Donated her townhouse to the Harriet Tubman Crusaders, an African-American branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Boston, as a residence for African-American women who were excluded from the city’s college dormitories and respectable rooming houses.
History teacher Clara Luper (1923–2011) and the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City that she advised initiated some of the first sit-ins in the civil rights movement, beginning in 1958.
Benjamin Roberts, an African American, sued the city of Boston in 1848 stating that his daughter Sarah Roberts was unlawfully refused entrance to five schools between her home and the Smith School.
Assistant editor of The Guardian, a newspaper dedicated to civil rights
A former director of the Museum of African American History, Ruth Batson (1921-2003) was chairperson of the education committee of Boston NAACP that led the fight in the early 1960s against segregation in the Boston Public Schools.
Virginia Isaacs Trotter (1842-1919) managed her family’s real estate in Hyde Park and supported her son Monroe, who established the Boston Guardian. She was a leading voice in early civil rights.
Ellen Swepson Jackson (1935-2005) was the founding director of the Freedom House Institute of Schools and Education and the visionary behind Operation Exodus, a program that bussed inner-city students to less crowded schools.
NAACP organizer and founder of the Women’s Service Club
Co-founded Freedom House, Inc., a Boston nonprofit community-based organization dedicated to human rights and advocacy for African-Americans in Boston. Her leadership moved Freedom House into areas of urban renewal, minority employment, and educational equality for children as well as being a positive force for interracial cooperation
She joined the Nation of Islam in the mid-1950s where she helped to establish a mosque with a daycare center attached to it. In the early 1940s, she became the guardian of her half-brother Malcolm Little, who later changed his name to Malcolm X