Every Fourth of July, Americans gather to celebrate, among many things, Independence Day and the Founding Fathers. America is basically obsessed with old white dudes. Just look at the money we use: until Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said they would add “a woman” (the identity of whom has yet to be specified) to the $10 bill, presidents, Founding Fathers, and other white men grace our paper money. But America’s history is so much more complex than that, filled with activists and radicals who pushed America to its limits. Like our great nation, none of them is perfect, but they all broke barriers or worked for those who couldn’t advocate for themselves. This year, it’s worth taking time to celebrate other Americans who changed America for the better.
1) Evan Wolfson, founder and President of Freedom to Marry
CREDIT: David Shankbone / Flickr
Evan Wolfson was born on February 4, 1957 in Brooklyn, New York and is a gay rights attorney largely credited with the legal victories that ultimately legalized same-sex marriage. He attended Yale College and worked in for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he directed the National Freedom to Marry Coalition, a precursor to Freedom to Marry. When he served as co-counsel in a 1990s marriage equality case in Hawaii, the notion that same-sex couples would be allowed to legally wed was considered fringe. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in response to the case. Rather than give up, Wolfson founded Freedom to Marry, which organized for years on all levels to advocate for the right to marry. Appropriately, Wolfson echoed a founding father in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette following the historic Supreme Court ruling. “My message was, same sex marriage was coming. It was my Paul Revere phase, I guess.” Wolfson made good on the promise of equal rights in America.
2) Frances Perkins, first woman appointed to the president’s cabinet and longest-serving Secretary of Labor
CREDIT: AP Photo)
Born on April 10, 1880 in Boston Massachusetts, Frances Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in chemistry and physics in 1902 and Columbia University with a master’s in political science in 1910. She witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 firsthand, and it inspired her in her lifelong crusade to protect American workers. While in college, she volunteered in settlement homes in Chicago, and later she studied economics and sociology at the Wharton School at Pennsylvania University. She was a breadwinner for her family at a time when many women weren’t expected to work outside the home. In 1913, she married New York economist Paul Caldwell Wilson, but kept her birth name. She became involved in New York politics, holding various positions for the government, including the head of the New York Consumers League. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed her to be Secretary of the newly created Department of Labor, making her the first woman appointed to a president’s cabinet. She was the force behind a bill to create Social Security and instrumental in its passage. At one point the committee creating it was running up against a deadline, so she made all the leaders come to her home, put a big bottle of Scotch on the table, and told them no one was leaving until it was finished. She served as labor secretary for 12 years, longer than any other person in that position, and when she stepped down in 1945, they brought in an orchestra to honor her. She personally shook hands with and thanked every one of the department’s 1,800 employees. The next year, President Truman appointed her to United States Civil Service Commission, a position that she held until 1953. Perkins suffered a stroke and died on May 14, 1965, at the age of 85.
3) Dolores Huerta, labor and immigration activist
CREDIT: Alice Ollstein
Born in Stockton, California to a migrant farm community in 1930, Dolores Huerta started out with a brief career as a teacher. She quickly moved on to co-founding the Community Service Organization in 1955, which created the Agricultural Workers Association in 1960. Huerta backed many notable pieces of legislation, including the ability to take the California driver’s exam in Spanish. She also co-founded what became United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in 1960 and together they became the guiding force of the labor movement in California. They gained a powerful allies, including civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. She stood just feet from the former attorney general when he was shot in 1968. Huerta even came up with the phrase, “Si se puede! Si se puede! (Yes we can).” This became her rallying cry during labor marches, and President Barack Obama openly admits he stole her slogan for his 2008 presidential campaign. He later repaid her by presenting her with the presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, one of many prestigious awards she has earned. Today she continues to advocate for immigration reform, though like many labor leaders in the 1980s, she opposed Reagan’s immigration reform.
4) Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and Underground Railroad ‘Conductor’
CREDIT: Library of Congress
Born as Araminta Ross into slavery in Maryland’s Dorchester County around 1820, the woman we now know as Harriet Tubman became one of the abolitionist movement’s most famous “conductors” in the Underground Railroad. Tubman made 19 harrowing trips into the South to provide escaped slaves safe passage. She married John Tubman, a free black man, around 1844. Eventually, the South put a $40,000 price on her head for freeing slaves, quite a lot for 1856. And she didn’t hesitate to defend herself with a pistol, famously saying “dead Negroes tell no tales.” “General Tubman” also coordinated with abolitionist John Brown to conduct his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1858. During the Civil War, she served for the Union army as a cook, a nurse, and a spy. After the war, she settled in Auburn, New York. Tubman is such a popular figure that she won an online poll run by Women on 20s, which seeks to replace genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson with a woman on the $20 bill.
