Modern histories of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and ‘60s frequently place figures
like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks front-and-center, while neglecting the hundreds
of thousands of everyday people who turned the fight for civil rights into full-blown movements for civil rights.
By resisting, protesting and boycotting vestiges of white supremacy, black Americans across the nation slowly uprooted many of the discriminatory structures that prevented, and continue to prevent, black Americans from realizing the relative prosperity enjoyed by their white counterparts. Despite playing an integral role, most of the activists who made up the movement remain historically anonymous, deemed too obscure, insignificant or irrelevant to warrant their own histories.