Hannie Schaft

Hannie Schaft 

Johanna Jannetje Schaft was a resistance fighter in Holland during World War II.  She became known as "the girl with the red hair." Her secret name in the resistance movement was Hannie.

After the German occupation of the Netherlands, university students were required to sign a declaration of allegiance to the occupation authorities. When Hannie refused to sign the petition in support of the occupation forces, she was not allowed to continue her studies.  She moved back in with her parents and became more and more active in the resistance movement.  

She was eventually arrested at a military checkpoint on April 17, 1945. She was shot dead three weeks before the end of the war; two men took her to the beach of Overveen and one shot her at close range, only wounding her. She supposedly said to her executioners: "I shoot better than you", after which the other man delivered the final shot.

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger was an American folk singer and activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers.  

A prolific songwriter, his best-known songs have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are sung throughout the world. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Right Movement. 

Seeger was involved in the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, which he co-founded in 1966. The organization has worked since then to bring attention to pollution in the Hudson River, and and worked to clean it.

Dr. Bob

Dr. Bob was an American physician and surgeon who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous with Bill Wilson, more commonly known as Bill W. 

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.  She was a ground-breaking reporter known for a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, and an expose in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. She launched a new kind of investigative journalism.  In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Ada Lovelace

"I never really am satisfied that I understand anything, because my understanding can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand."

Ada Lovelace

Audrey Hepburn

Qui Jin

The young intellectuals are all chanting, "Revolution, Revolution," but I say the revolution will have to start in our homes, by achieving equal rights for women.

Qui Jin

Thomas Merton

"Love is our true destiny.   

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another."

Thomas Merton 

Lucretia Mott

"There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large - of man as well as woman - than the true and proper position of woman."

Lucretia Mott

Gene Kelly

"You dance love,

and you dance joy,

and you dance dreams."

Gene Kelly  (August 23, 1912 – February 2, 1996) was an American dancer, actor, singer, film director, producer, and choreographer. Kelly was known for his energetic and athletic dancing style, his good looks and the likeable characters that he played on screen.

Bayard Rustin

"The power of love in the world is the greatest power existing.  If you have a greater power, my friend, you may move me."

Bayard Rustin  was an American leader in movements for civil rights, pacifism and non-violence and gay rights.

He was born and raised in Pennsylvania where his family was involved in civil rights work. In 1936, he moved to Harlem in New York City and earned a living as a nightclub and stage singer.  Above all, he was active in the struggle for for civil rights.  In the Fellowship of Reconcilition (FOR), Rustin practiced non-violence.  

He was a leading activist of the early 1947-1955 civil rights movment, participating in the 1947 Freedom Ride to challenge racial segregation on interstate busing. 

Rustin promoted the philosophy of nonviolence and the practices of nonviolent resistance, which he had observed while working with Gandhi's movement in India. 

Rustin became a leading strategist of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1968. He was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was headed by A. Philip Randolph, the leading African-American labor-union president.

After the passage of the civil-rights legislation of 1964–65, Rustin focused attention on the economic problems of working-class and unemployed African Americans, suggesting that the civil-rights movement had left its period of "protest" and had entered an era of "politics", in which the Black community had to ally with the labor movement. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Communist Vietnam and Cambodia. He was on a humanitarian mission in Haiti when he died in 1987.

Rustin was a gay man who had been arrested for a homosexual act in 1953. Homosexuality was criminalized in parts of the United States until 2003. Rustin's sexuality, or at least his embarrassingly public criminal charge, was criticized by some fellow pacifists and civil-rights leaders. Rustin was attacked as a "pervert" or "immoral influence" by political opponents from segregationists to Black power militants, and from the 1950s through the 1970s. In addition, his pre-1941 Communist Party affiliation when he was a young man was controversial. To avoid such attacks, Rustin served only rarely as a public spokesperson. He usually acted as an influential adviser to civil-rights leaders. In the 1970s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes.

On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin