Rosa Parks was an African-American Civil Rights activist. She became the catalyst for the Civil Rights movement when she refused to move from her seat on the segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks was brought up in a family that bore the scars of slavery, her grandparents were former slaves and advocates for racial equality. …
Claudette Colvin was a pioneer of the Civil Rights movement. She was the first to refuse to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Nine months before Rosa Parks. Colvin was 15 years old when riding the bus home from school when the conductor ordered her to give …
Irena Sendler (or Irena Sendlerowa in Poland) was a Polish nurse and social worker. She served in the Polish underground (Polish resistance movement) during WWII and was head of the children’s section of Żegota, a clandestine Polish rescue organisation. Sendler was influenced by her father, who was one of the first Polish socialists. He was …
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, GBE was an English feminist and suffragist. She is the founder of the Fawcett Society who carry on her fight for equal rights for women. Fawcett’s interest in politics began at an early age encouraged by her enterprising family. In 1865 Fawcett’s sister Louise took her to a speech on Women’s …
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher and advocate of Women’s rights. Wollstonecraft was brought up by an abusive father whom she left at age 17 when her mother died. She set up a school in Newington Green with her sister, who had fled an abusive marriage. She used this experience to write the pamphlet …
Florence Nightingale is known as ‘the founder of modern nursing’ and is famously thought of as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’. She is named after Florence, Italy, her place of birth. Nightingale was active in helping those less fortunate than herself early in her life, helping those who were ill or poor in the village …
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the ‘godmother of rock ‘n’ roll’. She was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and recording artist. Tharpe’s mother encouraged her musically and by 4 years old she was performing under the name ‘Little Rosetta Nubin’ (Rosetta Nubin is her birth name). She would sing and play guitar. At six Tharpe was …
Sylvia Rivera was an American drag queen (a term she later claimed to hate, rejecting all labels), gay liberation and transgender activist. Along with Marsha P Johnson she was one of the first to resist the police during the Stonewall Riots. Rivera reportedly shouted, “I’m not missing a minute of this, it’s the revolution!” as …
Marsha “Pay No Mind” Johnson was an activist, performer, model, sex worker (for which she was frequently arrested), and mother figure to many young trans women in New York during her lifetime. She was such a well known face that she posed for Andy Warhol, which she felt was a clear indication of her fame. …
Coretta Scott King was an American civil rights activist and the wife of 1960s civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. She devoted her life to the highest values of human dignity in service to social change. Coretta was born in Alabama where she graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. She then attended Antioch College …