Underground Railroad
The system of receiving, concealing, and freeing blacks who escaped slavery is known as the Underground Railroad. The “Railroad” started in the early 19th century and was made up of a tightly knit network of safe houses located at strategic points along the escape routes coming our of the South. African Americans who traveled the Underground Railroad referred to also as the “Freedom Train”, were escorted by a conductor, the person working secretly for the “Railroad” and managed the planned escapes. The Underground Rail road had complex, mathematical codes that allowed the “conductors” and “operators” to evade capture.

The Niagara Movement
The Niagara Movement was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and Niagara Falls, which was near where the first meeting took place in July 1905. The Niagara Movement was a call for opposition to racial segregation and disenfranchisement as well as policies of accommodation and conciliation promoted by African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is one of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the United States. The founding of the NAACP was, of course, a milestone in African-American history, and in U.S. race relations. The group's founding approach—African-Americans and whites uniting in opposition to discriminatory laws and social practices—proved popular, and the NAACP expanded rapidly

Southern Christian Leadership Conference
The very beginnings of the SCLC can be traced back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began on December 5, 1955. The boycott was also a signal to Black America to begin a new phase of the long struggle, a phase that came to be known as the modern civil rights movement. As bus boycotts spread across the South. Leaders of MIA and other protest groups met in Atlanta on January 10-11, 1957 to form a regional organization and coordinate protest activities across the South.

Black Women Club Movement
From the latter part of the 19th century to the early 21st century, African American women formed their own clubs as a way for African American women to assert their humanity, racial identity, and address issues unique to the African American community. When Ida B. Wells-Barnett was criticized by white women for pushing too hard for anti-lynching rather than suffrage during her speaking tours in England and Europe, American blacks responded by rising to her defense and forming the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Soon, chapters existed in most communities, and, by 1914, the NACW claimed 50,000 members in 1,000 clubs nationwide. Its self-help motto of "Lifting as We Climb" inspired the organization to focus on forming kindergartens and day nurseries, homes and orphanages for delinquent and abandoned girls, and settlement houses in black neighborhoods.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April of 1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC's work in the South, allowing full-time SNCC workers to have a $10 a week salary. Many unpaid volunteers also worked with SNCC on projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland. SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins and freedom rides, a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. SNCC's major contribution was in its field work, organizing voter registration drives all over the South, especially in Georgia and Mississippi.