I would like to argue that certain individuals of high political standing greatly impacted the civil rights movement during the most volatile years that this country has ever experienced.
The three people I think changed the civil rights movement for the better were Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Rosa Parks, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was a leader of a female activist group who fought to end segregation. One of her many accomplishments are that she joined a women’s group to help fight segregating laws. In addition to this, she wrote a letter to the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama. She threatened that the blacks were going to boycott the city buses if the laws were not changed. Unfortunately, the laws that were addressed in her letter were not changed and when a black woman was arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus her group was forced to boycott the public transportations buses. This boycott began December 5, 1955 and lasted over a year. For 381 days the blacks refused to ride the buses in Montgomery, using organized car pools or walking great distances instead. Some of those working for whites initially received rides to and from work by their employers, but even that assistance largely ended as whites were pressured by their neighbors to not help the blacks, thinking it would end the boycott sooner. Additionally, “Following Rosa Park’s arrest in December 1955, Robinson played a central role in the start of the protest by producing the leaflets that spread word of the boycott among the Black citizens of Montgomery“ (http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/jo-ann-gibson-robinson-was-unsung-activist). Rosa Parks was an icon of the civil rights movement. Although she was not the first person to refuse to give up her seat to a white person, she was the first to openly defy the Jim Crow laws by not giving up her seat on the bus