While the acts of these unsung heroes of black history may not have caught national media attention, they still made an impact on the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people.
Bayard Rustin
Rustin was one of the main organizers of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and without him, Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have had the platform he did (literally and figuratively) to speak from. The reason Rustin didn’t get as much attention as he should have is that he was openly gay, and was constantly dealing with the struggles of being in two minority groups at the time — the black community and the gay community
Robert Smalls
Smalls was born into slavery in South Carolina, and worked mostly on ships. He taught himself to read and in 1862, Smalls snuck his family aboard the “Planter,”— a Confederate steamer — raised the Confederate flag and sailed it past other Confederate ships on its way to the Union to share Confederate secrets. Smalls later went on to serve on the South Carolina Senate and the U.S. Congress.
Soledad Brothers
The Soledad Brothers — George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette — helped show the world how authority figures were creating an atmosphere much like slavery inside prisons. The brothers led a hunger strike and uprising in San Quentin to bring attention to the inhumane treatment of inmates that had caused the death of several of their black fellow prisoners.
Susie King Taylor
Taylor is the only African-American woman who is confirmed to have published a wartime memoir about the Civil War. Born into slavery, Taylor taught herself to read and when she escaped to St. Simon’s Island in Georgia, she founded a school. Taylor’s husband served in the Union Army, and she was both a nurse and laundress to the Union forces
John Huggins and Bunchy Carter
Otherwise known as the Black Panthers, Huggins and Carter worked to fight the white supremacist acts of the Los Angeles Police Department in the black neighborhoods of L.A. The two worked with Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins and other more-known figures to fight injustices against black communities. The two men were assassinated by FBI operatives in 1969 while they were students in University of California, Los Angeles’ High Potential Program. A memorial is held for them each year on the UCLA campus.
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton
After the U.S. Civil War, most white landowners refused to sell land to blacks at fair prices. A Tennessee native and former slave, Singleton, along with his partner Columbus Johnson, founded settlements in Kansas and helped hundreds of out-of-home black Tennesseans move to the Midwest. He became known as the “Father of the Exodus” for his work in the Exoduster Movement of 1879.
