Margo Adair (1950 – 2010) Margo’s work in politics, spirituality, and applied meditation touched the lives of thousands of people. For more than three decades, she was both a theoretical leader and practitioner, exploring the intersections of political change and personal transformation. Along with her writings on meditation and spirituality, she helped define the work of people of European descent in the uprooting of racism. Along with her writings on meditation and spirituality, she helped define the work of people of European descent in the uprooting of racism. She conducted countless workshops across the country on establishing productive, positive relationships across the differences that divide us. She co-authored with Shea Howell some of the earliest work in this area, The Subjective Side of Politics and Breaking Old Patterns, Weaving New Ties. Both works continue to influence the development of efforts across the country to address issues of race, class, and gender. She carried this commitment throughout her last year, conducting anti-oppression trainings and participating in many volunteer initiatives for social and environmental justice. She was an ally to the American Indian Movement, the environmental movement, and was a central figure in the National Organization of Men Against Sexism.She and her partner Bill Aal co-founded Tools for Change, to help individuals and organizations address issues of power, embrace cultural diversity and tap into intuitive and creative resources. They co-authored Margo’s third book, Practical Meditations for Busy Souls, and together have explored the intricate dance between spirituality and social justice.  Jessie Daniel Ames (1883-1972) She was one of the first Southern white women to speak out and work publicly against lynching of blacks, which were often done by white men as a misguided act of chivalry to protect their “virtue”. She bravely stood up to them and led organized efforts by white women in protest of its brutality, helping to bring about the decline of lynching in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1916 she organized a local women’s suffrage association in Texas and helped the state become the first one to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1919, she was the founding president of the Texas League of Women Voters. She also served as a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions of 1920, 1924, and 1928. In 1929 she became the director of the women’s committee of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC). In 1930 Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which obtained the signatures of 40,000 women to their Pledge (see below) Against Lynching. Despite hostile community opposition and physical threats, they conducted petition drives, lobbying and fundraising across the South to work against lynching. Pledge:

We declare lynching is an indefensible crime, destructive of all principles of government, hateful and hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity, debasing and degrading to every person involved…[P]ublic opinion has accepted too easily the claim of lynchers and mobsters that they are acting solely in defense of womanhood. In light of the facts we dare no longer to permit this claim to pass unchallenged, nor allow those bent upon personal revenge and savagery to commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women. We solemnly pledge ourselves to create a new public opinion in the South, which will not condone, for any reason whatever, acts of mobs or lynchers. We will teach our children at home, at school and at church a new interpretation of law and religion; we will assist all officials to uphold their oath of office; and finally, we will join with every minister, editor, school teacher and patriotic citizen in a program of education to eradicate lynchings and mobs forever from our land.

Kirsten Anderson joined White Lightning, a radical community organization in NYC founded to support residents in drug addiction recovery, recognizing that in the US the drug trade, and by extension, recovery programs had become some of the few places where people of various races and classes regularly mixed. White Lightning organized to transform the dilapidated Lincoln Hospital, serving predominantly Puerto Rican and Black communities of the South Bronx, and formed a mutual aid society, providing legal aid and radically minded drug recovery groups. When Anderson joined, as part of her initiation the founder of White Lightning administered an oral test of her political orientation, concluding “Great on class and race, but a little weak on women’s issues.” Anderson went on to build a women’s caucus within White Lightning called “Women Hold Up Half the Sky” and provided free clinics for women on issues like how to obtain a divorce. Anne Braden (1924 –2006)Always “favored the more radical course of action on the question of segregation. She simply could not see the argument of being prudent and going slowly”. During the 1970s, Anne wrote two open letters to southern white women, in which “she urges white women to build a women’s movement that is not at odds with the Black liberation struggle”. Anne was involved in work led by people of color, mainly in the Southern Organizing Committee (SOC) and the Kentucky Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. She is the author of The Wall Between (1958), a book about the sedition trial and campaign against racism. Up until her death, Anne continued “to work eighteen-hour days as an activist and writer in Louisville, teach college courses on racism, and speak widely on antiracism and social justice.” Marilyn Buggey was one of the founding members of the October 4th Organization (O4O), which organized laid off employees of Goldman Paper