Audre Lorde was a writer, feminist and civil rights activist - or, as she famously put it, 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'. Born in New York in 1934, she had her first poem published while she was still in high school.

After stints as a factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor, she became a librarian in Manhattan and gradually rose to prominence as a poet, essayist and speaker, anthologised by Langston Hughes, lauded by Adrienne Rich, and befriended by James Baldwin.

She was made Poet Laureate of New York State in 1991, when she was awarded the Walt Whitman prize; she was also awarded honorary doctorates from Hunter, Oberlin and Haverford colleges. She died of cancer in 1992, aged 58.

Sojourner Truth (c.1797 - 1883) was born into slavery in New York State. In 1826, she escaped with her young daughter, leaving two of her other children behind. When her son was later illegally sold to a slave owner in Alabama she sued for his return, becoming one of the first black women to successfully challenge a white man in an American court. She spent the rest of her life campaigning for abolition, equal rights and universal suffrage, and found fame as a reformer and public speaker. Her memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, is published in Penguin Classics.

Richard Allen has been a writer for more than 30 years and has written on a wide variety of subjects for The Australian Financial Review, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, Sunday Telegraph (UK) and BRW.

His previous books include Shimmering Spokes: One Australian's 16,000 Kilometre Odyssey, Recollections of a Remarkable Age, Australia’s Remarkable Trees, The Spirit of Golf and How It Applies to Life, Great Properties of Country Victoria: The Western District’s Golden Age, and The Royal Melbourne Golf Club 125 Years.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the most influential and esteemed writers of the twentieth century, was born in Joplin, Missouri, and spent much of his childhood in Kansas before moving to Harlem.

His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926; its success helped him to win a scholarship to Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, from which he received his B.A. in 1929 and an honorary Litt.D. in 1943. Among his other awards and honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosenwald Fellowship, and a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hughes published more than thirty-five books, including works of poetry, short stories, novels, an autobiography, musicals, essays, and plays. 

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, 1871. He trained in music and in 1901 moved to New York with his brother John; together they wrote around two hundred songs for Broadway. His first book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912, was not a great success until he reissued it in his own name in 1927.

In that time he established his reputation as a writer and became known in the Harlem Renaissance for his poems and for collating anthologies of poems by other black writers. Through his work as a civil rights activist he became the first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as the first African American professor to be hired at New York University. He died in 1938.

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland, 1818. He was separated from his mother as a baby and lived with his grandmother up to the age of eight, when he was sent to live as a house servant, a field hand and then a ship caulker. He escaped to New York in 1838 and seven years later published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an autobiography of his life as a slave, which became an instant bestseller.

Douglass rose to fame as a powerful orator and spent the rest of his life campaigning for equality. He became a national leader of the abolitionist movement, a consultant to Abraham Lincoln in the civil rights movement and a passionate supporter of the women’s rights movement. He died in 1895.

James Baldwin was born and educated in New York. Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, was published in 1953. Evoking brilliantly his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, it was an immediate success and was followed by Giovanni's Room, which explores the theme of homosexual love in a sensitive and compelling way.

Another Country (1963) created something of a literary explosion and was followed in 1964 by two non-fiction books, Nobody Knows My Name and Notes of a Native Son, which contain several of the stories and essays that brought him fame in America. Nobody Knows My Name was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of its year. Going to Meet the Man was James Baldwin's first collection of stories.

He also published several collections of essays, including The Fire Next Time (1963), Nothing Personal (1964), No Name in the Street (1971), The Devil Finds Work (1976) and Evidence of Things Not Seen (1983), and he wrote two plays, The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mr Charlie (1965). His later novels include If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Little Man, Little Man (1975) and Just Above My Head (1979). Many of his books are published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics.

James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant-in-Aid. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987.

The Times obituary declared, 'The best of his work ... stands comparison with any of its period to come out of the United States,' while Newsweek described him as 'an angry writer, yet his intelligence was so provoking and his sentences so elegant that he quickly became the black writer that white liberals liked to fear'.

Born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Widely regarded as one of the greatest activists in history, he became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, aged 35. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.