Her beating helped galvanize the civil rights movement

She lay sprawled unconscious in the toll road, overwhelmed and gassed by Alabama speak troopers. A White officer with a billy membership stood over her.

The lady was once Amelia Boynton Robinson, and a effectively-known photo of that beautiful moment helped galvanize the civil rights movement. It was once taken in the course of the “Bloody Sunday” march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965.

That attack by White officers in opposition to quiet Black demonstrators disquieted the nation and led to the passage of the Balloting Rights Act. It also revealed the toughness of Robinson, dubbed “the matriarch of the balloting rights movement.”

“I wasn’t attempting to search out notoriety,” Robinson later acknowledged. “But when that’s what it took, I didn’t care how many licks I got. It handsome made me even more sure to wrestle for our cause.”

Robinson had been combating for Black balloting rights prolonged sooner than Selma. As far again as the 1930s, she was once registering Black voters in Alabama – a intrepid endeavor that can perchance well perchance relish price Robinson her life in the Jim Crow South. In 1964, she grew to turn into the first African American lady to speed for Congress in Alabama.

President Obama honored her half of a century later when he clutched her hand – she was once outmoded by then, and in a wheelchair – as they crossed the Selma bridge in March 2015 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Robinson died five months later at age 104.

“She was once as solid, as hopeful, and as indomitable of spirit — as quintessentially American — as I’m sure she was once that day 50 years ago,” Obama acknowledged at her loss of life. “To honor the legacy of an American hero admire Amelia Boynton requires handiest that we practice her instance — that every of us wrestle to present protection to each person’s true to vote.”

—Faith Karimi, CNNPhoto: Jacquelyn Martin / Related Press

James Armistead’s life would gather a sizable movie.

Under Lafayette, the French general who helped the American colonists wrestle for their freedom, he infiltrated the British military as a look reach the end of the Modern War.

He once reported to Benedict Arnold, the traitorous colonist who betrayed his troops to wrestle for the British. And he equipped main intelligence that helped defeat the British and end the battle.

Armistead was once a slave in Virginia in 1781 when he got permission from his owner, who helped provide the Continental Navy, to affix the battle effort. Lafayette dispatched him as a look, posing as a runaway slave, and he joined British forces in Virginia who valued his recordsdata of the native terrain.

Once he’d received their belief, Armistead moved from facet to facet between the two armies’ camps, feeding fallacious recordsdata to the British while secretly documenting their methods and relaying them to Lafayette.

His critical intel detailed British general Charles Cornwallis’ plans to scramble hundreds of troops from Portsmouth to Yorktown. Armed with this recordsdata, Lafayette alerted George Washington, and they space up a blockade around Yorktown which led to Cornwallis’ resign.

Virginia lawmakers, after lobbying by Lafayette, granted Armistead his freedom in 1787. His owner, William Armistead, was once paid £250.

Armistead married, raised a household and spent the rest of his life as a free man on his dangle Virginia farm. He added Lafayette to his title as a token of gratitude to the French general.*Some sources list his start year as 1760 and his loss of life year as 1832.

—Faith Karimi, CNNPhoto: Corbis through Getty Photography

Cycling is seen mostly as a White sport. But one in every of the quickest males ever to speed on two wheels was once Marshall Walter “Necessary” Taylor, an American who dominated sprint cycling in the slack 1800s and early 1900s.

A vastly talented rider, Taylor won the first beginner speed he entered, at 14. He grew to turn into educated four years later and persevered profitable races, most of them sprints around oval tracks at Madison Sq. Backyard and other arenas in the jap US.

Soon Taylor was once competing in races across Europe and Australia, turning into the 2d Black athlete to rob an global championship in any sport.

He did all this while combating bitter racial prejudice – in most cases from White cyclists who refused to compete in opposition to him or tried to harm him in the course of races. One rival, after shedding to Taylor in Boston, attacked him and choked him unconscious.

“In most of my races I no longer handiest struggled for victory but also for my very life and limb,” Taylor wrote in his autobiography.

But this didn’t pause him from setting world recordsdata, drawing sizable crowds and turning into perchance the first Black celeb athlete.

—Brandon Griggs, CNNPhoto: Library of Congress / Getty Photography

Dorothy High was once in most cases the handiest lady in the room. She made it her life’s work to interchange that, combating battles in opposition to both sexism and racism to turn into, as President Obama called her, the “godmother” of the civil rights movement.

High felt the sting of racism at an early age. She was once licensed to Unusual York’s Barnard College in 1929 but realized there wasn’t a space for her because of the college had already stuffed its quota of two Black students per year.

In its place she enrolled at NYU and earned a master’s in tutorial psychology. This led to a profession as a social worker in Unusual York and Washington, where she helped lead the YWCA and the United Christian Childhood Movement.

In 1958, High grew to turn into president of the National Council of Negro Females, a place she held for more than 40 years. In that unbiased she fought tirelessly for desegregation, affordable housing, criminal justice reform and other causes.

By the 1960s, High had turn into one in every of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s key advisers. Historians whine that as an organizer of the March on Washington, she was once the handiest lady activist on the audio system’ platform in the course of King’s “I Win a Dream’’ speech.

Historians whine her contributions to the civil rights movement were misplaced sight of at the time thanks to her sex. But by the time of her loss of life in 2010, High had taken her place among the movement’s towering figures.

“She was once in actuality a pioneer, and he or she must be remembered as one in every of these intrepid and intrepid souls that in no map gave up,” Procure. John Lewis once acknowledged. “She was once a feminist and a main spokesperson for the rights of ladies prolonged sooner than there was once a ladies’s movement.”

—Nicole Chavez, CNNPhoto: Bettmann Archive/Getty Photography

The son of two extinct slaves, Garrett Morgan had diminutive more than a grade-college education.

But that didn’t pause the Ohio man from turning into an inventor with a rare gift for designing machines that saved folks’s lives – including an early model of the internet page visitors gentle.

As a baby Morgan got a job repairing sewing machines, which led him to his first invention – a revamped sewing machine – and his first entrepreneurial challenge: his dangle repair industry.

Soon he was once inventing other products, including a hair-straightener for African Americans.
In 1916, he patented a “safety hood,” a deepest respiratory gadget that safe miners and firefighters from smoke and tainted gases. It grew to turn into the precursor of the fuel masks aged by infantrymen in the course of WWI.

To steer sure of racist resistance to his product, Morgan hired a white actor to pose as the inventor while he wore the hood in the course of presentations to doable investors.

Later, after witnessing a automobile and buggy atomize, Morgan was once impressed to construct a internet page visitors gentle that had three indicators: “pause,” “scramble,” and “pause in all directions,” to permit pedestrians to safely infamous the avenue.

It also had a warning gentle – now as of late’s yellow gentle – to warn drivers they would shortly must pause. His internet page visitors gentle was once patented in 1923 and Morgan at remaining bought its form for $40,000 to Long-established Electric.

His legacy can even be seen as of late at intersections across the country and the world.

—Alaa Elassar, CNNPhoto: Related Press