Company, uniquely combining labor activism and community organizing. When Italian-American Frank Rizzo was elected mayor of Philadelphia in 1971 with tough-on-crime rhetoric and campaigns criminalizing the Black Power and New Left movements, O4O began organizing white working class people to think critically about the fallacy of Rizzo’s racialized logic and to recognize shared class interests with people of color. Buggey grew up poor in Philly’s Germantown neighborhood. As a teenager, her father would remove the light bulb from her room so that she couldn’t study, insisting she work rather than go to school. Despite this, she left home and attended Temple University, where she became involved in anti-war organizing, eventually dropping out of college to join the Free Press movement and co-found O4O. Using forums for popular education and a unique workplace-plus-community organizing model, O4O staged numerous campaigns to simultaneously improve working class people’s lives and combat institutional racism in Philadelphia. Marilyn Buck(1947-2010)A Marxist revolutionary and feminist poet, who was imprisoned for her participation in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur and the 1983 U.S. Senate bombing.  Buck received an 80-year sentence, which she served in federal prison, from where she published numerous articles and poems.  She was released less than a month before her death.  Buck was involved in organizing against the Vietnam War, as well as anti-racist activities.  She joined Students for a Democratic Society and with other SDS women helped to incorporate women’s liberation into the organization’s politics.  She worked with Third World Newsreel in outreach in support of Native American and Palestinian sovereignty and against U.S. intervention in Iran and Vietnam and in solidarity with the Black Liberation movement.  In prison, Marilyn spoke out against the injustices experienced by women of color, lead poetry workshops and translated for Spanish-speaking inmates. Robin DiAngelo Dr. DiAngelo teaches courses in Multicultural Teaching, Inter-group Dialogue Facilitation, Cultural Diversity & Social Justice, and Anti-Racist Education. Her area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, explicating how Whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives. She has been a consultant and trainer for over 20 years on issues of racial and social justice. “I grew up poor and white.  While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not.  In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white.” Bernardine Dohrn Currently a professor of law and the recent director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center, Dohrn was a former leader and founder of the anti-Vietnam war radical organization, Weather Underground.  As one of the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, the radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society, she and her comrades advocated for communist revolution, and for a white radical movement to work alongside the Black Panthers. While attending law school, Dohrn began working with Martin Luther King, Jr. She was the first law student organizer for the National Lawyers Guild, and was organizing against the war in Vietnam and in conjunction with the Black Freedom Movement. In May 1970 Dohrn recorded and sent a transcript of a tape recording to the New York Times, the statement was a “Declaration of a State of War” on behalf of the Weathermen. On October 14, 1970, Bernardine Dohrn was added to the FBI’s list of the 10 most wanted fugitives, for her involvement with the trial of the Chicago 8 and leadership during Chicago’s 1969 “Days of Rage”.  Co-author of the subversive 1974 manifesto “Prairie Fire”, Dohrn and other Weathermen went underground in their battle against the government and use of strategic bombing of symbolic sites to “bring the war home”. Virginia Foster Durr (1903-1999)As staff of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), the Durrs helped organize a four day conference in Birmingham, Alabama. The year was 1938, and the conference was the first of its kind in the South — “interracial and including all strata of society.” In attendance were “all the groups working for the democratic and economic development of the South”. Blacks and whites were breaking the rules of segregation, and on the second day of the conference infamous police chief “Bull” Connor showed up to “enforce the city ordinance that banned racially mixed meetings. Black people would have to sit on one side of the central aisle and white people on the other”. When Eleanor Roosevelt arrived soon after, she insisted on sitting on a folding chair exactly in between the two segregated groups. Durr revealed in interviews at age 87 that “she did not experience herself as a lonely nonconformist, or even as a radical. She knew that racial integration and the right to vote, the two things she especially worked on, were commonplace in almost every other developed country in the world” Durr stated, “I did know what was right, and I felt that denying anybody the right to vote was wrong. I felt to segregate was wrong. I never had any doubts about it…When things get rough, if you don’t believe in what you are doing, then you might as well give up. That’s the one thing that keeps you going.” Ruth Frankenberg(1957- 2007)The British-born sociologist Ruth Frankenberg, did groundbreaking research on how race shapes people’s lives in the US. Her first book, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (1993), focused on the advantages that whiteness carries for women rather than just the disadvantages suffered by non-white women, and so changed the approach of American social scientists to the ways racial inequalities endure even when white people regard