Human rights activist biography

The 1865 ratification of the 13th Amendment legally ended slavery in the United States, but, for the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, it also marked the beginning of a new era of oppression.

Violence and racism — both blatant and institutional — ran rampant, especially in the South, where the discriminatory Jim Crow Laws laid the groundwork for racial segregation following the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era.

By the 1950s, after enduring nearly a century of inequality, segregation, as well as vicious lynchings and other senseless acts of violence, a group of African American activists began the civil rights movement.

Over the course of the next two decades, countless Black men and women mobilized, organizing boycotts, sit-ins, and nonviolent protests such as the 1961 Freedom Rides and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in an effort to fight back against systematic oppression.