Standing Up: Civil Rights Heroes Quiz

Answer: Thurgood Marshall

Marshall (1908-1993), a native Marylander, had to leave the state to get his law degree: the University of Maryland Law School admitted only white students at the time. Fittingly, his first big civil-rights case - Murray v. Pearson in 1936 - challenged the segregation policy at that very law school. Since the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, U.S. law had allowed racial segregation as long as the facilities were "separate but equal." Marshall persuaded the Maryland Court of Appeals that the law-school options for black Marylanders were far inferior than those set aside for whites, and the university was forced to open its admission policies. The 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was even more successful, resulting in the desegregation of public schools nationwide. Including Brown v. Board, Marshall argued some 32 cases before the Supreme Court, and won 29 of them.

In 1965, Marshall became the first black U.S. Solicitor General, and two years later he was sitting on the Supreme Court; in both cases he was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, who had worked hard to get the landmark Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. Widely revered for his thoughtful and passionate defenses of civil rights both on and off the bench, he is the namesake for several schools and other buildings, including the Baltimore-Washington airport.

Answer: Mamie Till-Mobley

Mamie Till-Mobley (1921-2003) raised Emmett Till, her only child, in Chicago, but they still had family in Mississippi and often visited in the summers. That's why Emmett was there in the summer of 1955, having begged his mother to let him get on a train and visit his cousins. There, a couple of white men took offense to the way that Emmett had supposedly flirted with a white woman in her shop. Days later, they came by night to Emmett's great-uncle's home, kidnapped the boy at the point of a gun, and tortured him horribly before murdering him. Emmett's body was found in the river a few days later.

Mamie Till-Mobley moved heaven and earth to have her son's body returned to Chicago; there, she insisted on an open-casket funeral and invited news photographers. The furor couldn't stop Emmett's murderers from being acquitted by an all-white jury, but it did (eventually) spell the end of lynchings with impunity.

Answer: Medgar Evers

Born in 1926, Evers was a World War II veteran and a college graduate (his degree, in business administration, was from Alcorn College). As an insurance salesman in the early 1950s, he became increasingly involved in civil-rights efforts, starting with a boycott against gas stations that closed their restrooms to black customers. He applied to law school at the University of Mississippi - then an all-white institution - in 1954, and filed one of many school-desegregation lawsuits of the time. Soon he was working on behalf of the NAACP, working against injustice in many forms - from voter suppression to lynching.

As the years passed and Evers' stature grew, his enemies became more and more violent. A white man who was opposed to the civil rights movement shot Evers in the back in his own driveway, just a month after the house had been firebombed. The murder was followed by a miscarriage of justice; despite compelling evidence against the killer, two all-white juries failed to reach a verdict. (They were, perhaps, influenced by the fact that the governor of the state showed up at trial and shook the murderer's hand.) In the years that followed, Evers was memorialized in songs, poems, and movies. The city of Jackson, Mississippi, renamed the airport in his honor in 2004; his widow christened a US Navy cargo ship in his honor in 2011. Evers's killer was finally convicted in 1994, and died in prison seven years later.

Answer: Rosa Parks

Parks (1913-2005), then forty-two, was returning home from her work as a department-store seamstress. Though some commentators assumed that her resistance stemmed from simple fatigue, Parks was involved with the NAACP, and wrote in her autobiography that "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Her arrest inspired black citizens of Montgomery to boycott the public bus system, at great inconvenience and sacrifice, for 381 days until the buses were integrated.

In the meantime, Parks was fired and she faced prosecution for breaking city law. (Eventually, the law was found unconstitutional while she was appealing her conviction.) The Montgomery Bus Boycott was an early success of the civil-rights movement, and a vivid demonstration of the power of nonviolence and civil disobedience.

Answer: James Farmer

CORE teams typically included both black and white activists; the difference in the way that the two groups were treated could be the basis for a change of heart, a change of regulation, or a court ruling. The Freedom Ride followed a similar strategy: CORE activists, some black, some white, some men, some women, rode interstate buses through the South. The Supreme Court had ruled that interstate transport could not be segregated, and CORE meant to test compliance with this policy. In many jurisdictions, bus companies and local officials temporarily removed the illegal signage, or suspended enforcement of their policies. In Alabama, however, angry white mobs pulled the Freedom Riders off their bus and beat them horribly, stopping just short of murder. A new group of Riders had to come in from Nashville to finish their Ride.

