Category: Activist / page 4

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, […]
Septima Poinsette Clark
Septima Poinsette Clark


Septima Poinsette Clark was an educator and civil rights activist who developed a citizenship education program designed to eliminate illiteracy and get people ready to register and vote that played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Clark was born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was a former slave but her mother, born in Charleston but raised in Haiti, had never been enslaved. After graduating from high school in 1916, Clark worked as a school teacher in a rural school […]
Chelsea Clinton
Chelsea Clinton


Chelsea Clinton is the only child of former President Bill Clinton and former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Clinton was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, during her father's first term as governor. She received her B.A from Stanford, an MPH from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, and both an M.Phil. and doctorate in international relations from Oxford University. Clinton previously worked for McKinsey & Company and Avenue Capital Group. She was a special correspondent for NBC News from 2011 to 2014. Since 2011, she has […]
Mary Jane Coggeshall
Mary Jane Coggeshall


Mary Jane Coggeshall (January 17, 1836 - December 22, 1911) of Des Moines, Iowa, was known as "the mother of woman suffrage in Iowa." Coggeshall was born in Indiana and moved to Des Moines in 1865 with her husband and children. In 1870, she was a charter member of both the Polk County Woman Suffrage Society and the Iowa Women Suffrage Association. She served as the IWSA president in 1890, 1891 and 1903-1905, and then as honorary president from 1905-1911. She also served as president of the Des Moines Equal […]
Coralie Cook
Coralie Franklin Cook


Coralie Franklin Cook was an African American suffragist, orator and scholar. Descended from a woman enslaved by President Thomas Jefferson, Cook was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1861 to Albert and Mary Elizabeth Edmondson Franklin. She graduated from Storer Normal School in 1880. After a few years of teaching at her alma mater, she moved to Washington, D.C., and served as the head of the Home for Colored Orphans and Aged Women for five years. In 1899, she married George William Cook, an academic and NAACP member, and joined the […]
Mari Copeny
Mari Copeny


Amariyanna "Mari" Copeny, also known as "Little Miss Flint," is a youth activist from Flint, Michigan. In April 2014, the source of the drinking water for Flint, Michigan, was changed from treated water drawn from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Residents reported changes to the water's color, smell and taste, and in 2015, tests performed by the Environmental Protection Agency and Virginia Tech found elevated lead levels in the water. Officials had not applied corrosion inhibitors to the water, resulting in lead from aging city pipes leaching into the […]
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw


Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a civil rights advocate and founder of the field of critical race theory. She a leading authority in the areas of civil rights; Black feminist legal theory; and race, racism and the law. Crenshaw was born in 1959 in Canton, Ohio. She received a bachelor's degree in government and Africana studies from Cornell University in 1981, a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984, and an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1985. Crenshaw joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law […]
Janice Shaw Crouse
Janice Shaw Crouse


Janice Shaw Crouse was executive director of the World Congress of Families IX. She is senior fellow of Concerned Women for America, and is on the advisory board of Coalition for Divorce Reform. Crouse was raised in Milstead, Georgia. She graduated from Asbury University in 1961, received her master's degree from Purdue University and her Ph.D. from State University of New York in Buffalo. She was a college dean and public high school teacher before beginning her political career. Crouse became George H. W. Bush's speechwriter in 1991. In the […]
Marjorie Dannenfelser
Marjorie Dannenfelser


Marjorie Dannenfelser is president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a national pro-life group. Dannenfelser was born in Greenville, North Carolina. Pro-choice as a teenager, her position changed in 1986 after a summer internship at the Heritage Foundation following her freshman year at Duke University. Originally an Episcopalian, Dannenfelser converted to Catholicism in 1989. Prior to organizing the Susan B. Anthony List, Dannenfelser was staff director of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus and worked for U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan. In 1993, she joined the board of the newly-formed Susan B. Anthony […]