themselves as anti-racist. Perhaps most importantly, Ruth illuminated how white women sometimes change their racial consciousness and action in promising individual and collective directions. The Grimké Sisters Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) and Angelina Grimké Weld (1805-1879), known as the Grimké sisters, were 19th-century American Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women’s rights. They were born in Charleston, South Carolina. Throughout their lives, they traveled throughout the North, lecturing about their first hand experiences with slavery on their family’s plantation. Among the first women to act publicly in social reform movements, they received abuse and ridicule for their abolitionist activity. They both realized that women would have to create a safe space in the public arena to be effective reformers. They became early activists in the women’s rights movement, and were the first female public speakers in the United States. The Grimké sisters challenged social grounds on two different levels. The sisters spoke for the antislavery movement, at the time there was widespread disapproval of this; many male public speakers of this issue were criticized by the press. The public speaking of the Grimké sisters was also criticized because they were women. A group of ministers composed a letter citing the Bible in reprimanding the sisters for stepping out of the “woman’s proper sphere,” which was characterized by silence and subordination. They came to understand that women were oppressed and that, without power, women could not address or right the wrongs of society. Such an understanding made these women into ardent feminists.Angelina wrote her first tract, “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836),” to encourage southern women to join the abolitionist movement for the sake of white womanhood as well as black slaves. To her mind, slavery harmed white womanhood by destroying the institution of marriage when white men fathered their slaves’ children. To publicly discuss such a delicate subject caused an uproar. The sisters created more controversy when Sarah published “Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836)” and Angelina republished an “Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States” in 1837. In addition to denouncing slavery, an acceptable practice in radical circles, the sisters denounced race prejudice. Further, they argued that white women had a natural bond with female, black slaves. These last two ideas were extreme even for radical abolitionists. Their public speaking for the abolitionist cause continued to draw criticism, each attack making the Grimke sisters more determined. Devoutly religious, these Quaker converts’ works are predominantly religious in nature with strong biblical arguments. Both their abolitionist sentiments and their feminism sprang from deeply held religious convictions. They neatly summarized the abolitionist arguments, which would eventually lead to the Civil War. Sarah’s work addressed, 150 years early, many issues that are familiar to the modern feminist movement. Heather Hackman Dr. Hackman has been teaching and training on social justice issues since 1992. She has taught courses in social justice and multicultural education (pre-service and in-service teachers), race and racism, heterosexism and homophobia, social justice education (higher education leadership), oppression and social change, sexism and gender oppression, class oppression, and Jewish oppression.  In 2005 she founded Hackman Consulting Group and consults nationally on issues of deep diversity, equity and social justice. She has published in the area of social justice education theory and practice, racism in health care, and is currently working a book examining issue of race, racism and whiteness in education through a model she calls “cellular wisdom”. Her most recent research focuses on climate change and its intersections with issues of race, class and gender.   Heather Heyer Heather Heyer was a waitress, legal aide, and racial justice activist who friends described as a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised who was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices.  Heather was killed by a vehicle driven into a crowd of counter-protestors at a white supremacist rally known as the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina on August 12, 2017.  To learn more, hear her mother’s tribute to Heather at her memorial, and read the University of Virginia Graduate Student Coalition Charlottesville Syllabus.   Naomi Jaffe Naomi Jaffe founded a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967. In that year she also joined Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH). In the late 1960s, Jaffe joined the Weather Underground and went underground from 1970-1978. Jaffe’s analysis of that period is that in the Weather Underground she faced sexism, and with white feminists she “missed an anti-imperialist, antiracist analysis”. Later, Jaffe worked with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). She was involved in the struggle within CISPES to determine the connection between Central American and United States liberation movements. Jaffe believed that “a model that was accountable to Central American activists and to communities of color in the United States was the antiracist position”. Naomi Jaffe later served as the director of Holding Our Own, a multiracial feminist organization in Albany, N.Y, where she is still the coordinator of the local Free Mumia Committee.   