Richard Allen was born on February 28, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of Second Chance: The Life and Death of Richard Allen, a biography of the civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1965 after leading the Poor People's Campaign and the Poor People's Legal Defense and Education Fund. Allen attended Morgan State University and received a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1962 and a master's degree in education from Morgan State in 1963. He has been a civil rights activist all of his life
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He has served as senior adviser to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as staff member for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), as director of staff at the Institute for Southern Studies (ISSU), and as executive director of the Southern Regional Council (SRC). Allen is also an author; his books include The Civil Rights Movement: Origins and Evolution (Prentice-Hall, 1970); The Civil Rights Movement (Macmillan, 1972); Negroes with Guns: The Military Arm of the Civil Rights Movement (JHU Press, 1975); The Black Muslims in America (Macmillan, 1978); and The Haitian Revolution: Race Against Time (Gale Research Company, 1982).
He has lectured widely on such subjects as racial justice and American history.