Marilyn Alexander was a civil rights activist and the coordinator for the state groups of the Women's Committee for Equal Justice (WCEJ). Originally formed in 1949 by the Civil Rights Congress as the "National Committee to Free the Ingram Family," the WCEJ organized a campaign around the Rosa Lee Ingram legal case. In 1948, Rosa Lee Ingram, an African American sharecropper, and two of her sons were sentenced to death for murder after a one-day trial in Ellaville, Georgia. In 1954, Alexander and an interracial delegation of 75 women went to Georgia to raise awareness for the Rosa Lee Ingram case as an unlawful conviction.

Civil rights activist and educator Ruth M. Batson was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. She received her MA in education from Boston University (1976). Batson worked for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (1963-1966). She later became the executive director of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (1966-1970), a voluntary busing program organized to achieve racial balance in schools in Boston and surrounding suburbs. In 1969, she formed the Ruth M. Batson Educational Fund to provide grants to African American students, educational institutions, and community organizations. A long-term member of the NAACP, she was the first woman to serve as president-elect of its New England Regional Conference. She subsequently served as president and director of the Museum of African American History (1987-1990). In 2001, Northeastern University Press published her book, The Black Educational Movement in Boston: A Sequence of Events (1638-1975).

Under the auspices of the Schlesinger Library, the Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African-American women between 1976 and 1981. The project sought a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society in the first half of the twentieth century. Many interviewees had professional careers in such fields as education, government, the arts, business, medicine, law, and social work. Others combined care for their families with volunteer work at the local, regional, or national level. Additional resources are available via the Schlesinger Library Research Guide for the Black Women Oral History Project, and this collection is available digitally through the finding aid.

Born in 1896, Shirley Graham DuBois was a political activist, writer, playwright and composer. During the 1930s she studied music at Oberlin College and produced the musical drama Tom-Tom, which was performed in Chicago. DuBois later served as director of the Negro Unit of Chicago's Federal Theatre, where she produced several successful plays. Considered a prolific writer, DuBois published biographies of many prominent African Americans. In 1951 she married civil rights icon W.E.B. DuBois. The couple was politically active in various causes until they emigrated to Ghana in 1961.

Dorothy Height was the president of the National Council of Negro Women at the peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She also worked on behalf of African American women in the Young Women's Christian Association. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. This collection consists of an oral history with Height.

Ellen Swepson Jackson was the founder and executive director of Operation Exodus, a program organized to bus inner-city students from Boston to suburban schools. She later co-authored Family Experiences in Operation Exodus, Inc. (1967), and served as dean and director of affirmative action at Northeastern University from 1978 to 1997.

A lawyer and civil rights activist, Kennedy’s lifelong involvement with political and social activism included the Black liberation movement, women’s liberation, media awareness, consumer protection, and reproductive rights. Kennedy represented the estates of jazz legends Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker and became involved in the defense of various high-profile criminal cases including Black Panthers H. Rap Brown and Assata Shakur, as well as Valerie Solanas (the woman who shot Andy Warhol), before eventually becoming a professional activist and lecturer. Dubbed by the 1970s popular press as "radicalism's rudest mouth," she cultivated a reputation for her distinct personal style and colorful language as a social critic. She also hosted The Flo Kennedy Show, a thirty-minute talk show that aired regularly on Manhattan Cable Television and highlighted the causes of individuals facing discrimination.

Murray was a lawyer, educator, political activist, and writer. When she took a job with the Workers' Defense League in 1939, she became involved with the case of Odell Waller, an African American sharecropper who had killed his white landlord in self-defense during a dispute over his crops. Despite Murray's many lecture and fund-raising tours, Waller was put to death. Murray's unsuccessful efforts to combat the poll tax, combined with her arrest for violating segregation laws in Virginia while working on the Waller case, ignited her interest in civil rights law. She entered Howard University Law School in the fall of 1941 and became involved with the Howard chapter of the NAACP, especially the student's non-violent, direct action sit-in campaigns to desegregate Washington, D.C., lunch counters. Upon graduating from Howard, Murray attempted to enroll to Harvard Law School for graduate study but was refused because Harvard did not admit women. This experience awakened Murray's feminist consciousness. In the mid-1960s, Murray served on the Committee on Civil and Political Rights, a study committee of the President's Commission on the Status of Women; earned a J.D.S. from Yale Law School; and was a founding member of the National Organization for Women.

The National Institute for Women of Color (NIWC), founded in 1981 in the District of Columbia, was an independent non-profit organization created to promote the strengths of diversity along with educational and economic equity for women of color. Funded mainly through grants, NIWC was managed by its Board of Directors, with the help of state coordinators, a national advisory committee, and volunteers. NIWC was an advocacy group which acted as a networking center for women of color and focused on mutual concerns of education, housing, healthcare, and pay equity. NIWC's main objectives were to develop leadership skills in women, to recognize women of color leaders, to educate society about the status and basic needs of women of color, to provide a support network, and to advocate for changes in public policy. NIWC sponsored numerous conferences including the National Conferences for Women of Color in 1982, 1983, 1984, and 1987. The group also published a newsletter, fact sheets, and NIWC Brown Papers, which researched writings on issues of concern to women of color. NIWC stopped functioning in 1995 and legally disbanded in the early 2000s.

Born and raised in Boston, West was a prolific writer of short stories, novels, and newspaper articles. West began writing at a young age. Her story "The Typewriter" won second prize in a 1926 contest in the journal Opportunity. She then moved to New York City and became part of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing stories in magazines and the Daily News. She visited the Soviet Union with a group of African American writers in 1933 and later became editor and publisher of two African American literary journals, Challenge and New Challenge. In the early 1940s, West moved to Martha's Vineyard, where she wrote a weekly column for the Vineyard Gazette. Her first novel, The Living is Easy, was published in 1948. Her second novel, The Wedding, was published in 1995, and was later made into a television miniseries. A volume of her collected short stories was also published in 1995. This collection has been digitized and is available on the Library's website.