5) Rosa Parks, civil rights activist
CREDIT: AP Photo
Activist Rosa Parks, born in February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, had a much more expansive role in the civil rights movement than many initially believe. As Danielle L. McGuire documents in her book At The Dark End Of The Street, Rosa Parks actually got her start as an activist organizing against the exploitation and sexual assault of black domestic workers, and the Montgomery bus strike was really “the baptism, not the birth, of that struggle.” Parks joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, serving as the chapter’s youth leader, She also served as secretary to NAACP President E.D. Nixon until 1957. After refusing to give up her seat when a Montgomery bus driver named James Blake demanded it on Dec. 1, 1955, she was arrested in violation of “Jim Crow laws.” Recalling the incident in 1987 for a television program, she said, “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.'” She was given a suspended sentence and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Two other women were also arrested, but it was Parks who was selected to be the face of the cause. When one of the other women heard of Parks’ arrest, she said, “They’ve messed with the wrong one now” and many called her “the mother of the civil rights movement.” The Supreme Court ruled in 1956 that bus segregation was unconstitutional. She was later awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1991, and died in 2005 at the age of 92.
6) bell hooks, public intellectual
Posted by Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society on Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Born on September 25, 1952 as Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, bell hooks took on her stylized name in honor of her great grandmother. She has become America’s spirit guide for navigating the intersection of gender, race, and class in education, history, feminism, art, and many other disciplines. Despite growing up in segregated schools in the South, hooks went on to study at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin, later teaching at the University of Southern California and the University of California-Santa Cruz. Many consider Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, published in 1981 to be her first major work, though she’d published many other things before it. This book served as a critique of white feminists and examined long-running institutional structures of oppression against black women. Today she serves as a scholar-in-residence at The New School in New York City. A prolific writer, hooks has published dozens of books and many essays. More recently, she levels criticism at many popular manifestations of feminism, including Sheryl Sandberg’s blockbuster book Lean In and Beyoncé. She even tweets.
7) Billie Jean King, pioneering female athlete
CREDIT: AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File
Born in Long Beach, California on November 22, 1943 as Billie Jean Moffitt, this woman became America’s top-ranked women’s tennis player at the age of 23 and held the position for five years. She won six Wimbledon singles championships and four U.S. Open titles. She married law student Larry King while attending California State University in Los Angeles from 1961 to 1964. She famously defeated male tennis player Bobby Riggs in a high-profile “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. She founded many organizations, including the Women’s Tennis Federation, the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, the Women’s Sports Foundation, and co-founded World TeamTennis. She was outed by her former partner Marilyn Barnett in a palimony lawsuit in 1981. She wanted to retire at the time, she relayed in an interview in 2006, but the outing costed her all of her endorsements — worth an estimated $2 million — in 24 hours. She denied it for years, but finally came out publicly years later. Reflecting on it in 2007, she said, “I couldn’t get a closet deep enough. I’ve got a homophobic family, a tour that will die if I come out, the world is homophobic and, yeah, I was homophobic … At the age of 51, I was finally able to talk about it properly with my parents.” She was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. She continues to fight for LGBT rights today.
8) Nancy Pelosi, first female Speaker of the House
CREDIT: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The woman who came the closest to the White House as third in the line of succession when she was elected to be Speaker of the House in 2007 was born Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro in Baltimore, Maryland. She married Paul Frank Pelosi while attending Trinity College and continued interning and working for Democratic Party committees in California. Pelsoi won a special election to take her congressional district seat in 1987, a position she has held ever since. She first made history in 2002 when Democrats elected her to become the first woman to lead a major party in Congress. The only election she ever lost was when she ran for national party chair in 1984. “People tell me that I was the best-qualified candidate,” she grumbled at the time, according to New York Magazine. “But some of them tell me it’s too bad that I’m not a man.”
9) Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist
CREDIT: AP Photo
Perhaps one of America’s most recognizable historical figures who never held a public office, Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister and civil rights activist. Born on Janurary 15, 1929, he’s most notable for his call to nonviolent action in the civil rights movement, though this has often been whitewashed in history and few remember he also spoke about the role of violence in the movement, once calling riots the “language of the unheard.” He played a significant role in the Montgomery bus boycott and was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. He famously delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1963. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at the age of 35, at the time the youngest person to win the award. He was assassinated in 1968, but his legacy lives on, and he now has a monument in our nation’s capital.
10) Margaret Sanger, birth control activist
CREDIT: AP Photo
Born Margaret Higgins in 1879, the woman who became the founder of what is now known as Planned Parenthood and an activist who argued the that the right to decide when to become a mother was one of the central tenets of feminism has been demonized by right-wing and pro-life websites in the years since. Originally a nurse, her passion for birth control, a phrase she coined, stemmed from personal experience. Sanger was one of eleven children, and she saw her mother die from complications of having too many pregnancies (her mother also suffered seven miscarriages). In 1914, Sanger published The Woman Rebel, a pamphlet which contained detailed information for how to successfully prevent pregnancy — which was illegal at the time. That year she was indicted for violating obscenity laws and fled to England where she lived under an assumed name. After World War I, she founded the American Birth Control League, a precursor to Planned Parenthood. Unfortunately, Sanger’s passion for birth control led her to many dubious places, including speaking before the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan and seeking funding from pro-eugenicist groups. She fought all her life for the “magic pill” to prevent pregnancy, but died before it became a reality. The pill, which has been around now for 50 years, is largely credited with transforming the American economy and increasing gender equality for women in the workplace.
