Category: Activist / page 3

Amelia Jenks Bloomer
Amelia Jenks Bloomer


Amelia Jenks Bloomer was a temperance activist, suffragist and editor. Bloomer was born on May 27, 1818, in Homer, New York. Though she received only few years of formal education, she worked briefly as a teacher in Homer and then, after to moving to live with her sister in Waterloo, New York, she worked for several years as a live-in governess for a family. She married David Bloomer of Seneca Falls in 1840. She became active in the Seneca Falls political and social community, joined the local women’s Temperance Society, […]
Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs


Grace Lee Boggs was a civil rights and labor activist and author. Boggs was born on June 27, 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island. She was born as "Yu Ping 玉平". She attended Barnard College at Columbia University for her B.A. Following her B.A., she pursued her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College, where she received a doctorate in philosophy. After she graduated, she met and married James Boggs. They both engaged heavily in racial justice efforts. Following her education, she took a job at the University of Chicago in the Philosophy […]
Ruby Bridges Hall
Ruby Bridges Hall


In November 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges was the youngest of several African American students to integrate schools in the South and the only one at her elementary school. Bridges was born on September 8, 1954, in Tylertown, Mississippi, moving to New Orleans, Louisiana with her family before she was school-aged. She attended kindergarten in a segregated school in 1959-1960. After a federal court ordered Louisiana to desegregate in 1960, Bridges was admitted to first grade at the all-white William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans in November. She and her mother […]
Charlotte Hawkins Brown
Charlotte Hawkins Brown


Charlotte Hawkins Brown was an educator, author, and civic leader who played a significant role in advancing African American education in the early 20th-century American South. Brown was born on June 11, 1883, in Henderson, North Carolina, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She attended the State Normal School at Salem, Massachusetts (now Salem State University), where she trained as a teacher. In 1902, she returned to North Carolina and founded the Palmer Memorial Institute, a preparatory school for African American students. Under her leadership, the institute became known for its […]
LaTosha Brown
LaTosha Brown


LaTosha Brown is an award-winning organizer, philanthropic consultant, political strategist and jazz singer. She was born in 1971 in Selma, Alabama. She attended Auburn University at Montgomery, earning a bachelor's degree in political science and government. She is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, a civic engagement organization that played an instrumental role in the 2017 Alabama U.S. Senate race. She is principal owner of TruthSpeaks Consulting, Inc., a philanthropy advisory consulting firm in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the founding project director of Grantmakers for Southern Progress. Throughout her […]
Sue M. Wilson Brown
Sue M. Wilson Brown


Sue M. Wilson Brown was a clubwoman, civil rights activist and suffragist in Iowa. Brown was born on September 8, 1877, in Staunton, Virginia. She moved with her family to a coal mining camp near Buxton, Iowa, an integrated coal mining town in Mahaska County, and graduated from high school in Oskaloosa. She married S. Joe Brown, a lawyer in Buxton, in 1902 and they moved to Des Moines. Brown joined the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, and from 1907 to 1909 she edited the Iowa Colored Woman, the […]
Charlotte Bunch
Charlotte Bunch


Charlotte Bunch is an advocate focused on international attention to women’s issues and the inclusion of gender and sexual orientation on global human rights agendas. Born October 13, 1944, in West Jefferson, North Carolina, Bunch is a 1966 magna cum laude graduate of Duke University. She is active as a writer, lesbian activist and lecturer. She created and edited Quest: A Feminist Journal (1974), one of the first journals to promote analysis and policymaking to improve women's rights and status in society. In 1989, Bunch founded the Center for Women's […]
Tarana Burke
Tarana Burke


Tarana Burke is a social activist and community organizer who founded the MeToo movement. Burke was born on September 12, 1973, in The Bronx, New York. As a teenager, she became involved in working to improve the lives of young girls living in marginalized communities. During college, first at Alabama State University then Auburn University, she organized press conferences and protests regarding economic and racial justice. After graduation, she moved to Selma, Alabama. After working with survivors of sexual violence, she developed the nonprofit "Just Be," an all-girls program for […]
Lucy Burns
Lucy Burns


Lucy Burns was a suffragist and women's rights advocate, and a co-founder of the National Women's Party. Burns was born in Brooklyn, New York City on July 28, 1879. She attended Columbia University, Vassar College, and Yale University, then became a high school English teacher in Brooklyn. In 1906, she moved to Germany, where she continued her education, studying at University of Bonn and Berlin. She then moved to the United Kingdom, where she studied at Oxford University. In the United Kingdom, Burns met Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel […]
Nannie Helen Burroughs
Nannie Helen Burroughs


Nannie Helen Burroughs was a suffragist, religious leader, educator, and social activist in the early 20th century. Born May 2, 1879 in Orange, Virginia to a pair of former enslaved people, Burroughs moved to Washington, D.C. with her mother after her father died. Although she excelled in school, she was rejected for a position teaching public school. Some historians believe this was a result of colorist discrimination against Burroughs’ darker complexion. Burroughs, instead, worked as a bookkeeper and editorial secretary for the National Baptist Convention (NBC). Climbing the ranks of […]