Civil rights champions have diverse college journeys.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. may be the most recognized civil rights leader in U.S. history, but across many decades, numerous Black activists have changed the world through their efforts to end racial segregation, white supremacy, racial violence, and discrimination in housing, education and employment. They have led campaigns for anti-lynching legislation, constitutional protections, voting rights and criminal justice reform, and many became involved in the fight for civil rights during their college years — at Ivy League institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, and state and private schools. Here’s where 20 Black civil rights leaders went to college.
Martin Luther King Jr.
King spearheaded the American Civil Rights Movement, changing the course of history through nonviolent protest, powerful speeches and grassroots organizing. He rose to prominence leading the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted from December 1955 to December 1956 and garnered international attention. King also led mass demonstrations, sit-ins, jail-ins and legal action, helping pave the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He co-founded and served as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which fought for equality and voting rights. King articulated his theory of nonviolence in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. Later that same year, his “I Have A Dream” speech marked a turning point in the movement. At 35, King became the youngest man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at the age of 39.
College: Morehouse College in Georgia; Boston University School of Theology in Massachusetts; Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Born into slavery in Mississippi during the Civil War, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a sociologist, educator and investigative journalist who led an anti-lynching campaign, fought against segregation and for women’s suffrage, and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She co-owned and wrote for the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, facing constant threats for her anti-lynching commentaries. After a white mob ransacked her news office and destroyed her presses, Wells fled to New York. There, she founded the Negro Fellowship League, which housed and aided newly arrived migrants from the South during the Great Migration, and kept writing, publishing “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” and “The Red Record.” Wells-Barnett died in 1931 at the age of 68 and in 2020 was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding reporting on lynching.
College: Rust College in Mississippi; Fisk University in Tennessee
John Lewis
John Lewis participated in the first mass lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville in 1960 and became chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at age 23. He played a key role in the March on Washington in 1963 and voter registration efforts for the Freedom Summer project in 1964. Along with activist Hosea Williams, Lewis led the landmark 1965 march for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, known as “Bloody Sunday” after police attacked peaceful demonstrators with bullwhips and clubs. Lewis’ skull was fractured but he continued his activism through protests, legislation and by leading the Voter Education Project. “Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble” he wrote in 2018. Lewis represented Georgia as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020.
College: Fisk; American Baptist College in Tennessee
Mamie Till-Mobley
Mamie Till-Mobley became a force in the Civil Rights Movement after her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. Officials pushed for a quick burial but Till-Mobley brought her son’s mutilated body home to Chicago and insisted on an open casket, saying, “Let the people see what they did to my boy.” She allowed Jet magazine and newspapers to publish photographs of Emmett’s corpse, jolting the nation and helping to galvanize the movement. Emmett’s killers were wrongly acquitted, and his mother continually spoke out at racial justice rallies across the country until her death in 2003 at age 81. Her memoir, “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America,” was published posthumously and her activism inspired the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act of 2022.
College: Chicago State University in Illinois: Loyola College Chicago in Illinois
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers became involved in antisegregation efforts shortly after returning from World War II, when he was turned away from a local election by an armed white mob. He served as the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, organizing high-profile boycotts. Evers fought Jim Crow laws, played a pivotal role in efforts to have Black student James Meredith admitted to the University of Mississippi, and launched an investigation into Emmett Till’s murder. His assassination in 1963 “prompted (U.S.) President John F. Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill,” according to Medgar Evers College–CUNY. His murderer, a white supremacist, was sentenced in 1994. Evers’ wife, Myrlie, reflected on his life: “Medgar was a man who never wanted adoration, who never wanted to be in the limelight. He was a man who saw a job that needed to be done and he answered the call.”
College: Alcorn State University in Mississippi
Dorothy Height
Reflecting on Dorothy Height’s life of service, President Barack Obama called her “the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement.” She became an activist in high school, joining the anti-lynching campaigns of the 1920s. A social worker, Height directed the integration of all YWCA centers in the 1940s and campaigned for better conditions for Black domestic workers. She became president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1957, a role she held for 40 years. Height organized voter education in the North, voter registration in the South and scholarships for student civil rights workers. She played a key role in organizing the March on Washington in 1963 and established the YWCA’s Center for Racial Justice in 1965. Height was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003, on her 92nd birthday. She died in 2010 at 98.
Colleges: New York University; Columbia University in New York
Bernice King
Bernice King is a peace advocate, author, lawyer and CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change — known as The King Center — and the youngest child of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. She spearheaded the launch of Students with King, as well as the Beloved Community Leadership Academy, and NV365 Education & Training to teach the King philosophy of nonviolence, and established the Be A King Scholarship. King continues to fight for justice and democracy and refuses to let her father’s legacy be diluted, saying, “Don’t act like everyone loved my father. He was assassinated. A 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America. Most hated. Many who quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate, and may already hate, the authentic King.”
Colleges: Spelman College in Georgia; Emory University School of Law in Georgia
Gloria Richardson Dandridge
Gloria Richardson Dandridge stands at the center of an iconic image from the Civil Rights Movement, in the midst of a protest, bravely pushing aside a charging National Guard member’s bayonet. Richardson organized protests over housing, jobs and health care, and advocated for the right of Black people to defend themselves when attacked. Best known as the leader of the Cambridge Movement in Maryland, she led sit-ins to desegregate movie theaters, bowling alleys and restaurants. Richardson co-chaired the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, worked with the National Council for Negro Women and was onstage at the March on Washington as one of six women listed as “fighters for freedom.” Her activism put her “literally front and center in a high-stakes Black liberation campaign, and she’s being threatened. She’s got white supremacist terrorists threatening her,” her biographer, Joseph R. Fitzgerald, told NPR. Richardson died in 2021 at age 99.
College: Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering civil rights and racial injustice, and creator of The 1619 Project, which was published by The New York Times and retells U.S. history using a framework that places slavery, its consequences and ongoing legacy at the forefront. “We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured,” she writes. “But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right…” Born in 1976 in Waterloo, Iowa, Hannah-Jones established the Center for Journalism & Democracy at Howard University and co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. She was elected into the Society of American Historians in 2020.
Colleges: University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill; University of Notre Dame in Indiana
W.E.B. Du Bois
One of the most prominent Black intellectuals of his time, W.E.B. Du Bois campaigned against Jim Crow laws and for nationwide anti-lynching legislation. After facing racism as a student in the South, Du Bois saw a new world while studying in Germany in the early 1890s, recalling: “I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in. With me were white folk… who viewed the scene with me. They did not always pause to regard me as a curiosity, or something sub-human; I was just a man of the somewhat privileged student rank, with whom they were glad to meet…” The first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Massachusetts, his birth state, Du Bois played a critical role in developing African-American education. He helped found the NAACP and its magazine, The Crisis. Du Bois was also a historian, sociologist and author of numerous seminal books, including “The Souls of Black Folk.”
College: Fisk; Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany; Harvard
Joseph Lowery
Known as “the dean of the Civil Rights Movement,” Rev. Joseph Lowery co-founded the SCLC with Martin Luther King Jr. and led the organization for two decades. The Alabama native was a prominent leader in nonviolent protests, including the Montgomery bus boycott, and was jailed numerous times for his activism. He co-founded the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of advocacy groups, and over decades campaigned for voting rights and LGBTQ rights as well as against apartheid and the death penalty. He testified before a Senate judiciary committee in 1989: “By reserving the penalty of death for Black defendants, or for the poor, or for those convicted of killing white persons, we perpetrate the ugly legacy of slavery — teaching our children that some lives are inherently less precious than others.”
College: Paine College in Georgia; Wayne State University in Michigan
Jesse Jackson
A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Rev. Jesse Jackson began his activism during his college years in North Carolina, where he led protests to desegregate theaters, restaurants and libraries. He met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, when he traveled to Selma, Alabama, after Bloody Sunday and joined the SCLC. By 1966, Jackson was leading the Chicago chapter of SCLC’s economic arm, Operation Breadbasket, and later became its national director. He helped found the Chicago Freedom Movement to work for open housing and school desegregation. Jackson went on to establish Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition — now the Rainbow PUSH Coalition — and serve in the U.S. Senate. He ran unsuccessfully for president as a Democrat in 1984 and 1988, only the second Black person to seek the office after New Yorker Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.
Colleges: North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; Chicago Theological Seminary in Illinois
Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Carmichael was a key leader in the Black Power movement, after his 1966 speech at the University of California, Berkeley brought the phrase “Black power” — and a more direct approach to protest — to the forefront. A native of Trinidad, he succeeded John Lewis as leader of the SNCC in 1966 and became honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party in 1968. As a philosophy major at Howard, Carmichael joined the university’s Nonviolent Action Group, affiliated with the SNCC, and was active in civil rights campaigns from the Albany Movement to the New York hospital strikes. In addition to working against segregation in D.C., he was an original SNCC freedom rider of 1961. Then 19, Carmichael became the youngest person imprisoned for participating in the movement; he was jailed for 49 days for entering a “whites only” cafeteria in Mississippi. Carmichael was arrested for his activism so often, according to The New York Times, that he “lost count after 32.”
College: Howard
Sherrilyn Ifill
Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights attorney, nationally recognized voting rights expert, and the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at Howard Law School. Ifill served as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 2013 to 2022, dramatically increasing its staff, budget and endowment. Early in her career, she litigated voting rights cases for the LDF before spending two decades on faculty at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law. At Howard, Ifill is launching the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy, which will promote equality and justice and “train a generation of lawyers … equipped to utilize the 14th amendment as advocates,” she told The Guardian. Ifill has called for “a clear-eyed confrontation with the stubborn persistence of white supremacy and its ongoing threat to the promise of our new country.”