Selma James Selma James became the first organising secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in 1965, and a founding member of the Black Regional Action Movement and editor of its journal in 1969. In 1972, James’ publication, Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, launched the “domestic labour debate” by spelling out how housework and other caring work women do outside of the market produces the whole working class, thus the market economy, based on those workers, is built on women’s unwaged work.  In this same year she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign which demands money from the State for the unwaged work in the home and in the community. The 1983 publication of James’s Marx and Feminism broke with established Marxist theory by providing a reading of Marx’s Capital from the point of view of women and of unwaged work.Since 2000 James has been international coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike, a network of grassroots women, bringing together actions and initiatives in many countries. The Strike demands that society “Invest in Caring Not Killing”, and that military budgets be returned to the community starting with women, the main carers everywhere. She has been working with the Venezuelan Revolution since 2002. In 2012 PM Press published Sex, Race and Class–the Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952–2011, which offers pioneering intersectional and revolutionary analysis from a span of six decades of this influential political thinker and activist. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was a revolutionary Ashkenazi Jewish feminist, poet, writer and lesbian activist. She served as a the founding member and first executive director for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). Her writings on radical diasporism challenged Zionist colonial frameworks, instead demanding that Jewish safety and home require us to fight for collective safety and liberation in diaspora. She challenged and disrupted narratives of white supremacy within Jewish communities, centering Jews of color and queer and trans Jews. She has inspired generations of radical queer Jews building home where we are, fighting for racial and economic justice and wielding the power of our Jewish traditions to deepen and grow our movements, our bodies and our lives. May her memory be a blessing! Frances E. Kendall Is a nationally known consultant who has focused for more than thirty-five years on organizational change, diversity, and white privilege. Author of Diversity in the Classroom and Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race, Kendall was recently named a “Pioneer of Diversity” by Profiles in Diversity Journal.   Chelsea Manning Private Manning is a United States Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after releasing the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge, but with credit for time served and good behavior could be released on parole after eight years. Assigned in 2009 as an intelligence analyst to an Army unit based near Baghdad, Manning had access there to databases used by the United States government to transmit classified information. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 United States diplomatic cables; and 500,000 army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs. Much of the material was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.  She is one of the most courageous whistleblowers in US history.

Manning was raised as a boy, Bradley, but in a statement issued the day after sentencing the soldier identified herself as female, having felt female since childhood.

A selection from the transcript of her statement read by her lawyer David Coombs at a press conference after the sentence, the longest ever handed down in a case involving a leak of United States government information for the purpose of having the information reported to the public:

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability. In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror. Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission. Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light. As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

Peggy McIntosh Peggy McIntosh consults with higher education institutions throughout the world on creating multicultural and gender-fair curricula. She is the author of many influential articles on curriculum change, women’s studies, and systems of unearned privilege. She is best known for authoring the groundbreaking article “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies”(1988). This analysis and its shorter form, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1989), have been instrumental in putting the dimension of privilege into discussions of gender, race and sexuality. The essay set forth the concept of white privilege, a theoretical construct that has since significantly influenced anti-racist theory and practice as well as other activist movements. “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” McIntosh is the Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, she is founder and co-director of the National S.E.E.D. (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project on Inclusive Curriculum. The transformational SEED Project helps teachers, counselors, and administrators create their own year-long, site-based seminars on making school climates, curricula, and teaching methods more gender fair and multi-culturally equitable.

Juliette Hampton Morgan (1914-1957) Juliette Hampton Morgan, a Montgomery librarian, was among a small group of white liberal southerners who advocated for racial justice in the 1940s and 1950s, a time of great social and political upheaval in Alabama. In letters to the Montgomery Advertiser, essays, and private correspondence with friends, family members, and colleagues, Morgan made some of the most insightful observations in the historical record about Montgomery’s racial crises.

