THE WOOZY HALL OF FAME
Examples of Transformative Leadership Against the Odds.
Click on name for subject biography
TUNIS CAMPBELL
Tunis Campbell was one of the main organizers of the structure which would make Field Order #15, one of the manifest experiments in Black self-governance. He was a community organizer, teacher, abolitionist, anti-colonialist and an American, who rejected the concept that Blacks should be repatriated back to Africa.Quote:"We should really determine ourselves what we're doing... This is our home... Beginning next week, I will divide up the land into forty acres for each of you... Order," said Campbell, "is Heaven's first law."
Harriet Jacobs fended off repeated sexual advances by her owner and resolved to run away, stowing herself away in the attic of her free grandmother's home for several years before making her way to freedom, becoming an avid abolitionist and writing her memoirs which fueled the flames of abolition. Quote: "There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious."
Robert Smalls is one of the most intelligent, adaptive and highly accomplished Blacks of the 19th and early 20th century. His accomplishments rival that of any American of his era. Born in 1839, Robert Smalls has the distinction of being a former slave who purchased his own freedom, a decorated civil war veteran, a Captain of a U.S. vessel, a S.C. state legislator and U.C. Congressman, as well as Major General in the S.C. Militia. Quote (from Harper's Weekly, 1862): "Robert Smalls, with whom I had a brief interview at General Benham's headquarters this morning, is an intelligent negro... adopted the idea of running the vessel, The Planter to sea from a joke which one of his companions had perpetrated."
ROBERT F. WILLIAMS
Robert F. Williams was a shining example of an uncompromising Black man, who dedicated his life to the acquisition of justice through his pen, his mouth and his right to bear arms. Quote: "We as men should stand up as men and protect our women and children. I am a man, and I will walk upright as a man should. I will not crawl."
Frantz Fanon was a loyalist looking for something to be loyal to. Once he experienced the exploitation of the Algerian people, he finally found cause worthy of a lifetime dedication. Quote: "What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary."
HARRIET TUBMAN
With the strength of 1,000 mules and the cunning of a fox, this simple woman placed herself squarely between north and south, freedom and slavery and risked her life to lead former slaves to the promise of the north. Quote: "We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
NAT TURNER
Blessed by visions of a religious nature, and a gift for clairvoyance, his inability to bow to an unjust system, transformed his vision from one of beauty and communion into one of the cleansing power of blood. Quote: "I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.
E.D. NIXON
Mostly unschooled, but fiercely determined, this simple man organized the civil rights movement from behind the scenes, which is the reason he is a little known figure. Quote: "I'm from Montgomery, Alabama, a city that's known as the cradle of the confederacy, that had stood still for more than ninety-three years until Rosa L. Parks was arrested and thrown in jail like a common criminal. Fifty thousand people rose up and caught hold to the cradle of the confederacy and began to rock it till the Jim Crow rockers began to reel and the segregated slats began to fall out."
HUEY P. NEWTON
With the naivety of someone who believed in the impossible, Huey P. Newton went from being an illiterate drop-out, to the leader of the Black Power movement. Quote: "Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves."
W. E. B. DU BOIS
Du Bois became the leading figure in Black intelligensia. From his pulpit in Harvard, to his personal experiences in rural Tennessee, Du Bois took part in the creation of the Niagra Movement, The NAACP, and attempted to link American Blacks with the struggles of Africa. Quote: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
PAUL ROBESON
Paul Robeson was an All-American athlete and top scholar who used his celebrity to advance the American ideals of freedom of speech, equal rights and political freedom around the world. Quote: "I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own."
A. PHILLIP RANDOLPH
The founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph became the leading activist of his day. Quote: "Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship."
CARTER G. WOODSON
From the dank, hot and dusty coal mines of West Virginia, to the hallowed halls of Harvard, Woodson is the author of the seminal book, The Mis-education of the Negro", a must read for all education minded Blacks. Quote: "If the Negro area, however, is to continue as a district supported wholly from without, the inept dwellers therein will merit and will receive only the contempt of those who may occasionally catch glimpses of them in their plight."
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
This escaped slave became the most iconic figure for Black activism, as well as Black strength. Escaping to freedom with forged seamen's papers, Douglass did not settle for merely his own freedom. Quote: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning."
THURGOOD MARSHALL
The chief architect of the NAACP legal strategy to fight segregation, the hopes of the entire Black nation sat squarely upon his shoulders as he argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. Quote: "Even if all parties approach the court's mandate with the best of conscious intentions, ... that mandate requires them to confront and overcome their own racism on all levels a challenge I doubt all of them can meet."
EL HAJJ MALIK EL SHABAZZ
El Hajj's story is singularly important to the Black community because his rocky beginnings became the starting point for a transformation and world view that was stopped only by his untimely death. Quote: "Have you forgotten, that once we were brought here, we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language? We lost our religion, our culture, our god. And many of us, by the way we act, we even lost our mind."
NELSON MANDELA
From tribal leader to lawyer to activist, underground resistance leader, inmate to President. Nelson Mandela is a case study in persistance, flexibility, determination and indomitable will.Quote:"As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."
MARCUS GARVEY
A native Jamaican, Garvey's need for recognition and pride became the impetus for the uplift of the entire Black Community as his organization birthed the political consciousness of the Harlem renaissance. Quote: "God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and eternity our measurement."
ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA
Guevara is to be believed when he states tha the act of violent revolution is an act of complete love. Shunning the fruits of the Cuban revolution, Guevara became a world liberator. Quote: "There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us."
PAULO FREIRE
Freire's legacy is based in the fact that he brings compassion and the most powerful of problem solving devices, the human ear, as the centerpiece of his self-empowered, community based mode of inquiry and empowerment. Quote: "Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."