It would be remiss of me not to mention that throughout the turbulent times in history that African Americans have fought and died for the right to be free and treated like human beings in this country, we were not alone. Alongside of the African American heroes of activism were white people who also had the courage of their conviction to believe in the spiritual righteousness to act. Despite the very real threat of being ostracize, alienated, beaten and even killed; they stood up and challenged white supremacy and the hatred of their own people. Some white people would call them traitors, I would call it humanity. Although, these people are rarely mentioned in the struggles of African Americans in history by mainstream media and academia, the movement of freedom and equality was strengthen by their support. It is these compassionate people who maintain and balance the reality that not all white people are racist. Although as African Americans we struggle to keep the anger of our plight in society at bay towards those who are guilty of racism, it is a redeeming quality we welcome and appreciate...and I say, thank you to all those who stand/stood up to the injustices and wickedness of racism and systemic oppression!

These are some of the names and faces of the unsung white heroes.

"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril."

A quote by...

 William Lloyd Garrison

1. (December 12, 1805 – May 24, 1879) was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which he founded with Isaac Knapp in 1831 and published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States.

The Quakers

William Wells Brown, who had freed himself from enslavement by escape and later worked on the Underground Railroad as well as becoming a noted lecture and writer for the abolitionist cause, testified that the reputation of Quakers for anti-slavery was well known among the enslaved. No fugitive, Brown wrote, was ever betrayed by a Quaker.

*****

2. Thomas Garrett (1789-1871) was a Quaker and a known conductor of the Underground Railroad. In 1848 he and fellow Quaker John Hunn were brought to trial by two slave-owners on charges of harboring and aiding fugitive slaves. The defendants were found guilty by the U.S. Circuit Court in Delaware, presided over by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who ten years later would deliver the landmark 'Dred Scott Decision.' Harriet Beecher Stowe cites Garrett's 1848 trial as inspiration for some scenes in her influential anti-slavery novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.

3. Elijah F. Pennypacker (1804-1888) a convinced Quaker, was originally of Mennonite descent. He was a politician and activist who labored tirelessly in the anti-masonic, temperance, and anti-slavery movements. Pennypacker's home in Chester County, Pa., was a vital station on the underground railroad. He was a member of Radnor Monthly Meeting and a minister until his death in 1888.

4. John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was a white American abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States.

Brown's attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later part of West Virginia), electrified the nation. He was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men and inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty on all counts and was hanged. Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg and represented the wishes of the Republican Party to end slavery. Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that, a year later, led to secession and the American Civil War.

5. Robert Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, the first child of Mable Arbutus (Bushnell), a secretary, and Timothy Aloysius Ryan, who was from a wealthy family that owned a real estate firm. Ryan was a liberal Democrat who tirelessly supported civil rights issues. Despite his military service, he also came to share the pacifist views of his wife Jessica, who was a Quaker. By the mid-1960s, Ryan's political activities included efforts to fight racial discrimination. He served in the cultural division of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and, with Bill Cosby, Robert Culp, Sidney Poitier, and other actors, helped organize the short-lived Artists Help All Blacks.

Ryan's film work often ran counter to the political causes he embraced. He was a pacifist who starred in war movies, westerns, and violent thrillers.

6. Juliette Morgan was the only child of Frank and Lila Morgan of Montgomery, Alabama. She was a seventh-generation Southerner and a third-generation Alabamian born into a white family with high status in the community.  In 1939, 16 years before the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, Morgan began writing letters to the Montgomery Advertiser, the city's local newspaper, denouncing the horrible injustices she witnessed on the city buses. In these letters, she said segregation was un-Christian and wrong, and the citizens of Montgomery should do something about it. The response was immediate: Morgan lost her job at a local bookstore.

One morning as she rode the bus, Morgan watched a black woman pay her fare and then leave the front door of the bus to re-enter through the back door, as was the custom. As soon as the black woman stepped off, the white bus driver pulled away, leaving the woman behind even though she'd already paid her fare. Incensed, Morgan jumped up and pulled the emergency cord. She demanded the bus driver open the door and let the black woman come on board. No one on the bus, black or white, could believe what they were seeing. In the days that followed, Morgan pulled the emergency cord every time she witnessed such injustices.

Morgan was bombarded by obscene phone calls and hate mail. White people boycotted the library where she worked. They called her an extremist. Teenage boys taunted and humiliated her in public and in front of her staff at the library. A cross was burned in her front yard. Some of Morgan's friends said she was mentally ill and demanded she be fired. Morgan's personal campaign against racism and injustice eventually caused her to become estranged from friends, former students, colleagues, neighbors and even her own mother. Because the library superintendent and trustees still refused to fire her from her job, the mayor withheld municipal funding to the library so her job would be cut. Anxiety and depression overwhelmed her until, on July 15, 1957, she resigned her position at the library.

