Frances Joseph-Gaudet

Frances Joseph-Gaudet (1861- December 1934), prison reform worker and educator, was born in a log cabin in Holmesville, Mississippi of African American and Native American descent. Widowed early, she dedicated her life to prison reform. Beginning in 1894 she held prayer meetings, wrote letters, delivered messages, and secured clothing for black prisoners, and later for white prisoners as well. She eventually purchased a farm and founded the Gaudet Normal and Industrial School in Louisiana.

Sarah “ Sadie” Delany and Elizabeth “Bessie” Delany

Sarah "Sadie" Delany (September 19, 1889 – January 25, 1999) was an American educator and civil rights pioneer who was the subject, along with her younger sister, Elizabeth Delany, of the New York Times bestselling oral history biography, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, by journalist Amy Hill Hearth.

Sadie was the first African American permitted to teach domestic science at the high-school level in the New York City public schools, and became famous, with the publication of the book, at the age of 103.

Annie Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany (3 September 1891 – 25 September 1995) was an American civil rights pioneer who earned a Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) degree from Columbia University in 1923. She was the second black woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York State, and became famous, with the publication of the book, when she was aged 101.

Their father, the Rt. Rev. Henry Beard Delany, born a slave, was the first African American ordained a Bishop in the Episcopal Church in 1918.

Their mother, Nannie James Logan Delany, married their father when both were teachers at St. Augustine College in North Carolina.

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thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was a distinguished American jurist and the first African American to become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall was born on July 2nd,1908, in Baltimore, Maryland.He enrolled and graduated magna cum laude from the Law School of Howard University in Washington. He won his first major civil rights decision in 1936, Murray v. Pearson, which forced the University of Maryland to open its doors to blacks. At the age of 32, Marshall successfully argued his first case before the United States Supreme Court and went on to win 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the court. As a lawyer, his crowning achievement was arguing successfully for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in 1954. President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall as the 96th Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1967, a position he held for 24 years. Marshall compiled a long and impressive record of decisions on civil rights, not only for African Americans, but also for women, Native Americans, and the incarcerated; he was a strong advocate for individual freedoms and human rights. A life long Episcopalian, he adamantly believed that capital punishment was unconstitutional and should be abolished.