Category: Activist / page 3

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 […]
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 bachelors 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 Me Too 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 […]
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 […]
Keli Carender
Keli Carender


Keli Carender is an American blogger credited with being the first Tea Party protest activist when she was the principal organizer of a protest of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 on February 16, 2009. Carender was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1981. She is a graduate of Western Washington University where she majored in mathematics and biology, and has a postgraduate certificate of education in secondary math from the University of Oxford. Carender founded and co-chaired the Seattle Sons & Daughters of Liberty. She has served in […]
Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson


Rachel Carson was a marine biologist, environmentalist and author who demonstrated to the world the impacts of using fertilizers and pesticides on the environment. Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her M.A. in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on […]
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
Mary Ann Shadd Cary


Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an abolitionist, journalist, suffragist and educator. She was also the first female African American newspaper editor in North America after starting the Black newspaper The Provincial Freeman. Shadd Cary was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1823 into a free African American family and was the oldest of 13. Shadd Cary moved to Canada later in her life but continued her work with her newspaper, a weekly publication for African Americans, by frequently traveling back to the U.S. to gather information for the paper. After the […]
Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt


Carrie Lane Chapman Catt—an Iowa State University alumna who devoted most of her life to the expansion of women's rights around the world as well as international peace—is recognized as one of the key leaders of the American women's suffrage movement. Her superb oratory and organizational skills led to ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote in August 1920. Catt was born on January 9, 1859, in Ripon, Wis., the second of three children of Lucius and Maria (Clinton) Lane. In 1866, […]