The next morning, Morgan's mother found her dead in her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills by her side. Morgan had left a note that simply said, "I am not going to cause any more trouble to anybody." The toll of feeling alone in her work against racism had been too much for her.

7. In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began to organize Freedom Rides. The first departed from Washington, D.C. and involved 13 black and white riders who rode into the South challenging white only lunch counters and restaurants. When they reached Anniston, Alabama one of the buses was ambushed and attacked. Meanwhile, at an SNCC meeting in Tennessee, Lewis, Zwerg and 11 other volunteers decided to be reinforcements. Zwerg was the only white male in the group. Although scared for his life, Zwerg never had second thoughts. He recalled, "My faith was never so strong as during that time. I knew I was doing what I should be doing.

The group traveled by bus to 

Birmingham, where Zwerg was first arrested for not moving to the back of the bus with his black seating companion, Paul Brooks. Three days later, the riders regrouped and headed to Montgomery. At first the terminal there was quiet and eerie, but the scene turned into an ambush, with the riders attacked from all directions. . "Mr. Zwerg was hit with his own suitcase in the face. Then he was knocked down and a group pummeled him". The prostrate activist was beaten into unconsciousness somewhere around the time a man took Zwerg's head between his knees while others took turns pounding and clawing at his face. At one point while Zwerg was unconscious, three men held him up while a woman kicked him in the groin. He recently did a speech on May 18, 2011 at Troy University Rosa Parks Museum. Hespoke about the effect the Freedom Rides had on his life. In a recent interview with Lisa Simeone Jim talked about how blessed he was to have been a part of the Movement.

8. Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo (April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Michigan. In March 1965 Liuzzo, then a housewife and mother of 5 with a history of local activism, heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr and traveled from Detroit, Michigan to Selma, Alabama in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was shot dead by members of the Ku Klux Klan. She was 39 years old.

9. Michael Francis Moore (born April 23, 1954) is an American documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, author, journalist, actor, and left-wing political activist. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush and the War on Terror, which is the highest-grossing documentary at the American boxoffice of all time and winner of the Palme d'Or. His film Bowling for Columbine (2002), which examines the causes of the Columbine High School massacre, won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Both Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko (2007), which examines health care in the United States, are among the top ten highest-grossing documentaries. In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, which documented his personal quest to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV Nation, a satirical news magazine television series and The Awful Truth, a satirical show.

Moore's written and cinematic works criticize topics such as globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the Iraq War, the American health care system, and capitalism. In 2005 Time magazine named Moore one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Michael Moore is the example of a man who views the world in realistic terms, not just in black and white, but as a whole connective picture. With all the social, racial and immoral problems that occur in this society, as a white man, he doesn't stick his head in the sand and pretend the problems do not exist. We do not expect white people to be pro-black, as diverse cultures; everyone has the right to embrace their own heritage with pride and celebration including African Americans.

A white person just need to understand what it means to be African American in a racist construct, all that is required is to empathize, recognize and acknowledge that racism still  exists, how it operates to keep a people oppressed and finally, to take responsibility for it as an individual and group. Then make the effort to be educated to other cultures outside of the comfort zone of white supremacy and privilege and change how this system affects minorities. If white people could just do this, it could change the world. I truly believe that it is winding down to the time that “The Most High” is giving each of us a choice to do the right thing, to turn towards Him and repent and put the effort forward to care for our fellow man regardless of ethnicity, to stand up for injustices and evil that occurs everywhere. If not, well the scriptures tell us in these last days what will happen to the people who do not.

Former President Jimmy Carter said it best when asked in an interview: 

Is there more racism in the country now than when you were president?

Jimmy Carter

Carter: “I think there is. After the civil-rights movement was successful—about a hundred years after the end of the War Between the States, the Civil War—there was a general feeling in this country that the main elements of racism, of white superiority, had finally been overcome. With the news media showing the police abuse toward black people in some places, and the terrible events in Charleston, South Carolina, maybe we’ve been awakened to say that we’ve still got a long way to go. The burgeoning of obvious, extreme racism has been a sobering factor for us.”

In 2002, Former President Jimmy Carter was awarded the Noble Peace Prize, at the end of his speech he said some very valuable and poignant words that we as human beings should take in to consideration and implement them in our lives.

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes - and we must.”

Matthew 25:40-46

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.