooperation with the anti-communist efforts in the early 1950's. At that time Wilkins collaborated with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to publish and distribute leaflets denouncing activist Paul Robeson, a frequent target of the anti-communist movement.

Wilkins died in New York City on September 8, 1981 at the age of 80. He was a member of Omega Psi Phi 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.

Ernest Just

"The Brotherhood of Man is not so much a Christian doctrine as a fundamental biological law. For biology does not and cannot recognize any specific differences among humans. This is a fact of tremendous significance for the human family. The peace of the world lives here. And the transcendent value of science to man will be measured in just proportion to which we can realize this truth."

Ernest Everett Just was born August 14, 1883 in Charleston, South Carolina. His mother, a teacher, thought that educational opportunities for African Americans were limited in the south, and he was sent to Kimball Union Academy, a college prep boarding school in Meriden, New Hampshire. He finished the four-year program in three years, graduating as valedictorian, having served as class president, editor of the school newspaper, and president of the debate team. He then attended Dartmouth College, earning bachelor's degrees in history and biology with special honors in zoology, again as valedictorian as the only Magna Cum Laude graduate and Phi Beta Kappa member in the class.

Despite his academic achievements, the only teaching positions Just was offered were at African American colleges. In 1907 he joined the faculty of Howard University, becoming chair of the Zoology Department in 1912, and serving on the Howard Medical School faculty as head of the Physiology Department. He organized the first drama club at Howard, and with three students founded Omega Psi Phi fraternity in 1911.

Just began graduate studies as a research assistant at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and took a year's leave of absence from Howard to attend the University of Chicago, receiving a PhD in experimental embryology in 1916. He had already become known as an expert on the reproductive systems and cells of marine animals, and was awarded the NAACP's first Spingarn Medal in 1915. His work is summarized in his 1939 book The Biology of the Cell Surface.

He continued his summer research at Woods Hole until 1929 when he went to the Zoological Station in Naples, Italy. The next year he was the first American to be invited to the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where he worked until the rise of the rise of the Nazi Party led him to relocate to Paris in 1933.  Foreigners were warned to leave the country in 1940, but he stayed to finish his current research and was placed in a prisoner of war camp after the German invasion. The U. S. State Department quickly arranged his release, and he returned to the United States. Already in ill health, he died October 27, 1941 in Washington, DC at the age of 58.

Carl Rowan

"We ought not think of this involvement in citizenship only in terms of something somebody would call charitable. . . . If somebody on this campus, a handful of students, said 'You know, I can stop this polarization by getting involved in some organized way in making use of diversity, making diversity work'--that would be a tremendous service." ~ Carl Rowan, quoted in Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Winter 1995

Journalist, cabinet member and ambassador Carl Thomas Rowan was born August 11, 1925 in Ravenscroft, Tennessee. He graduated from high school as valedictorian and class president, briefly attending Tennessee State University where he took part in a training program enabling him to become one of the first African Americans to serve as a commissioned officer in the U. S. Navy during World War II.

After the war Rowan attended  Oberlin College where he had trained while in the Navy, graduating in 1947 with a degree in mathematics. The next year he earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota and worked on two African American weekly newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Register. He was soon hired by the Minneapolis Tribune as a copywriter, becoming a staff writer in 1950, extensively covering the Civil Rights Movement. A series of columns exploring racial issues led to his first book, South of Freedom, published in 1952, and he became the only journalist to win three Sigma Delta Chi awards in a row from 1954 to 1956.

Rowan was named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs by President Kennedy in 1961, overseeing news coverage of military involvement in Vietnam. He was part of the negotiating team that secured the exchange of pilot Francis Gary Powers and served as a delegate to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1963 he was appointed Ambassador to Finland, and in 1964 was named Director of the U. S. Intelligence Agency, thus becoming the first African American to be on the National Security Council.

With President Lyndon B. Johnson

Rowan left government service in 1966 to resume his career in journalism. He wrote a widely read syndicated column for the Chicago Sun-Times until 1998, and appeared as a panelist on Inside Washington. He received the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1988, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995, and received the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement in 1999.

Rowan founded Project Excellence in 1987 to provide college scholarships for African American youth in the Washington DC area who excel in writing and speaking. The organization has awarded $76 million to almost 3000 students. He died in Washington DC on September 23, 2000 at the age of 75.

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.

Louis T. Wright, M.D.

"There is no use saving the Negro from being lynched, or educating for sound citizenship if he is to die prematurely as a result of murderous neglect by America's health agencies solely on account of his race or color." ~ Dr. Louis Wright, 1937

Louis Tomkins Wright was born in LaGrange, Georgia, on July 23, 1891. His father was a doctor who had left medical practice to go into ministry and was a district superintendent for the Methodist Episcopal Church at the time of his death in 1895. Wright's stepfather, Fletcher Penn, was also a physician, being the first African American graduate of Yale Medical School. He practiced in Atlanta.

Wright received a bachelor's degree from Clark Atlanta University where he was class valedictorian, and was admitted to Harvard Medical School. He graduated fourth in his class yet was unable to find an internship in the Boston area. He was accepted by Freedmen's Hospital in Washington DC (affiliated with Howard University), and while there researched the use of the Schick test for diphtheria on African Americans.

