This piece first appeared in our February 2021 Magazine.
The civil rights movement in Alabama was the result of countless hardworking people coming together. Their work culminated in landmark Supreme Court cases and encouraged others to believe that change is possible. This is not an exhaustive list of figures from this movement. For more information you can visit blackpast.org and the King Institute.
Fred Gray
Fred Gray is the attorney who represented major figures of the civil right movement including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama and opened his law office there in 1954. He is most known for his legal work on the Montgomery bus boycott, but he also went before the Supreme Court in Gomillion v. Lightfoot where he argued against the boundaries drawn for the Tuskegee city limits created after African Americans in the city began registering to vote. This case set a precedent against gerrymandering by race.
Mary Fair Burkes
Mary Fair Burkes founded the Women’s Political Council (WPC) in Montgomery, Alabama in 1949. She was also head of the English department at Alabama State College. The organization sought to increase the political activity of Black women in Montgomery and Burkes eventually found herself at the core of the Montgomery bus boycott with Jo Anne Robinson and Rosa Parks. Burks and the WPC were instrumental in ending segregation on city buses by meeting consistently with the mayor of Montgomery for years to achieve their goals.
Jo Anne Robinson
Jo Anne Robinson was a cofounder of the WPC and friend of Mary Burkes. She was one of many, including Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, who had experiences of being removed from buses or forced to move to the back or stand. Robinson was one of the figures who headed the bus boycott by creating flyers for the first boycott of just one day and then organizing the carpool that assisted in successfully extending the boycott. She wrote a memoir on her life “The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson.”
E.D. Nixon
E.D. Nixon was a leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which also helped lead the Montgomery busy boycotts. He was also a union organizer, encouraged to do so after becoming acquainted with socialist labor organizer A. Phillip Randolph. Nixon also served as state president of the NAACP. He was an advocate for the inclusion of low-income Black people in the activism of the organizations he was part of. He also worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and encouraged him to be president of the MIA.
Fred L. Shuttlesworth
Fred Shuttlesworth was a prominent leader during the civil rights movement. He served as reverend of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham and founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and Southern Christian Leadership Conferences (SCLC). He was one of the leaders of the Birmingham Campaign which sought to put economic pressure on Birmingham businesses to end segregation. He also helped organize the Freedom Riders’ ride into Birmingham. Shuttlesworth was a close associate of King’s and was behind countless efforts to end segregation.
