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Four
Greats of the Black Experience
--Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois,
Mary McLeod Bethune and Martin Luther King Jr.--
received unanimous support from panel of 18 historians and
political scientists.
Eight
Near-Greats of the Black Experience
--Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marcus Garvey,
Langston Hughes, A Philip Randolph, Carter G.
Woodson, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, and Booker
T. Washington.
The Fifty
(In descending order)
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Civil rights leader and scholar was co-founder of the NAACP and
the Pan-African Movement.
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Mary
McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)
Educator, civil rights leader, adviser to presidents was the
first Black woman to receive major federal appointment.
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Civil rights leader, minister, major leader of the
Freedom Movement, 1960s.
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Chicago Defender editor and publisher established a new type of
journalism and vigorously supported the Great Migration to
Northern Cities.
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Minister and protest leader (above) is sometimes called
"The Father of the Negro." First Black bishop and AME
church leader was president of the first national Negro
convention.
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Bandleader, entertainer and the first great jazz soloist to
achieve worldwide fame and influence as a trumpet player and
symbol of a new music.
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Ella Baker
(1903-1988)
Civil rights leader played key leadership role in SCLC and
organized the Shaw University conference that led to the founding
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Her work goes back to northern
labor politics in the 1940's, and later with the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference. |
Although Ms. Baker worked with SCLC,
she clashed with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because she
did not believe in the "one great leader" model of
social change, but instead worked to empower thousands
of ordinary people to speak out. The impact of the work
of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
with whom she was closely affiliated, showed the power
of such an approach. Since then, Ms. Baker's words have
been memorialized in Sweet Honey In The Rock's "Ella's
Song (We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest)."
Source:
Who Was
Ella Baker |
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Novelist, essayist and lecturer helped define the Freedom
Movement of the '60s with The Fire Next Time and other books and
statements.
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Astronomer and mathematician helped survey the federal
territory that became the District of Columbia and published
annual almanacs.
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