Farmer (1920-1999) was CORE's national director at the time, and participated in the Freedom Ride part of the way. (He had to leave them before they entered Alabama due to the death of his father.) The Ride he helped organize, as well as the bravery of all the riders and the brutality of their opponents, cast a harsh light on the reality of segregation in the South, and helped lead to federal intervention and large-scale integration.

He served Richard Nixon as an assistant Cabinet secretary from 1969 to 1970.

Answer: Bayard Rustin

Rustin (1912-1987) was a tremendously energetic man, devoted to many aspects of civil rights. While he's most famous for his contributions to the black civil rights movement, he also worked to protect the rights of Japanese Americans during World War II; to strengthen workers' rights and unions; and to promote gay rights. His own conviction for homosexual activity, in 1953, became a weapon in the hands of segregationists, as did his membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s. As a result, Rustin's public role in the civil-rights movement was often minimized as a public-relations strategy.

Rustin's commitment to non-violence was crucial in the early shaping of the movement. In 1947, after spending almost a month doing hard labor on a chain gang for sitting in the "white" section of an interstate bus, he traveled to India and to Ghana to study strategies for nonviolent civil disobedience. He drew on this experience to advise Martin Luther King in the conduct of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and to help organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His crowning victory was, perhaps, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which he planned and organized.

Answer: Diane Nash

Inspired by sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nashville student activists targeted the lunch counters at downtown stores - where black customers were permitted to shop, but not to eat. Simultaneously, a boycott of the stores threatened the merchants' bottom lines. The first few sit-ins went smoothly - despite taunts and heckling from white segregationists - but, during the fourth sit-in, many of the peaceful demonstrators were attacked as they sat in their seats. The police arrested 81 demonstrators, including Nash (born 1938), but none of their attackers. A few months later, after more segregationist violence, the Nashville lunch counters were desegregated.

As an emerging student leader, Nash soon pursued a much wider range of actions. When the Freedom Ride stalled in 1961 - because of the violence inflicted on the riders in Alabama - Nash organized a group of students from Nashville to replace them, at great personal risk. As she later noted, if they hadn't continued the Ride, "the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence." She continued running Freedom Rides, and then worked on voter registration drives in the South. "We will not stop," she said of the Freedom Rides. "There is only one outcome."

Answer: James Meredith

Despite violent riots (in which two people, one a French journalist, were killed) and systematic ostracism by his peers, Meredith (born in 1933) earned his degree in political science from the formerly all-white institution in 1963. He later continued on to law school at Columbia, in New York.

In 1966, he led the March Against Fear from Tennessee through Mississippi, inspiring and encouraging voter-registration efforts along the way. Shot on his march by an angry segregationist, Meredith nevertheless rejoined the marchers by the end, setting a powerful example of personal bravery.

Answer: John Lewis

Lewis, born in 1940, was a major player in the same Nashville sit-ins as Diane Nash. Later that year, he joined the Freedom Ride from Washington, DC to New Orleans; he was the first of the Riders to be violently assaulted by segregationists. (He was beaten after entering a designated "white" waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina.) In Alabama, the bus was firebombed, and more beatings followed; it was sheer luck that none of the Riders was killed.

Lewis became the chairman of SNCC in 1963; he was the youngest speaker at that year's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and helped coordinate the Freedom Summer voter-registration effort of 1964. On March 7 of the next year, he helped lead a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in protest of the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson at the hands of state troopers during a previous march. When they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the nonviolent marchers were met by more state troopers, who brutally attacked them; Lewis's own skull was fractured with a nightstick. The horrific images shocked the nation and the world and marked a turning point in the civil rights movement. Segregation was exposed not as a way of life, but as a means of terrorism and death.

Lewis began his service in Congress in 1987, as a Democratic congressman from Georgia. Twenty-five years later, he was still serving; he has been called "the conscience of Congress" for his continuing moral leadership and commitment to freedom.

Answer: Martin Luther King, Jr.

King (1929-1968) was a Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama when Rosa Parks's civil disobedience catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A leader of that effort, King soon became the most prominent public face of the civil-rights movement as a whole. A handsome man with thrilling oratorical skills, a devout Christian with biblically inspired eloquence, he was perfectly suited to win the moral argument. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written to white ministers while he was imprisoned for civil disobedience in 1963, is widely read in American schools; his "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that same year as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, is perhaps the most famous single speech in modern American history.

In the late 1960s, King also spoke out against the Vietnam War and against poverty in America - but his campaigns were cut short by his murder on April 4, 1968. Riots followed, in a tragic epilogue to a life devoted to nonviolence.