American actor, journalist, and politician, born in Nashville, United States. He is a writer, lecturer, politician, and a leader in the civil rights struggle. In the early 1960s, he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to being engaged in the Democratic Party, he helped create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), worked as its communications director, and graduated from a private preparatory boarding school in Pennsylvania. At the age of thirty-one, he returned to Morehouse College in 1971 to finish his Bachelor of Arts in English after leaving in 1961 to work on civil rights. He was chosen to serve in the House of Representatives in Georgia. He died in Fort Walton Beach, in the United States.