*Hughes Van Ellis was born on this date in 1921. He was a Black Soldier, mechanic, and survivor of one of the most extensive racial holocaust episodes in America. Van Ellis was born in Holdenville, Okla., and was not yet five months old at the time of the Tulsa Massacre, after which his parents fled Tulsa with […]
learn more*Yuri Kochiyama was born on this date in 1921. She was an Japanese-American activist and journalist. Born Mary Yuriko Nakahara in San Pedro, Calif, she an outgoing student in high school, she played sports and wrote for the school newspaper. She was mostly unaware of political issues until her father, Seiichi, was taken into custody […]
learn more*Joseph Felmet was born on this date in 1921. He was a white-American journalist, pacifist, and activist. Joseph Andrew Felmet was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He attended Lee H. Edwards High School and delivered newspapers for The Asheville Times. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1942 with a bachelor’s […]
learn more*Leeland Jones was born on this date in 1921. He was a Black educator and civic leader. Leeland Jones, Jr., a Buffalo, New York native, spent the first six or seven years of his life sleeping in the bed of his grandfather, a former slave who had fled from the South through the Underground Railroad. He […]
learn more*O Donald “Smitty” Smith was born on this date in 1921. He was an African American businessman, musician and activist.
learn moreOn this date, we mark the birth of Whitney M. Young, Jr. in 1921, an African American educator and activist.
Young was born in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, and received his B. S. degree at Kentucky State College in 1941. During World War II, he served in an anti-aircraft company of African American soldiers with white officers. This experience of racism increased Young’s interest in civil rights.
learn more*John W. Douglas was born on this date in 1921. He was a White American lawyer, political attorney, civil and human rights activist.
John Woolman Douglas was born in Philadelphia, PA. He graduated from Princeton University in 1943 and served in the Navy during World War II. He received a law degree from Yale University in 1948. During this time he married Mary St. John in 1(945). After law school, Douglas attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and received a postgraduate degree in politics, philosophy and economics.
learn moreMatthew Little was born on this date in 1921. He was an African American businessman and one of Minnesota’s most prominent Civil Rights advocates for over 50 years.
William Matthew Little was born in Washington, N.C., the first city in America named after George Washington, and the son of Arthur and Bessie Little. His grandfather was a farmer, and his father was an engineer in a plant that made corn and wheat products.
learn more*Betty Reid Soskin was born on this date in 1921. She is a community activist, lyricist, and retired park ranger. Born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit, Michigan, she is the daughter of Dorson Louis Charbonnet and Lottie Breaux Allen of Louisiana. Her father was Creole, and her mother was a Cajun. Her great-grandmother had been born […]
learn more*Mamá Tingó was born on this date in 1921. She was an Afro Dominican activist leader of the rural farming community. Mamá Tingó was born Florinda Muñoz Soriano in Villa Mella, Dominican Republic. She was the daughter of Eusebia Soriano and was baptized in the Parroquia Esprit Santo, the Holy Spirit Church, in 1922. She married […]
learn more*Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley was born on this date in 1921. She was a Black teacher and the mother of Emmett Till. Born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan in Webb, Mississippi, She and her family left the South when millions of black Southerners migrated to the industrial North in the Great Migration to escape racial violence and Jim Crow laws. In 1922, […]
learn more*On this date in 1922, Floyd McKissick was born. He was an African American civil rights activist and a former National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
From Asheville, North Carolina he did his undergraduate education at that state’s colleges and Morehouse College. His attempt to apply for Law School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was denied because the school was not integrated. With the help of NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, he sued the school and became the first African American to earn a LL. B degree at the University of North Carolina.
learn more*Fred Shuttlesworth was born on this date in1922. He was a Black civil rights activist and minister.
Born Freddie Lee Robinson in Mount Meigs, Alabama, Shuttlesworth became pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and was Membership Chairman of the Alabama state chapter of the NAACP in 1956, when the State of Alabama formally outlawed it from operating within the state. In 1956 Shuttlesworth and Ed Gardner established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) to take up the work formerly done by the NAACP.
learn more*Willie S. Glanton was born on this date in 1922. She was a Black lawyer and politician. Willie Stevenson was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and was the daughter of Ervin S. Stevenson and Willie Ever Parker. She graduated from Tennessee State University and Robert Terrell Law School in Washington, D.C., and was admitted to the Iowa […]
learn more*Gloria St. Clair Hayes Richardson was born on this date in 1922. She was a Black administrator, politician, and activist. Gloria St. Clair Hayes, the only child of John Edwards Hayes and Madel Pauline (St. Clair) Hayes, was from Baltimore, Maryland. Her grandfather, H. Maynadier St. Clair, was a city council member in Cambridge from […]
learn more
