- Malcolm X
Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little; May 19, 1925 - February 21, 1965), also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an American Black Muslim minister and spokesman for the Nation of Islam. After leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and became a Sunni Muslim; he also founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement, a political activist, a Baptist minister, and is regarded as one of America's greatest orators. King's most influential and well-known public address is the "I Have A Dream" speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1963. In 1964, King became the youngest man to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (for his work as a peacemaker, …
- Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael (June 29, 1941 - November 15, 1998), also known as Kwame Ture, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party.
- Fred Hampton
Fred Hampton was an American activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). He was killed in his apartment by a corrupt tactical unit of the Cook County, Illinois State's Attorney's Office (SAO), in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Hampton’s murder was chronicled in The Murder of Fred Hampton.
- Elijah Muhammad
Elijah Muhammad (October 7, 1897 - February 25, 1975) is notable for his leadership of the Black Muslims, African-Americans, and the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975. He also was an early important teacher and mentor to Malcolm X.
- Huey P. Newton
Dr. Huey Percy Newton, was co-founder and inspirational leader of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, a black internationalist/racial equality organization that began in October 1966.
- Eldridge Cleaver
Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 - May 1, 1998) was an author and a prominent American civil rights leader who began as a dominant member of the Black Panther Party. Born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, Cleaver's family moved to Phoenix and then to Los Angeles. As a teenager he was involved in petty crime, and in 1957 was convicted of assault with intent to murder. While in prison, he wrote a book of essays, "Soul on Ice", …
- Geronimo Pratt
Geronimo Pratt (born 13 September 1947), also known as Geronimo ji-Jaga, is a former high ranking member of the Black Panther Party. He was targeted by the FBI program COINTELPRO, which aimed to "neutralize Pratt as an effective BPP functionary". Pratt was tried and convicted of the kidnap and murder of Caroline Olsen in 1972, and spent 27 years in prison, eight of which were in solitary confinement.
- Mark Clark
Mark Clark (Black Panther) was a member of the Black Panther Party. He was killed with Fred Hampton in an infamous Chicago police raid on December 4, 1969.
- Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier is a Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement. In 1977 he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for murdering two FBI Agents who died during a 1975 shoot-out on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There has been considerable debate over Peltier’s guilt and the fairness of his trial. Some supporters and organizations, including Amnesty International, consider him to be a political prisoner.
- Bobby Seale
Bobby Seale (born October 22, 1936) is an American civil rights activist, who along with Dr. Huey P. Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party For Self Defense in 1966. Seale's membership as a college student in the African American Association is said to have been inspired him to start the Black Panthers, which at one point had over 5000 members. Seale went on to become the chairman of the party and underwent FBI surveillance as part of its COINTELPRO program.
- Viola Liuzzo
Viola Gregg Liuzzo (April 11, 1925 - March 25, 1965) was a white civil rights activist from the U.S. state of Michigan and mother of five, who was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members after the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama. One of the Klansmen in the car from which the shots were fired was an FBI informant. After her death, she was the subject of a smear campaign by the FBI. Liuzzo's name is one of those inscribed on a civil rights memorial in the state capital.
- Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. on January 17, 1942) is a retired American boxer and former three-time World Heavyweight Champion and winner of an Olympic gold medal. In 1999, Ali was crowned "Sportsman of the Century" by "Sports Illustrated" and the BBC. Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He was named after his father, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., who was named for the 19th century abolitionist and politician Cassius Clay.
- John Lewis
John Robert Lewis is an American politician and was an important leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation. Lewis, a member of the Democratic Party, has represented Georgia's 5th Congressional District (map) in the United States House of Representatives since 1987. The district encompasses almost all of Atlanta.
- H. Rap Brown
H. Rap Brown (born October 4, 1943) came to prominence in the 1960s as a civil rights worker, black activist, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Justice Minister of the Black Panther Party. He is perhaps most famous for his proclamation during that period that "violence is as American as cherry pie", as well as once stating that "If America don't come around, we're gonna' burn it down".
- Ella Baker
Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 - December 13, 1986) was an African American civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s. She was a behind-the-scenes activist whose career spanned over five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, including: W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr.
- Alex Rackley
Alex Rackley was a twenty-four year old member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party who was kidnapped and taken to Panther headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut. He was held there for two days and tortured because fellow members suspected he was a police informant
- Dennis Banks
Dennis Banks (born April 12, 1937), a Native American leader, teacher, lecturer, activist and author, is an Anishinaabe born on Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. Banks is also known as Nowa Cumig ("Naawakamig" in the Double Vowel System); his name in the Ojibwe language means "In the Center of the Ground."
