The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Pacifica Foundation is an American non-profit organization that owns five independently operated, non-commercial, listener-supported radio stations known for their progressive/liberal political orientation. Its national headquarters adjoins station KPFK in Los Angeles, California.
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Willard became the national president of Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898. Her influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution were adopted. Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education. During her lifetime, Willard succeeded in raising the age of consent in many states as well as passing labor reforms including the eight-hour work day. Her vision also encompassed prison reform, scientific temperance instruction, Christian socialism, and the global expansion of women's rights.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1845, she was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States.
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wells dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence, and advocating for African-American equality—especially that of women.
KPFA is an American listener-funded talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station signed on the air April 15, 1949, as the first Pacifica Radio station and remains the flagship station of the Pacifica Radio Network.
Mary Edwards Walker, commonly referred to as Dr. Mary Walker, was an American abolitionist, prohibitionist, prisoner of war, and surgeon. She is the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor.
Dorothy Irene Height was an African-American civil rights and women's rights activist. She focused on the issues of African-American women, including unemployment, illiteracy, and voter awareness. Height is credited as the first leader in the civil rights movement to recognize inequality for women and African Americans as problems that should be considered as a whole. She was the president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. Height's role in the "Big Six" civil rights movement was frequently ignored by the press due to sexism. In 1974, she was named to the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which published the Belmont Report, a bioethics report in response to the infamous "Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) is a bipartisan, independent commission of the United States federal government, created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 during the Eisenhower administration, that is charged with the responsibility for investigating, reporting on, and making recommendations concerning civil rights issues in the United States. Specifically, the CCR investigates allegations of discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, disability. In December 2023, Rochelle Mercedes Garza was appointed to serve as Chair of the CCR having been the youngest person to be appointed to the position.
Mary Louise Smith, a U.S. political organizer and women's rights activist, was the second woman to become chair of a major political party in the United States.
Barbara Rose Johns Powell was a leader in the American civil rights movement. On April 23, 1951, at the age of 16, Powell led a student strike for equal education opportunities at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia. After securing NAACP legal support, the Moton students filed Davis v. Prince Edward County, the only student-initiated case consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional.
Clayborne Carson is an American academic who is a professor of history at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985, he has directed the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.
Elsa Knight Thompson, née Elsie Eloise Knight, was an American radio documentary maker and broadcaster.
Peter N. Kirsanow is a partner with the law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff, working within its Labor & Employment Practice Group in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a black civil-rights commissioner and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, serving his fourth consecutive 6-year term, which he was reappointed to by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in December 2019. He is the longest-serving member among the current commission. He was previously a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from January 2006 to January 2008.
Nicole Sawaya was a Lebanese-American radio journalist who was the Executive Director of the Pacifica Radio Network.
Victoria "Vicky" Wilson is an American publishing executive and writer who served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) from 2000 through 2001.
Euvester Simpson is an American voting rights activist and contributor to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. A Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member at the age of 17, she helped black people learn to read, write, and register to vote in Mississippi during the movement. She was an active member in the movement through its entirety. She was involved in the Winona, Mississippi bus incident.
Jill Elizabeth Ruckelshaus is a former special White House assistant and head of the White House Office of Women's Programs and a feminist activist. She also served as a commissioner for the United States Commission on Civil Rights in the early 1980s. Currently, she is a director for the Costco Wholesale Corporation.
Frances Reynolds Keyser was an American suffragist, clubwoman, and educator. She succeeded Victoria Earle Matthews as superintendent of the White Rose Mission in New York City, and was academic dean of the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute alongside school founder Mary McLeod Bethune.
Frances Harriet Williams (1898–1992) was an American activist and civil servant. She was born in 1898 in Danville, Kentucky to Frank L. Williams and Fannie (Miller) Williams but grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1919 and earned a master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago in 1931.