She wrote as a seventh-generation southerner, not as an outsider, and her work to end racial segregation came at a high cost when she took her own life after backlash and ostracism from white Montgomerians at her activism. For years in Montgomery Morgan had witnessed white bus drivers mistreat black men and women who paid the same 10-cent fare that she did. Although Morgan had been raised to accept the principles of white supremacy, she was outraged when she saw drivers refuse to pick black people up in the rain, throw their change on the floor rather than hand it to them, and call them ugly names. One evening on her way home from the library, Morgan watched a black woman pay her fare and leave the bus to enter by the back door, as black people were required to do. Before the woman could re-enter, however, the driver pulled away. Morgan had seen actions like this before, but this evening she jumped up and pulled the emergency cord. When the bus stopped, she demanded that the driver open the back door and let the woman board. For the next several years, she disrupted service every time she witnessed an abuse. Morgan’s activism eventually threatened her position at the library. On July 15, 1957, someone burned a cross on Morgan’s front lawn. She resigned the following day and that night apparently took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Kathy Obear Dr. Kathy Obear isPresident of ALLIANCE FOR CHANGE Consulting and Founding Faculty of The Social Justice Training Institute, a five-day intensive professional development program for social justice educators and practitioners focusing on dynamics of race and racism. She has over 25 years experience as a trainer and organizational development consultant specializing in creating inclusion, team and organizational effectiveness, conflict resolution, and change management.For over a decade she has passionately worked to help social justice educators and diversity practitioners respond more effectively when they feel “triggered” so they navigate difficult dialogues and triggering events with greater competence.  She additionally leads workshops on how to dismantle racism as white women. Earlier in her career Kathy worked in Student Affairs at several colleges and, since 1987 when she started her consulting business, she has given speeches, facilitated training sessions, and consulted to top leaders at hundreds of universities, human service organizations and corporations across the United States and internationally to increase the passion, competence, and commitment to create inclusive, socially just environments where all members can thrive. Her articles include “Best Practices that Address Homophobia and Heterosexism in Corporations,” and “Navigating Triggering Events: Critical Skills for Facilitating Difficult Dialogues,” The Diversity Factor. Minnie Bruce Pratt Pratt has been active in organizing that intersects women’s and gender issues, LGBT issues, anti-racist work, and anti-imperialist initiatives.   Together with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, she co-authored Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, which has been adopted for classroom use in hundreds of college courses and community groups. A prolific author and poet addressing intersections of social oppression, Pratt’s most recently co-edited the anthology Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism. After 30 years of teaching she is currently Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Writing & Rhetoric at Syracuse University, where she also serves as faculty for a developing Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/ Transgender Studies Program. Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) There are few writers of comparable influence and achievement in so many areas of the contemporary women’s movement as the poet and theorist Adrienne Rich. Over the years, hers has become one of the most eloquent, provocative voices on the politics of sexuality, race, language, power, and women’s culture. There is scarcely an anthology of feminist writings that does not contain her work or specifically engage her ideas, a women’s studies course that does not read her essays, or a poetry collection that does not include her work or that of the next generation of poets steeped in her example. In nineteen volumes of poetry, three collections of essays–On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979), Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986), and What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)–the ground-breaking study of motherhood, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), the editing of influential lesbian-feminist journals, and a lifetime of activism and visibility, the work of Adrienne Rich has persistently resonated at the heart of contemporary feminism and its resistance to racism, militarism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism.In 1997 Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, saying, “Art . . . means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.” In 2003, Rich joined other poets in protesting the war in Iraq by refusing to attend a White House symposium on poetry. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) From 1934 to 1940 worked with the national president of the NAACP to secure a federal anti-lynching bill. For a decade served on the Board of Directors of the NAACP. Resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution because they refused to allow Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. Sought opportunities for Black Americans in defense industries and an end of discrimination in the military. Ann Russo Antiracist feminist writer, educator, and activist who is currently the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at DePaul University. Her research, teaching, and activism over the past 25 years has been embedded in the social movements organized to address the pervasive sexual, racial and homophobic harassment, abuse, and violence in women’s lives. She is the author of Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action in the Feminist Movement (2001); co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality; and co-editor of Talking Back and Acting Out: Women Negotiating the Media Across Cultures and Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. As an activist, she has participated in local and national organizing efforts addressing discrimination and violence, including work with Chicago with the women and Girls Collective Action Network, YWCA’s Chicago-Area Rape Crisis Line, Rape Victim Advocates, Beyondmedia, the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network and Queer White Allies Against Racism, among others. Mab Segrest  Born in 1949, and grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama. While Segrest’s parents were working to set up white private schools, she was fighting segregation. For six years, Segrest coordinated the work of the