1. Martin Luther King (1929 – 1968) – King was an American Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian, a
King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the
1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president.
With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against
segregation in Albany, Georgia (the Albany Movement), and helped
organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that
attracted national attention following television news coverage of the
brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on
Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in
American history.
On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel
Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In
1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the
following year he and SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on
segregated housing. In the final years of his life, King expanded his
focus to include poverty and speak against the Vietnam War, alienating
many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled “Beyond Vietnam”.
In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C.,
to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, when he wasassassinated on
April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many
U.S. cities.
2. Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013 ) – Mandela spent
most of his life campaigning for an end to apartheid in South Africa.
After over 20 years in prison, he was released and was able to be the
first elected President in post apartheid South Africa. Also admired for
his forgiveness and willingness to reach out to the white community in
South Africa.
Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in Mveso,
Transkei, South Africa. Becoming actively involved in the
anti-apartheid movement in his 20s, Mandela joined the African National
Congress in 1942. For 20 years, he directed a campaign of peaceful,
nonviolent defiance against the South African government and its racist
policies. In 1993, Mandela and South African President F.W. de Klerk
were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to
dismantle the country’s apartheid system. In 1994, Mandela was
inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. In 2009, Mandela’s
birthday (July 18) was declared “Mandela Day” to promote global peace
and celebrate the South African leader’s legacy. Mandela died at his
home in Johannesburg on December 5, 2013, at age 95.
3. Mohammed
Ali (1942 – ) Great boxer of the 1960s. Refused to fight in Vietnam.
Then a controversial decision, he later became widely admired as a
principled figure of great stature.Muhammad Ali born Cassius Marcellus
Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942) is an American former professional boxer,
generally considered among the greatest heavyweights in the sport’s
history. A controversial and polarizing figure during his early career,
Ali is now highly regarded for the skills he displayed in the ring plus
the values he exemplified outside of it: religious freedom, racial
justice and the triumph of principle over expedience. He is one of the
most recognized sports figures of the past 100 years, crowned “Sportsman
of the Century” by Sports Illustrated and “Sports Personality of the
Century” by the BBC.
Born Cassius Clay, he began training at 12
years old and at the age of 22 won the world heavyweight championship in
1964 fromSonny Liston in a stunning upset. Shortly after that bout, Ali
joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name. He converted to Sunni
Islam in 1975.
In 1967, three years after winning the heavyweight
title, Ali refused to be conscripted into the U.S. military, citing his
religious beliefs and opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam
War. He was eventually arrested and found guilty on draft evasion
charges and stripped of his boxing title. He did not fight again for
nearly four years—losing a time of peak performance in an athlete’s
career.Ali’s appeal worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where
in 1971 his conviction was overturned. Ali’s actions as aconscientious
objector to the war made him an icon for the larger counterculture
generation.
4. Kofi Atta Annan (born 8 April 1938) is a Ghanaian
diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United
Nationsfrom January 1997 to December 2006. Annan and the United Nations
were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize “for their work for
a better organized and more peaceful world.” He is the founder and the
Chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as being the chairman of
The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela.
From 23 February
until 31 August 2012, Annan was the UN–Arab League Joint Special
Representative for Syria, to help find a resolution to ongoing conflict
there. Annan quit after becoming frustrated with the UN’s lack of
progress with regard to conflict resolution, stating that “when the
Syrian people desperately need action, there continues to be
finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council”. He has been
involved in several humanitarian projects and won several awards
including the Kora All Africa Music Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001
5. Michael Jackson(August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American
singer, songwriter, record producer, dancer, and actor. Called the King
of Pop, his contributions to music and dance, along with his publicized
personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four
decades.
Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller is the best-selling album
of all time. His other albums, including Off the Wall (1979),
Bad(1987), Dangerous (1991), and HIStory (1995), also rank among the
world’s best-selling albums. Jackson is one of the few artists to have
been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. He was also
inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Dance Hall of Fame as
the first and only dancer from pop and rock music. His other
achievements include multiple Guinness World Records, 13 Grammy Awards,
the Grammy Legend Award, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 26
American Music Awards—more than any other artist—including the “Artist
of the Century” and “Artist of the 1980s”, 13 number-one singles in the
United States during his solo career,—more than any other male artist in
the Hot 100 era—and estimated sales of over 400 million records
worldwide. Jackson has won hundreds of awards, making him the most
awarded recording artist in the history of popular music. He became the
first artist in history to have a top ten single in the Billboard Hot
100 in five different decades when “Love Never Felt So Good” reached
number nine on May 21, 2014. Jackson traveled the world attending events
honoring his humanitarianism, and, in 2000, the Guinness World Records
recognized him for supporting 39 charities, more than any other
entertainer.
6. Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) born
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818 – February 20,
1895) was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator,
writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader
of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and
incisive antislavery writings. He stood as a living counter-example to
slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to
function as independent American citizens. Even many Northerners at the
time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a
slave
7. Haile Selassie (1892 – 1975) – Leader of Ethiopia and
symbol of African independence against colonialism. Born Tafari Makonnen
Woldemikael, was Ethiopia’s regent from 1916 to 1930 and Emperor of
Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. He also served as Chairperson of the
Organisation of African Unity from 25 May 1963 to 17 July 1964, and
again from 5 November 1966 to 11 September 1967. He was a member of the
Solomonic dynasty.
At the League of Nations in 1936, the Emperor
condemned the use of chemical weapons by Italy against his people during
the Second Italo–Ethiopian War. His internationalist views led to
Ethiopia’s becoming a charter member of the United Nations, and his
political thought and experience in promoting multilateralism and
collective security have proved seminal and enduring. His suppression of
rebellions among the landed aristocracy (the mesafint), which
consistently opposed his reforms, as well as what some critics perceived
to be Ethiopia’s failure to modernize rapidly enough, earned him
criticism among some contemporaries and historians. His regime was also
criticized by human rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch, as
autocratic and illiberal.
Among the Rastafari movement, whose
followers are estimated at between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000, Haile
Selassie is revered as the returned messiah of the Bible, God incarnate.
Beginning in Jamaica in the 1930s, the Rastafari movement perceives
Haile Selassie as a messianic figure who will lead a future golden age
of eternal peace, righteousness, and prosperity. Haile Selassie was an
Ethiopian Orthodox Christian throughout his life. Haile Selassie is a
defining figure in both Ethiopian and African history.
8. Barack Obama
(born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United
States, and the first African American to hold the office. Born in
Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University andHarvard
Law School, where he served as president of theHarvard Law Review. He
was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He
worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at
University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three
terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to
2004, running unsuccessfullyfor the United States House of
Representatives in 2000.
In 2004, Obama received national
attention during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United States
Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary, his
keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July, and his
election to the Senate in November. He began his presidential campaign
in 2007 and, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham
Clinton in 2008, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party
primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated
Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was
inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his
inauguration, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
9. Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013) born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe; 16
November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigeriannovelist, poet, professor,
and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) was considered his
magnum opus, and is the most widely read book in modern African
literature.
Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in
South-Eastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship
for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world religions and
traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university
student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting
Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained
worldwide attention for Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later
novels include No Longer at Ease (1960),Arrow of God (1964), A Man of
the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe wrote his
novels in English and defended the use of English, a “language of
colonisers”, in African literature. In 1975, his lecture An Image of
Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” featured a famous
criticism of Joseph Conrad as “a thoroughgoing racist”; it was later
published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.
10.
Usain Bolt is a Jamaican sprinter. Widely regarded as the fastest person
ever, he is the first man to hold both the 100 metres and 200 metres
world records since fully automatic timemeasurements became mandatory in
1977. Along with his teammates, he also set the world record in the
4×100 metres relay. He is the reigning Olympic champion in these three
events, the first man to win six Olympic gold medals in sprinting, and
an eight-time World champion. He was the first to achieve a “double
double” by winning 100 m and 200 m titles at consecutive Olympics (2008
and 2012), and topped this through the first “double triple” (including
4×100 m relays).
Although gaining worldwide popularity for a
sprint double victory at the Beijing Games, Bolt has had more victories
as a 200 m runner. While he had not won any significant 100 m title
prior to the 2008 Olympics, he had won numerous crowns in the 200 m
event at the youth, junior and senior levels. Further, at the 2013 World
Championships in Moscow, Bolt completed a hat-trick of 200 m world
titles by winning his third straight gold in the event. His 2009 record
breaking margin for 100 m, from 9.69 seconds (his own previous world
record) to 9.58, is the highest since the start of fully automatic time
measurements
SOURCE: africa