College: Vassar College in New York; New York University School of Law
Samuel L. Jackson
Before he played Uncle Sam in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show in 2025, before he was an award-winning actor and producer, Samuel L. Jackson was a civil rights crusader. Jackson grew up in the segregated South and got involved in protests and civil disobedience at Morehouse College. As part of a group demanding a Black studies program and governance reforms, Jackson and other students locked themselves in the administration building with Morehouse trustees in a 29-hour hostage standoff. Temporarily expelled, Jackson volunteered for the SNCC and joined the Black Power movement, working with Stokely Carmichael. “I was never a Black Panther,” Jackson said. “But the fact that you were alive during that period in America, you had to either be part of the problem or part of the solution. We chose to be part of the solution.” Across the decades, Jackson has used his platform as an actor to advocate for racial equality and criminal justice reform.
College: Morehouse
Ibram X. Kendi
Historian and scholar Ibram X. Kendi is the author of 16 books, including the international bestseller “How to Be An Antiracist” and “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Born in New York City in 1982, Kendi founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C., and the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. When he joined Howard University in early 2025 as director of the newly established Institute for Advanced Study, provost and chief academic officer Anthony K. Wutoh welcomed his “exceptional scholarship and unwavering commitment to social justice.” The center will focus on the global African diaspora, racism, technology and climate change. Kendi’s biography of Malcolm X for young readers, “Malcolm Lives!” is scheduled to be published in May 2025.
College: Florida A&M University; Temple University in Pennsylvania
Thurgood Marshall
Long before becoming the first Black justice appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall worked as an attorney to end racial segregation in schools. Studying at Howard, Marshall was encouraged to view the law as a means for social change, and he joined the NAACP as an attorney soon after graduating. He later led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and through the 1940s and ’50s won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His most famous was the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. “The process of democracy is one of change,” Marshall wrote. “Our laws are not frozen into immutable form; they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.” In 1967, he ascended to the Supreme Court, where he served for 24 years before retiring in 1991.
College: Lincoln University in Pennsylvania; Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C.
Ayo Tometi
Ayo Tometi, formerly Opal Tometi, co-founded the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Black Lives Matter global antiracism movement with Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Tometi launched the BLM social media channels and website, and is former executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, which advocates for racial, social and economic justice for U.S. immigrants. In addition to antiracism, her work focuses on unifying Black people globally. “Knowing that there is a community of people on every corner of this planet that believes in justice, that is willing to sacrifice, and that is willing to take a stand is the most heartening thing,” Tometi told Her Campus, a media platform that promotes women’s empowerment worldwide. She was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1984.
College:University of Arizona; Arizona State University
Al Sharpton
A minister and politician, Rev. Al Sharpton was ordained at the age of 9 and has been involved in nonviolent antiracism activism since his teens. At 17, he founded the National Youth Movement to build voter registration and job opportunities. In 1969, Jesse Jackson tapped the Brooklyn native to be youth director of the city’s chapter of Operation Breadbasket. Sharpton is founder and president of the National Action Network, which focuses on voting rights, corporate responsibility, youth leadership and criminal justice reform. “Jim Crow is old,” he said at the funeral of civil rights icon Rosa Parks. “The problem is that Jim Crow has sons. The one we’ve got to battle is James Crow, Jr., Esquire.” Sharpton ran for office several times, most recently in 2004, when he ran unsuccessfully for president as a Democrat.
College: CUNY–Brooklyn College in New York
Derrick Johnson
A lawyer and advocate for health care equity, voting rights and equitable education, Derrick Johnson is national president and CEO of the NAACP. Under his leadership, the NAACP launched the Jamestown to Jamestown Partnership, marking the 400th anniversary of enslaved Africans arriving in America, and the 2020 We are Done Dying Campaign, which focused on inequities in the U.S. health care system. Johnson, a Detroit native, works to advance financial empowerment for Black Americans and to close the wealth gap by supporting Black entrepreneurs through micro-grants. In 2024, he spearheaded the launch of NAACP Capital, a $200 million initiative to strengthen Black founders and businesses through targeted investment. He has had several fellowships, including at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management in D.C.
College: Tougaloo College in Mississippi; South Texas College of Law Houston
20 Black civil rights activists and where they attended college
Martin Luther King Jr.: Morehouse College; Boston University School of Theology; Crozer Theological Seminary
John Lewis: Fisk University; American Baptist College
Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Rust College; Fisk
Mamie Till-Mobley: Chicago State University; Loyola College Chicago
Medgar Evers: Alcorn State University
Dorothy Height: New York University; Columbia University
Bernice King: Spelman College; Emory University School of Law
Gloria Richardson Dandridge: Howard University
Nikole Hannah-Jones: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; University of Notre Dame
W.E.B. Du Bois: Fisk; Humboldt University of Berlin; Harvard University
Joseph Lowery: Paine College; Wayne State University
Jesse Jackson: North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; Chicago Theological Seminary
Stokely Carmichael: Howard University
Samuel L. Jackson: Morehouse College
Sherrilyn Ifill: Vassar College; New York University School of Law
Ibram X. Kendi: Florida A&M University; Temple University
Thurgood Marshall: Lincoln University; Howard University School of Law
Ayo Tometi: University of Arizona; Arizona State University
Al Sharpton: CUNY-Brooklyn College
Derrick Johnson: Tougaloo College; South Texas College of Law Houston
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Where 20 Black Civil Rights Leaders Went to College originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 02/13/25: This article was published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
