Rosa Parks

Born as Rosa Louise McCauley, Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala.

1955 On Dec. 1 in Montgomery, Ala., she refuses to go to the back of the bus and is
arrested, igniting bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.
1956 Boycott ends on Dec. 21, after U.S. Supreme Court rules bus segregation is
unconstitutional
1957 Moves to Michigan to escape harassment
1996 Receives Presidential Medal of Freedom
1999 Receives Congressional Gold Medal
Her simple act of protest galvanized America's civil rights revolution
By Rita Dove
How she sat there, the time right inside a place so wrong it was ready.
--From "Rosa," in On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove
One December evening, a woman left work and boarded a bus for home. She was
tired; her feet ached. But this was Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and as the bus became
crowded, the woman, a black woman, was ordered to give up her seat to a white
passenger. When she remained seated, that simple decision eventually led to the
disintegration of institutionalized segregation in the South, ushering in a new era of the
civil rights movement.
Parks was 42 years old when she refused to give up her seat. She has insisted that her
feet were not aching; she was, by her own testimony, no more tired than usual. And
she did not plan her fateful act: "I did not get on the bus to get arrested," she has said.
"I got on the bus to go home."

Malcolm X
Malcolm Little, Muslim name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was born May 19, 1925, in
Omaha, Neb., U.S. and died Feb. 21, 1965 in New York, N.Y. He was a black militant
leader who articulated concepts of race pride and Black Nationalism in the early 1960s.
After his assassination, the widespread distribution of his life story--The Autobiography
of Malcolm X (1965)--made him an ideological hero, especially among black youth.
Growing up in Lansing, Mich., Malcolm saw his house burned down at the hands of the
white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Two years later his father was murdered, and
Malcolm's mother was subsequently placed in a mental institution. Malcolm spent the
following years in detention homes, and in his early teens he moved to Boston to live
with his sister. In 1946, while in prison for burglary, he was converted to the Black
Muslim faith (Nation of Islam); this sect professed the superiority of black people and
the inherent evil of whites. Released from prison in 1952, Malcolm went to Nation of
Islam headquarters in Chicago, met the sect's leader, Elijah Muhammad, and embraced
its rigorous asceticism. He changed his last name to "X," a custom among Nation of
Islam followers who considered their family names to have originated with white
slaveholders.
Malcolm X was sent on speaking tours around the country and soon became the most
effective speaker and organizer for the Nation of Islam. He founded many new
mosques and greatly increased the movement's membership. In 1961 he founded
Muhammad Speaks, the official publication of the movement. He was eventually
assigned to be minister of the important Mosque Number Seven in New York City's
Harlem area.
Speaking with bitter eloquence against the white exploitation of black people, Malcolm
developed a brilliant platform style, which soon won him a large and dedicated
following. He derided the civil-rights movement and rejected both integration and racial
equality, calling instead for black separatism, black pride, and black self-dependence.
Because he advocated the use of violence (for self-protection) and appeared to many to
be a fanatic, his leadership was rejected by most civil-rights leaders, who emphasized
nonviolent resistance to racial injustice.
Malcolm X described the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Nov. 22, 1963) as
a "case of chickens coming home to roost"--an instance of the kind of violence that
whites had long used against blacks. Malcolm's success had by this time aroused
jealousy within the Black Muslim hierarchy, and, in response to his comments on the
Kennedy assassination, Elijah Muhammad suspended Malcolm from the movement. In
March 1964 Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and announced the formation of his own
religious organization. As a result of a pilgrimage he took to Mecca in April 1964, he
modified his views of black separatism, declaring that he no longer believed whites to
be innately evil and acknowledging his vision of the possibility of world brotherhood. In
October 1964 he reaffirmed his conversion to orthodox Islam.
Growing hostility between Malcolm's followers and the rival Black Muslims manifested
itself in violence and threats against his life. He was shot to death at a rally of his
followers at a Harlem ballroom. Three Black Muslims were convicted of the murder.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X was written by Alex Haley after he had conducted
numerous interviews with Malcolm X shortly before the latter's death. The book was
immediately recognized as a classic of black American autobiography.

Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas K. Gandhi was born in 1869 to Hindu parents in the state of Gujarat in
Western India. He entered an arranged marriage with Kasturbai Makanji when both
were 13 years old. His family later sent him to London to study law, and in 1891 he was
admitted to the Inner Temple, and called to the bar. In Southern Africa he worked
ceaselessly to improve the rights of the immigrant Indians. It was there that he
developed his creed of passive resistance against injustice, satyagraha, meaning truth
force, and was frequently jailed as a result of the protests that he led. Before he
returned to India with his wife and children in 1915, he had radically changed the lives
of Indians living in Southern Africa.
Back in India, it was not long before he was taking the lead in the long struggle for
independence from Britain. He never wavered in his unshakable belief in nonviolent
protest and religious tolerance. When Muslim and Hindu compatriots committed acts of
violence, whether against the British who ruled India, or against each other, he fasted
until the fighting ceased. Independence, when it came in 1947, was not a military
victory, but a triumph of human will. To Gandhi's despair, however, the country was
partitioned into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The last two months of his life were
spent trying to end the appalling violence which ensued, leading him to fast to the brink
of death, an act which finally quelled the riots. In January 1948, at the age of 79, an
assassin killed him as he walked through a crowed garden in New Delhi to take evening
prayers

David Ben Gurion

Born in 1886, Died in 1973. Israeli statesman. David Ben Gurion was born in
Poland as David Gr?n. He settled in Palestine in 1906. He was an active Zionist and
during World War I helped to organize the Jewish Legion in support of the British. In
the struggle to found an independent Jewish state in Palestine he followed a policy of
cooperation with the British during World War II. After the war, however, he led the
political struggle against them and authorized sabotage activities. A founder and leader
of the Labor (Mapai) party and an early leader of the Histadrut, he was the first (1948
53) prime minister of the newly created state of Israel. In 1955 he returned to the
cabinet as defense minister under Moshe Sharett and later that year again became
prime minister, reflecting a shift in Israeli policy toward confrontation with Israel's
hostile Arab neighbors. Amid growing controversy he resigned in Feb., 1961, but was
quickly returned to office. He again resigned in June, 1963. In retirement Ben-Gurion
continued to be politically active, forming a splinter party from the dominant Labor
party in 1965. A selection of his writings was published as Rebirth and Destiny of Israel
(1954); he also wrote Israel: Years of Challenge (1965), Israel's Security (1960), The
Jews in their Land (1966), Memoirs (1970), Israel: A Personal History (1971), and My
Talks with the Arabs (1973).