Timuel Black

Timuel Dixon Black Jr. was an American educator, civil rights activist, historian and author. A native of Alabama, Black was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and studied the city's African-American history. He was active in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, most notably participating in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Chicago Freedom Movement during 1965 and 1966. Black was part of a coalition of Black Chicagoans that worked to elect Chicago's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983, and he mentored a young Barack Obama, the future U.S. president, on building a political base on Chicago's South Side.