- Bunchy Carter
Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter was an African American activist and former gang member who was killed on January 17, 1969. He is celebrated by many supporters as a martyr in the Black Power movement in the United States.
- Gus Hall
Gus Hall was a leader of the Communist Party USA and its four-time U.S. presidential candidate.
- John Sinclair
John Sinclair (born October 2 1941 in Flint, Michigan) is a Detroit poet, one-time manager of the band MC5, and leader of the White Panther Party from November 1968 to July 1969. He was jailed in 1969 after giving two joints of marijuana to an undercover narcotics officer. His case received international attention when John Lennon performed at a benefit concert on his behalf in 1971.
- David Gilbert
David Gilbert (born October 6, 1944) is an American radical organizer and author currently imprisoned at Clinton Correctional Facility. Gilbert was a founding member of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society and member of The Weather Underground Organization. After eleven years underground, he was arrested in 1981, along with members of the Black Liberation Army and other radicals, after they killed three people in an armored car robbery.
- Kathy Boudin
Kathy Boudin (born 1943) is an American radical, who was convicted in 1984 for her involvement in a robbery that resulted in the killing of three people.
- Diana Oughton
Diana Oughton (January 26 1942 - March 6 1970) was a member of the 1960s radical group The Weathermen. Oughton was born in 1942 to James Henry Oughton III (1913-1996) and was raised in Dwight, Illinois. She had a sister: Carol Oughton (1944-). Her father was a restaurateur. James Henry Oughton II (1882-1935), her grandfather, was president of the Keeley Institute for alcoholics. He died of bullet wounds inflicted by robbers who entered the Institute in Dwight, …
- Robert F. Williams
Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 - October 15, 1996) was a civil rights leader, author, and the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the 1950s and early 1960s. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in the American South and organized armed resistance against white supremacy.
- Ted Gold
Theodore "Ted" Gold (December 13, 1947 - March 6, 1970) was an American political activist and member of the Weathermen.
- Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers (b. 1944) is a former member of the Weather Underground who is now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
- Ron Karenga
Ron Karenga was a notorious gangleader, murder, torturer and traitor to Black People and the Black Power Movement.
- Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Dohrn (b. 1942) is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and is the Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Centerand is a former leader of the organization known as the Weathermen.
- Mario Savio
Mario Savio was an American political activist and a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially his "place your bodies upon the gears" address.
- Morris Starsky
Dr. Morris Joseph Starsky (d. 1989), an American political and social activist and philosophy professor, served as a tenured faculty member in the Arizona State University Philosophy Department until his termination by the Arizona Board of Regents in 1970.
- James Bevel
Reverend James Bevel (b. October 19, 1936) the strategist, tactician, and main teacher of nonviolence of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in America, served as the Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education of the SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1962 to 1969. Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, Bevel served in the Navy for a time and then attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee.
- Russell Means
Russell Means (born November 10, 1939) is one of contemporary America's best-known and prolific activists for the rights of American Indians. Means has also pursued careers in politics, acting, and music.
- H. Bruce Franklin
H. Bruce Franklin (born 1934) is an American cultural historian who has authored or edited nineteen books on a range of subjects. As of 2006, he is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He first attained prominence as a Melville scholar and has served as president of the Melville Society.
- Diane Nash
Diane Judith Nash was born on May 15, 1938 in Chicago was one of the founders of the SNCC, a key force in the American civil rights movement.
- Clyde Bellecourt
Clyde Howard Bellecourt (born May 8, 1936) is a Native American civil rights organizer noted for co-founding the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 with Dennis Banks, Herb Powless, and Eddie Benton Banai, among others. His older brother Vernon Bellecourt has also been active. Clyde was the seventh of 12 children born to his parents (Charles and Angeline) on the White Earth Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota.
- Susan Stern
Susan Stern (31 January, 1943 - July 1976) was a political activist. She was a member of the prominent anti-Vietnam War groups Students for a Democratic Society, Weatherman and the Seattle Liberation Front, and was tried on conspiracy charges as one of the "Seattle Seven". She wrote a memoir entitled "With the Weathermen" about her experiences before overdosing in 1976.
- Robert Parris Moses
Robert Parris Moses (born Harlem, New York, January 23, 1935, usually known as Bob Moses) is an American Harvard-trained educator who joined the civil rights movement and later founded the nationwide US Algebra project.
- Mark William Rudd
Mark William Rudd (born June 2, 1947 in Irvington, New Jersey) is a revolutionary organizer, American educator, and anti-war activist. From 1963 onwards Rudd was a member and from 68 onward he was a leader of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Before and after the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, he became a spokesperson for dissident students who were protesting a variety of issues, most notably the Vietnam War.
- Carl Oglesby
Carl Oglesby was the President of Students for a Democratic Society during the term 1965-1966.