Born in 1925, by the time he was 28 years of age, Medgar Evers had lost a friend to a lynch mob, had been turned away from a voting place by armed white men, and had been denied admission to a Mississippi law school because of his color.

One of the most influential religious leaders of the 20th Century, Rabbi Abraham Heschel spoke to both Jews and Christians. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1907, he pursued a doctorate in Germany and received a liberal rabbinic ordination at the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums.

For the Rev. James Lawson, the civil rights activity of the 1960’s was not just a political movement but “a moment in history when God saw fit to call America back from the depths of moral depravity and onto His path of righteousness.”

Born William Edward Burghardt DuBois on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His father was an itinerant laborer, his mother a domestic worker. Two years after he was born, his father left the family. Raised by his mother, he spent his entire youth in that small New England town.