One in particular who comes to mind is Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.
During the years of 1965-67, I used to pray for him every night, and every morning I turned on our little battery-powered radio to see if he'd been assassinated.
I don't mean this to be disrespectful Sylvia, but I credit much of the advancement of our society to the distancing of ourselves from religious beliefs, supersticions, and practices. Hard to justify being a "superior" race if you don't have a god telling you so.
I've a personal story about my law school. This story brought home to me how far we've come in recent history. Our law school, University of Arkansas School of Law, was the first law school in the south to allow a black student to attend a white school. His name was Silas Hunt, and there is a building named for him here. This was sometime in the 1950's.
Even so, the segregationists aspects were still present. At first, he had to be in a separate classroom and be taught individually. Evidently, the white students got upset that he was getting one on one instruction, when they were in huge classes. lol So, they moved him in with the white class. But, they didn't just move him in. They built a little wooden fence around a chair in the classroom, and he was to sit in this little sectioned off area. Evidently, this lasted a few months, and then one night it disappeared. We don't know if students tore it down or what, but it wasn't replaced. Silas Hunt never graduated. I don't know what happened to him, but I intend to look into his history and see if he's still alive.
The year after Silas Hunt enrolled, 3 other black students enrolled, and graduated. I got to meet them in a recent new school building dedication. Meeting the people who actually went through the segregationist struggles really brought home how far we've come, and yet how close the past still is. This was only 50 years ago. It blows my mind to imagine what things were like for my parent's generation.