A. Philip Randolph

Asa Philip Randolph (April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979) was a prominent twentieth-century African-American civil rights leader and the founder of both the March on Washington Movement and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a landmark for labor and particularly for African-American labor organizing. He was one of several Black atheists involved in the civil rights movement.

Randolph was once known as the most dangerous black in America. As a socialist, he viewed the condition of American Blacks as the symptom of a larger social illness, an illness which is caused by an unfair distribution of power, wealth, and resources. The agent for spreading Mr. Randolph's socialism was a magazine called the Messenger, founded in 1917, "the only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes." He co-edited the magazine with Chandler Owen, a fellow socialist who came to be Mr. Randolph's closest friend. During Messenger's first year, the November 1917 issue expressed the following Atheistic values:

"Our aim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the times, and above the cheap peanut politics of the old reactionary Negro leaders. Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty is meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is."

Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokesmen for African-American civil rights.  In 1942, an estimated 18,000 blacks gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Randolph kick off a campaign against discrimination in the military, in war industries, in government agencies, and in labor unions.  During the Philadelphia Transit Strike of 1944, the government backed African-American workers' striking to gain positions formerly limited to white employees.

Source: www.infidelguy.com and www.apri.org and Wikipedia

Butterfly McQueen

Born Thelma McQueen (January 7, 1911 – December 22, 1995) in Tampa, Florida, she trained as a dancer and took her stage name from the "Butterfly Dance" after performing it in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She performed with the dance troupes of Katherine Dunham and Janet Collins before making her professional debut in George Abbott's Brown Sugar.

McQueen made her first film in 1939 in what would become her most identifiable role—as Prissy, the young maid in Gone with the Wind, uttering the famous words: "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!" She also played an uncredited bit part as a sales assistant in The Women, filmed after Gone with the Wind but released before it. Around this time McQueen also modeled for the Mrs. Butterworth bottle. She also played Butterfly, Mary Livingstone's maid in the Jack Benny radio program, for a time during World War II. But by 1947 she had grown tired of the ethnic stereotypes she was required to play and ended her film career.

By 1950 she had played another racially-stereotyped role for two years on the television series Beulah, which reunited her with her Gone with the Wind co-star Hattie McDaniel.

Her acting roles after this were very few, and she devoted herself to other pursuits including study, and received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1975. In 1979 McQueen won a Daytime Emmy award for her performance as Aunt Thelma, a fairy godmother in the ABC After school special, 'Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid'. She had one more role of some substance in the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast.

McQueen lived in New York in the summer months and lived in Augusta, Georgia in the winter months. She died in Augusta, Georgia as a result of burns received when a kerosene heater she was attempting to light malfunctioned and burst into flames. A lifelong atheist, she donated her body to medical science and remembered the Freedom From Religion Foundation in her will.

Source:  Wikipedia

Hubert Harrison

Hubert Harrison (April 27, 1883 - December 17, 1927) was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, and radical socialist political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as “the father of Harlem radicalism” and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time.” John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates."

An immigrant from St. Croix at age 17, Harrison played significant roles in the largest radical class and race movements in the United States. In 1912-1914 he was the leading Black organizer in the Socialist Party of America. In 1917 he founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the race-conscious “New Negro” movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership of individuals and race-conscious program of the Garvey (Marcus Garvey) movement.

Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness among working people, positive race consciousness among Black people, agnostic atheism, secular humanism, social progressivism, and freethought. He was also a self-described "radical internationalist" and contributed significantly to the Caribbean radical tradition. Harrison profoundly influenced a generation of “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Marcus Garvey, Richard Benjamin Moore, W. A. Domingo, Williana Burroughs, and Cyril Briggs.

Source:  Wikipedia

Alton Lemon

Alton Lemon won the case Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971, which successfully challenged a Pennsylvania law, the first such law in the nation providing public tax funds to religious schools for teaching four secular subjects. Mr. Lemon, a member of the ACLU, volunteered to be part of the challenge of this law, which became a watershed for the Establishment Clause, and resulted in a historic decision bearing his name.

The United States Supreme Court unanimously invalidated the parochial aid. In one of the enduring legacies of the Burger Court, it also codified existing precedent on the Establishment Clause into a test--called the "Lemon Test." The "Lemon Test" has three prongs. If any of the three prongs are violated by an act of government, it is unconstitutional:

· It must have a secular legislative purpose;

· Its principal or primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion;

· It must not foster excessive entanglement between government and religion.

"It has been hated and reviled by the religious right. Three presidents (you can guess which ones) have openly sought to overturn it. Justice Scalia, who's a pretty scary fellow himself, has made an odious comparison of the Lemon Test to 'some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.' Despite attacks against it and attempts to modify and chip away at it, the Lemon Test endures.

Source: Freedom From Religion Foundation