North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence (NCARRV). She is the cofounder of Feminary: A Lesbian-Feminist Journal for the South and is the author of My Mama’s Dead Squirrel (1985) and Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994). She also coedited The Third Wave: Feminist Essays on Racism (1997). During her six years with NCARRV, Segrest dealt with many acts of violence perpetrated by the Klan. Many times she articulates the costs to her physical and mental health. The memory of past violence and the threat of future violence was always with her. Segrest states, “I had become a woman haunted by the dead…I was what the murderers would call a ‘n_____ lover’ and what they’d call a dyke.” “The racism, the homophobia, the hatred of Jews and women, the greed accelerate, and they sicken us all. But we do not have to accept it. There is a lot to be done, but how we go about it is also important. Because all we have ever had is each other.” (Memoir of a Race Traitor, 1994, p. 80). Ricky Sherover-Marcuse (1938-1988) Ricky is best known among a generation of political activists from the sixties and seventies as the initiator of workshops in “unleaming racism.” She developed this form of consciousness raising, and conducted workshops all over the United States, Europe, and the Middle East until her death. A Jew, committed to the liberation of all peoples, Ricky was determined to forge an authentic, socialist revolutionary movement by encouraging both an understanding of the political roots of oppression, and of how it is personally internalized within each of us and enacted, however unwittingly, in daily life. Co-founder of TODOS: Sherover Simms Alliance Building Institute, whose aim is to help individuals and groups heal from the effects of oppression, build cross-cultural alliances, and create environments where youths and adults from all cultures are honored, valued, and respected. Lillian Eugenia Smith (1897-1966) Was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known best for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944). A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions almost guaranteed social ostracism. Fay Stender (March 29, 1932 – May 19, 1980) was a lawyer and prison rights activist from the San Francisco Bay Area who represented clients included Black Panther leader Huey Newton, the Soledad Brothers and Black Guerrilla Family founder George Jackson. In 1970, Stender edited and arranged for Jackson’s prison letters to be published as Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, and established a legal defense fund with the proceeds from the book. Stender eventually had a falling out with Jackson over his requests that she smuggle weapons and explosives into the prison.  In 1979, Stender was brutally attacked by a recently released member of the Black Guerrilla Family, resulting in partial paralysis and chronic pain.  She committed suicide a year later. While the death of Fay Stender is indeed a tragedy, and is a sobering reminder of the imperfect world in which we struggle, she remains a role model for the life she led and the ways in which she gave herself completely to radical causes. Peggy Terry was a white working class organizer in Chicago’s up-town neighborhood with JOIN Community Union, pre-cursor to the Young Patriots (which formed part of the powerful multi-racial Rainbow Coalition) and successfully organized neighborhoods and communities around welfare rights, tenants rights, unemployment, and police brutality; while continually bringing an explicit civil rights and anti-racist message to their white working class organizing. Terry was raised in poverty during the Great Depression in Oklahoma and Kentucky by family members who were sympathizers of the KKK. However, Terry’s personal experiences of poverty and first-hand witness accounts of the brutality faced by civil rights demonstrators during the 1950s radicalized her to begin organizing with the communist party, eventually joining Students for Democratic Society (SDS). With SDS, Terry became one of the founding organizers of working class white residents in Chicago, many of whom were migrants from the South and Appalachia, building JOIN Community Union in Chicago’s uptown. What made JOIN different from Chicago’s Alinsky-driven organizations at the time was its mission to organize around poor people’s immediate needs with an explicit effort to address racism. Terry’s influence and ability to demonstrate this vision—whether over coffee in her kitchen or when confronting the welfare caseworkers—was critical for JOIN. By 1967, tensions were high between working class community based organizers within JOIN and the influx of student organizers driven to JOIN by both SDS and the Black Power Movement’s call for white folks to “organize your own”. In 1968, JOIN Community Union asked all organizers with student backgrounds to leave. Infiltrated by FBI informant Thomas Mosher and destabilized by local police raids and harassment, JOIN started to buckle under internal and external pressures. In 1968 JOIN suspended its local work to take on one last campaign: the vice-presidential run of Peggy Terry with Eldridge Cleaver in the Peace and Freedom Party. While JOIN itself disbanded shortly after this unsuccessful campaign, many Chicago residents were radicalized through JOIN and committed to a lifetime of racial and social justice organizing. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland is an American civil rights activist and a Freedom Rider from Arlington, Virginia. She was a white teenager in the south during Segregation and is known for taking part in sit-ins, marches, being the first white person to integrate Tougaloo College in Jackson Mississippi, and to be a part of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She attended demonstrations and sit-ins and was one of the Freedom Riders in 1961 who was arrested and put on death row for months at the notorious Parchman Penitentiary. She was also the first white person to join in the 1963 Woolworths lunch counter sit-ins in Jackson, Mississippi, and that same year participated in the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 which contributed to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act that year. For her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement, she was disowned by her family, attacked, shot at, cursed at, and hunted down by the Klan. She placed her life in jeopardy in order to help create the change she wanted to see in the United States. Later in life, she started a foundation known as the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland foundation. The foundation’s goal is to educate youth about the civil rights movement and to help teach youth how to become activists in their own communities. ”Anyone can make a difference. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember, you don’t have to change the world . . . just change your world.” *all information comes from online biographies, memorials, and Wikipedia