FIGURES BLAZED TRAILS IN U.S.
clopedia Africana. He vigorously opposed discrimination in every form, from colonialism to lynching, and as a historian he insisted that blacks were not responsible for the failings of post-civil War Reconstruction in the South. The day after he died at 95, he was honored with a moment of silence during the civil rights movement’s March on Washington.
1883 - 1966 Samuel Battle Police officer
A great-grandson of a Revolutionary War soldier and a son of former slaves, Samuel Jesse Battle broke ground in 1911 as the first person appointed to New York City’s combined 10,000-member police force after the city was consolidated in 1898. He became the first black sergeant, first black lieutenant and first black parole commissioner. He started as a houseboy at an upstate New York hotel, then worked as a Red Cap at Grand Central Terminal. Initially rejected by police surgeons after he was given a medical evaluation, he retook the test and passed it after prominent blacks protested to city officials. As a policeman, he was given the silent treatment by fellow officers until one day he dashed into a crowd of rioters to rescue a white officer. “The white officers worked in an all-negro neighborhood, practically, and they needed me as much as I needed them and sometimes more,” Battle recalled. In his book “One Righteous Man,” Arthur Browne quoted Battle on an uncompromising career: “I would rather have honesty and character than prestige and wealth. I can walk and ride the streets of this city, hold my head up, look all men in the face.” News of his death at 83 led The Times’ obituary page.
1908 - 1993 Thurgood Marshall Supreme Court justice
He was a grandson of a slave, a son of a railroad porter and a teacher. He was born Thoroughgood, and he would live up to his name, although he had disliked having to spell it and so adopted an abbreviated version in the second grade. His goal was to practice law, although he defied it as a college sophomore by joining a sit-in against segregation at a local movie theater. As founder and executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc., he argued the 1954 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that delivering an education to blacks separately from whites could never be accomplished equally. President John F. Kennedy named him to the federal bench. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him solicitor general and in 1967 nominated him to be the first black justice on the Supreme Court. His credo was straightforward: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” He would serve for 24 years, and, when he died at 84, his obituary in The Times was unequivocal in assessing his impact as a “pillar of the civil rights revolution” and “architect of the legal strategy that ended the era of official segregation.”
1913 - 2005 Rosa Parks Protester
It took five days for the news to reach The Times, but, finally, on Dec. 6, 1955, an Associated Press dispatch from Montgomery, Ala., reported that a Mrs. Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old department store seamstress, had been fined $14 in Police Court for disregarding a driver’s order to obey a municipal segregation ordinance and give up her seat to a white passenger. She was by no means the first black to challenge the separation of the races in public transportation or accommodations. (In 1854, a 24-year-old teacher, Elizabeth Jennings, who had been ejected from a whites-only Third Avenue trolley in Manhattan, challenged the trolley company’s segregation policy and won; she apparently did not merit an obituary in The Times.) But Parks’ resistance touched off a bus boycott by blacks and elevated her into the pantheon of fighters for civil rights. In 2013, eight years after she died at 92, she was immortalized as the first black woman to be honored with a lifesize statue in the United States Capitol. Her act of defiance, The Times wrote, grew into “a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.” She explained: “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more.”
1919 - 1972 Jackie Robinson Baseball pioneer
“For sociological impact,” Dave Anderson wrote in Robinson’s Times obituary, “Jack Roosevelt Robinson was perhaps America’s most significant athlete.” When the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947, Robinson integrated baseball more than a year before President Harry Truman banned segregation in the armed forces, and years before the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Linda Brown’s separate education in Topeka, Kansas, was unequal. “In a fundamental way,” the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson said, “that experiment helped lay the predicate for the Supreme Court decision.” The experiment also vindicated the “great man” theory of history. In Robinson, who was 53 when he died, the Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey found the gentle giant he was looking for to represent his race on the field and off: “I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back!” Rickey said. Within less than a half-century, his contribution had been taken for granted. Asked about Jackie Robinson in 1985, the St. Louis Cardinals rookie Vince Coleman replied: “I don’t know nothin’ about him.”
1924 - 2005 Shirley Chisholm Congresswoman
“I am an historical person at this point,” Chisholm said in 1969 after she was sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, “and I’m very much aware of it.” An outspoken, steely educator turned politician from Brooklyn, Chisholm promised fireworks and delivered as the first black woman to serve in Congress and the first to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. She famously declared herself “unbought and unbossed,” defeated a House candidate endorsed by the Democratic organization and immediately challenged the seniority system in a legislative body that she pronounced unrepresentative because, she said, “it is ruled by a small group of old men.” Old white men, in fact. Her mother was a seamstress, her father a factory worker. She became a teacher, then ran for the New York state Assembly, served seven terms in the House and entered the 1972 presidential primaries as a “catalyst for change.” Fearless, she visited the segregationist George W. Wallace after he was wounded in an assassination attempt. “He said to me, ‘What are your people going to say?’ ” she recalled. “I said: ‘I know what they’re going to say. But I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.’” Retiring well before she died at 80, she insisted that she did not want to be remembered as the nation’s first black anything. “I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts,” she said. “That’s how I’d like to be remembered.
1929 - 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. Civil rights leader
Born Michael King, he sang with the church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of “Gone With the Wind.” But racial slights, a passion to “serve humanity” and a respect for the power of social protest transformed him into a Baptist minister and an advocate for racial justice, which he advanced by applying his Christian principles to civil disobedience. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and expanded his agenda to denouncing the war in Vietnam and organizing a Poor People’s Campaign. At the age of only 39, he was gunned down in Memphis — an assassination that sparked riots across the country. Within days, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which barred discrimination in housing. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating a national holiday in his honor. To millions of black Americans, The Times wrote, he was “the prophet of their crusade for racial equality. He was their voice of anguish, their eloquence in humiliation, their battle cry for human dignity. He forged for them the weapons of nonviolence that withstood and blunted the ferocity of segregation.”
1940-2015 Julian Bond Legislator
A great-grandson of a slave, Bond was a son of a college president, but by 1960 he still was not legally allowed to eat at the lunch counter of Atlanta’s City Hall cafeteria in the racially segregated South. His legacy to the civil rights struggle went beyond the sit-in there that got him arrested and the early belligerence of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where, as one of its original leaders and chief spokesman, he deftly guided the mainstream white news media to the egregious examples of antiblack violence and discrimination. He gradually recognized the potential for political power, registering black voters; founding, with Morris Dees, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization; serving for two decades in the Georgia General Assembly; and becoming the chairman of the NAACP. When he died at 75, The Times’ obituary called him “a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights.”