1. Frederick Douglass
Abolitionist, gifted orator, and adviser to President Lincoln. Fun fact: He was born Frederick Bailey. “Douglass,” which he adopted after he escaped from bondage and settled in Massachusetts, is taken from a character in Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lady of the Lake.”
2. Martin Luther King Jr.
Not-so-fun fact: As a child, he was recruited to appear onstage, dressed in a slave costume, for the gala premiere in Atlanta of Gone With the Wind.
3. Barack Obama
You know that if you became the first African American president in U.S. history but still finished only third on this list, those other two guys must really be giants.
4. W.E.B. Du Bois
Sociologist, writer, and champion of civil rights—a public intellectual par excellence. Check out these chillingly relevant words, which Du Bois issued in 1905: “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
5. Thurgood Marshall
The first Black justice to serve on the Supreme Court. An absolute hero of American jurisprudence. If only he’d stayed on the court until he died—one week into Bill Clinton’s presidency—most Americans would still have no idea who this Clarence Thomas guy was.
6. Harriet Tubman
A life of almost impossible to imagine courage. Tubman traveled back and forth between North and South to lead dozens of people out of bondage. And then she was a Union spy!
7. Dolores Huerta
An American labor leader and a co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association. Been through countless struggles—and she’s still at it, at 96.
T-8. A. Philip Randolph
He organized and went on to represent the first African American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He had the ear of presidents. He was co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Enough for you?
T-8. Booker T. Washington
For years the more accommodationist Washington was seen as Du Bois’s less radical and threatening antipode, which he certainly was. But the leader of the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University—who was also a gifted writer and orator—had a massive following in his day.
T-8. Malcolm X
The famed Black nationalist leader. Malcolm Little had plenty of reasons to hate America, but by 1964, after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he’d begun to turn the other cheek. The next year, members of the Nation of Islam assassinated him.
T-11. Muhammad Ali
The rare athlete who transcended sports to become a cultural icon. As beloved as Ali became, it’s worth remembering that much of mainstream white society hated him into the 1970s for telling certain uncomforting truths, like: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me a n-----.”
T-11. Louis Armstrong
By the time he was 15, he’d been arrested for a firing a gun into the air and been stabbed by a prostitute. Ten years later, he was the most celebrated jazz trumpeter in the country.
T-11. Jackie Robinson
To understand the cultural impact of his breaking the color barrier in 1947 with the Dodgers, you have to understand that baseball was everything back then. The NFL barely mattered. Although football, too, considered wooing Robinson, a star UCLA running back, to break its color line.
T-11. Sitting Bull
The famed Lakota leader was the spiritual head of the group of tribes who defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Alternately feared and revered, he was killed in 1890 by Indian agency police under orders of the government.