Wright returned to Atlanta where he went into practice with his stepfather. In 1916 NAACP Field Secretary James Weldon Johnson came to Atlanta to start a local chapter. Wright joined and was elected treasurer. This marked the beginning of his life-long friendship with Walter White who was chapter secretary. At the outbreak of World War I Wright joined the Army Medical Corps and served in France, where he won a Purple Heart after being exposed to phosgene gas.

After the war, Wright settled in New York City, where he worked for the Health Department at applied for staff privileges at Harlem Hospital. When he was hired at the hospital six months later, four white physicians resigned in protest and Dr. Cosmo O'Neal, the hospital director who hired him, was transferred to working the gate-booth at Bellevue Hospital. However, other African American doctors were subsequently hired and the New York City Civil Service Commission reorganized the administration of the city's hospitals, creating the Department of Hospitals. By 1929 Wright had been promoted to assistant visiting surgeon and was also named NYPD Police Surgeon. He became the first African American to become a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (1934) and to become a Board Certified Surgeon, one year after the Board was created (1939).

Inspired by the discrimination he had experienced and overcome throughout his career, Wright fought for equality in medical education and in medical care for all people. He continued be be active with the NAACP and was elected to its Board of Directors in 1931, becoming Chairman in 1934. Reunited with Walter White, who had become Executive Director, he secured funding from the Carnegie Foundation to research and make recommendations concerning health care needs of African Americans. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1940.

In 1939 Wright was stricken with tuberculosis, likely due to lung damage during the war, and was hospitalized in Ithica, New York, for most of the next three years. Returning to the staff at Harlem Hospital in 1942, he was named Director of the Department of Surgery, and the physical limitations from his illness led him to concentrate on research. He developed a metal plate for knee fractures and a neck brace, as well as becoming known as becoming known as an expert on head injuries and skull fractures. He headed the team that first used Aureomycin, and published over 35 papers on the use of antibiotics. He was also one of the pioneers of chemotherapy in treating cancer. In total, he had approximately 100 papers published in medical journals.

The library at Harlem Hospital was named in Wright's honor months before he passed away on October 8, 1952 at the age of 60. Colleague Aubrey Maynard, who had been the first African American intern at Harlem Hospital in 1926, wrote these words recalling the occasion:

“Like some of his era, [Wright] had viewed with cold horror the scene of a lynching. He had known the surging fury of defiance when a mob moved toward his home and family. From boyhood he had felt the spur and the obligation to gain educational and professional status to fulfill the aspirations of devoted parents. He had been a black soldier in a white man’s army which fostered segregation and seethed with prejudice and injustice. Through the depression he had struggled to support his family as a doctor in the ghetto. Physical disability had eroded his strength. He had learned the promises and evasions and maneuvers—and occasionally the successes—of political life in a racist society. Step by step, he had gained professional and personal stature. Now, at his celebration of his sixtieth birthday, he cherished the hope that untold thousands would pass to fulfilled lives through the doors that he had opened. His friends, who remembered the long years, rejoiced with him.”

The above quotation is from the  June 2000 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, which contains an excellent article on Dr. Wright and the status of health care for African Americans at the time of his research.

Kenneth Clark

 It is now generally understood that chronic and remediable social injustices corrode and damage the human personality, thereby robbing it of its effectiveness, of its creativity, if not its actual humanity. ~ Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto 

Psychologist Kenneth Clark was born on July 14, 1914 in the Panama Canal Zone where his father worked as a passenger agent for the United Fruit Co.  When he was five his mother moved to Harlem so that he and his sister could attend school in the United States. She found work as a seamstress and became an organizer and steward for the International Ladies' Garmentworkers Union.

Dr. Clark attended Howard University and studied psychology "for the promise of getting some systemic undertanding of the complexities of human behavior and human interactions... in the seemingly intractable nature of racism, for example". He received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Howard, and in 1940 became the first African American to receive a PhD in psychology from Columbia University. He taught at the City College of New York from 1942 until his retirement in 1975, becoming the school's first African American tenured professor in 1960.

Dr. Clark is best known for his research into children's self-esteem, conducted with his wife Mamie Phipps Clark, also a psychologist. Their study, expanding on Mamie's master's thesis at Howard, found that black children preferred white dolls and connected them with more positive traits than they did black dolls. This finding has been repeated over the years, most notably in Kiri Davis's 2006 documentary A Girl Like Me. It was used by Thurgood Marshall in presenting his case in Brown v. Board of Education, with Chief Justice Earl Warren concluding that segregation of children "solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

In 1946 the Clarks founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem to provide counseling for children and educational support for the community. They also started Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited in 1960 to further educational and job opportunities. This organization, known as HARYOU, worked to reorganize Harlem schools and provided preschool classes and tutoring.

Dr. Clark received the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1961 and the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Foundation Four Freedoms Award in 1985. He died on May 1, 2005 at the age of 90 in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Read his New York Times obituary here.