Sojourner Truth, American abolitionist and advocate of women's rights, born into slavery in Hurley, Ulster County, New York, and originally named Isabella. (She was freed when New York State emancipated slaves in 1828.) A mystic who heard voices she believed to be God's, she arrived in New York City in 1829, where she preached in the streets. In 1843, obeying her voices, she took the name Sojourner Truth and went preaching along the eastern seaboard. That same year she came into contact with the abolitionist movement, which she enthusiastically embraced, and for the next few years she toured the country speaking in its behalf. Encountering the women's rights movement in 1850, she also added its causes to hers. During the American Civil War she solicited gifts

Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, usually called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Its goals included the promotion of black solidarity, with a special concern for the welfare of African blacks. But the UNIA met apathy from black workers as well as active opposition from the lighter-skinned middle class who did not wish to be identified as blacks. Hoping for support in the United States, Garvey established a branch of the UNIA in New York City in 1917. He taught that blacks would be respected only when they were economically strong, and to that end he founded a newspaper, Negro World, as well as other black-owned businesses such as the Black Star Line, a steamship company. Garvey pledged to establish in Africa a black-governed nation.

Tubman supported her parents and worked to raise money for her missions into the South. She spoke at abolitionist meetings and at women's rights assemblies, often concealing her name for protection from slave hunters. Her forceful leadership led the white abolitionist John Brown to refer to her admiringly as "General" Tubman. She helped Brown plan his October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, W. Va., and promised that many of the slaves she had freed would join him. Only illness prevented her from fighting at Brown's side during the raid itself.

Tubman worked closely with the Underground Railroad. Often she left fugitives in the care of other "conductors" after leading them part of the way herself. She maintained strict discipline during the perilous journeys to the North. If a runaway lagged behind or lost faith and wished to turn back, she forced him on at gunpoint. Before the Civil War she freed her parents and most of her brothers and sisters as well as hundreds of other slaves.

DOUGLASS, Frederick was an escaped slave, Frederick Douglass became one of the foremost black abolitionists and civil rights leaders in the United States. His powerful speeches, newspaper articles, and books awakened whites to the evils of slavery and inspired blacks in their struggle for freedom and equality. Douglass founded a new antislavery newspaper, The North Star later renamed Frederick Douglass's Paper in Rochester, N. Y. Unlike Garrison, he had come to believe that political action rather than moral persuasion would bring about the abolition of slavery. Douglass also resented Garrison's view that blacks did not have the ability to lead the antislavery movement. By 1853, he had broken with Garrison and become a strong and independent abolitionist.

After supporting desegregation efforts in Saint Augustine, Fla., in 1964, Martin Luther King concentrated his efforts on the voter-registration drive in Selma, Ala., leading a harrowing march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. Soon after, a tour of the northern cities led him to assail the conditions of economic as well as social discrimination. This marked a shift in SCLC strategy, one intended to "bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible." Having begun to recognize the deeper relationships of economics and poverty to racism, King now called for a "reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values." Along with demands for stronger civil and voting rights legislation and for a meaningful poverty budget, he spoke out against the Vietnam War. On Apr. 4, 196

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