July 12, 1899

Civil rights leader Edgar Daniel Nixon is born in Lowndes County. Standing six feet, four inches tall, the charismatic Nixon became one of the most influential members of the civil rights movement in the state. He organized the Alabama Voters League to increase black voter registration, helped found the Montgomery Improvement Association, and was instrumental in starting the Montgomery bus boycott, even using his house as collateral for Rosa Parks’ release from jail. Nixon won the 1985 Walter White Award from the NAACP, and in 1986, his house was placed on the Alabama Register of Historic Places.

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

E.D. Nixon (1899-1987) was a civil rights leader in Montgomery during the 1960s who worked to get African-Americans registered to vote and was an organizer of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Montgomery bus boycott. Nixon was one of more than 80 leaders of the boycott arrested by Montgomery police in February 1956. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of Montgomery County)

Alabamians Clifford and Virginia Durr were deeply involved in the civil rights movement. Attorney Clifford Durr represented Rosa Parks in court after her arrest for violating Montgomery’s segregation laws on a city bus in 1955. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library Archives)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.