1908–2007
For over 90 years Marnesba Tackett was active in the Civil Rights Movement. She was a master organizer, coordinating the major rallies of the day. She was best known for helping desegregate the Los Angeles school system in several ways. When she was 44, she tackled the problems of the L.A. schools in the Black neighborhoods. The schools were so overcrowded that the students had to attend classes in shifts of half a day each. To help remedy the situation, she ran for and won the chair of the Education Committee at her local branch of the NAACP, and while there she won a lawsuit against the city’s racist text books. Later she joined the ACLU in their protests to desegregate schools, where she filed a lawsuit against the L.A. Unified School District accusing them of deliberately segregating students by race. This led to the Superior Court judge ordering the desegregation of the L.A. schools.
A dedicated organizer, Tackett was in charge of coordinating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Civil Rights rally at Wrigley Field, L.A., attended by 40,000 people in 1963. She went to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to march beside John Lewis for Voters Rights, fighting against the segregationist system of redistricting. Her lifelong activism combined with her strong organizational skills helped pave the way for others in the fight for equal rights. PBS made a documentary on her called The Feisty Fighter.