Category: Activist / page 7

Helen Hamilton Gardener
Helen Hamilton Gardener


Helen Hamilton Gardener was an author, suffragist and civil service official. Gardener was born as Alice Chenoweth on January 21, 1853, in Winchester, Virginia, and grew up in Washington, D.C., Indiana and Ohio. She graduated from Cincinnati Normal School in 1873, and worked as a teacher for two years until her marriage to Charles Smart, the school commissioner of Ohio. They moved to New York City in 1880, where she lectured on sociology at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and wrote for local newspapers under several masculine pseudonyms. […]
Alicia Garza
Alicia Garza


Alicia Garza is an activist, editorial writer and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. Garza was born on January 4, 1981, in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with a degree in anthropology and sociology at the University of California in San Diego in 2002. On February 26, 2012, when Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by neighborhood security guard George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, Garza first used the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on Facebook. In 2013 she, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors officially created the Black Lives Matter Movement, and […]
Edna Fischel Gellhorn
Edna Fischel Gellhorn


Edna Fischel Gellhorn was a Missouri suffragist, reformer and philanthropist. Born in St. Louis in 1878, Gellhorn became involved in the Missouri suffrage campaign in 1910, serving in the St. Louis and Missouri Equal Suffrage Leagues and helping to organize suffrage demonstrations. In 1919, Gellhorn cast the deciding vote to open up the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League to African Americans. Gellhorn’s most famous accomplishment was a 1916 demonstration known as the “Golden Lane,” where thousands of suffragists, clad in “suffrage yellow,” lined the streets and distracted from the Democratic […]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman


Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a lecturer, writer, economist and leading theorist of the women’s movement in the United States. Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. Her paternal great-grandfather was Calvinist preacher Dr. Lyman Beecher and her great-aunts were novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, women's education advocate Catherine Beecher, and suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. Gilman's father abandoned the family, leaving them in poverty. Although Gilman received little formal education, she did attend the Rhode Island School of Design for two years. In 1884 she married artist Charles W. […]
Elizabeth Glaser
Elizabeth Glaser


Elizabeth Glaser was an AIDS activist who contracted HIV in a blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth to her daughter, Ariel. She learned of her infection in 1985, and that she had passed the virus on to Ariel through breast milk and to her son Jake, born in 1984, in utero. Ariel died in 1988 and Elizabeth died in 1994. Jake has survived into adulthood. When seeking treatment for their daughter, Glaser and her husband, actor and director Paul Michael Glaser, discovered that no AIDS drugs had yet been […]
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman


Emma Goldman was a political anarchist, writer and speaker who advocated for causes such as free speech, birth control, women's equality and worker’s rights. Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno, Russia, to a poor Jewish family. Due to her family's poverty, Goldman had to leave school and work. As a teenager, she began studying the ideas of Russian populists and nihilists. In 1885, she emigrated to Rochester, New York, with an older sister to avoid being forced into marriage by her father. Working as a seamstress in […]
Emma González
X González


X González (born Emma González) is an American activist and advocate for gun control, and a survivor of the February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. In the days following the shooting, she and other Stoneman Douglas students founded the gun-control advocacy group Never Again MSD. González first drew national attention after a speech she gave at a rally against gun violence, proclaiming "We call B.S." on the lack of action by politicians funded by the NRA. She continued to advocate for gun control after that rally, […]
Jessica González-Rojas
Jessica González-Rojas


Jessica González-Rojas Represents New York State's 34th District in the New York State Assembly. She assumed office on January 1, 2021. González-Rojas earned her bachelor's degree in international relations from Boston University and a master's degree in public administration with a concentration in public and nonprofit management and public policy from NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She has also completed a certificate program in management at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. From 2002 to 2006, González-Rojas served on the New York State Democratic Committee for […]
Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore
Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore


Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore, an author, photographer and social issues advocate, was second lady of the United States from 1993-2001. She is the wife of Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States. Gore was born on August 19, 1948, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. She was given the nickname Tipper by her mother. She received her B.A. in psychology in 1970 from Boston University and a master's degree in psychology from Vanderbilt University's George Peabody College, in 1975. She worked part-time as a […]
Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman


Amanda Gorman is an award-winning writer, poet, and activist. Gorman was born on March 7, 1998, in Los Angeles, California. She began writing at a very young age and was encouraged to practice her writing by her mother. In 2020, Gorman graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology. In 2017, Gorman was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate. On Jan. 20, 2021, Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden. She the youngest inaugural poet in […]