11) Sonia Sotomayor, first Hispanic woman to serve on the Supreme Court
CREDIT: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, FILE
Sonia Sotomayor was born in the Bronx on June 25, 1954. A child of Puerto Ricans, she attended both Princeton and Yale, becoming an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office in 1979. President Obama appointed her in 2009, making her the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. She reportedly visited 89 of the 100 senators before her confirmation vote, the most of any Supreme Court nominee. Sometimes a liberal dissident, she’s been known to circulate her “fiery” opinions that sometimes convince her more conservative colleagues. She even shops at Costco.
12) Sally Ride, first American woman in space
CREDIT: AP Photo/Debra Reid, File
The first American woman to fly in space (the first woman title is claimed by a Russian cosmonaut named Valentina Tereshkova), Sally Ride was born on May 26, 1951 in California. She grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Stanford University, eventually earning a PhD in physics. When applying to NASA, she beat out 1,000 other applicants to be part of the program. She both became the first woman to make a low-earth orbit for NASA and made a followup flight the next year. She was scheduled to make a third, but it was canceled after the Challenger disaster. She left NASA in 1987 and taught at University of California–San Diego, where she was the director of the California Space Institute and taught women and girls interested in science and mathematics. She was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2003 and died in 2012, when an obituary outed her as the partner of Tam O’Shaughnessy. All this time, Sally Ride had been a lesbian. Now, the California Assembly voted to create a statue of Ride at the state capitol.
13) Carol Moseley Braun, first African American woman elected to the Senate
CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
As the first (and still only) African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun was born on August 16, 1947. She studied at the University of Illinois and the Chicago College of Law, where she met her husband Michael Braun. With a strong interest in politics, she was first elected to the state house of representatives in 1978, then later ran an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor. She was elected to the position of recorder of deeds in 1988. After the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, she said, “The Senate absolutely needed a healthy dose of democracy. It wasn’t enough to have millionaire white males over the age of 50 representing all the people in the country.” She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, the first “year of woman” wave (a second happened in 2012). She served on the powerful Finance Committee, with Tom Daschle giving up his seat to allow her to become the ranking Democrat. Moseley Braun lost her re-election campaign after a tenure marked by controversy and scandal. She ran an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Chicago in 2010. She recently remarked on the lack of diversity in Congress, saying, “It’s a small wonder why there aren’t more women, women of color and women of color from not very privileged backgrounds getting involved.”
14) Ruth Bader Ginsburg, women’s rights attorney and Supreme Court Justice
CREDIT: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Even before becoming the current liberal lion and Supreme Court icon that she is today, Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York in March 15, 1933. She graduated from Cornell University and Harvard Law School, where she was one of about nine women in a class of more than 500. Because her husband, Marty Ginsburg, got a job in New York, she transferred to Columbia Law School. Turned down for a clerkship because she was a woman, Ginsburg essentially invented a kind of legal work, co-founding the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. There, she argued several landmark cases establishing women’s equal rights, including getting the case to apply the Establishment Clause to women for the first time in history, often using men disadvantaged by legal gender restrictions to win her victories. She was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, saying, “she is to the women’s movement what former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was to the movement for the rights of African Americans.”
15) Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee leader
CREDIT: AP Photo
The first woman to lead the Cherokee nation and the first woman to lead a major Native American tribe was born Nov. 18, 1945, in Tahlequah. Her great grandfather survived the march westward known as the “Trail of Tears.” Wilma Mankiller grew up in the Mankiller Flats near the Rocky Mountains in Oklahoma. She attended Skyline College, San Francisco State University, Flaming Rainbow University, and Arkansas University. She ran successfully to become the tribe’s deputy chief in 1983 and became the tribe’s principal chief two years later.Through her tenure, she won many victories for her people. “Prior to my election, Cherokee girls would have never thought that they might grow up and become chief,” she said. She died in 2010. Mankiller recently gained notoriety when the Women on 20s campaign nominated her to replace Andrew Jackson.
16) Rachel Carson, environmentalist and author of The Silent Spring
CREDIT: AP Photo
Born in rural Pennsylvania on May 27, 1907, Rachel Carson became a prominent environmental activist following the publication of her blockbuster book The Silent Spring, in which she sounded the alarm about the dangerous pesticides containing DDT. The chemical has since been outlawed. She attended the Pennsylvania College for Women as an English major. As a young writer, Carson obtained a job working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where she wrote a seven-part series on marine life called “Romance Under the Waters.” At the time, she was just one of two women working professionally for the service. She also wrote features for the Baltimore Sun. She wrote two other books about ocean life, but it was her third, The Silent Spring, that placed her firmly into the national spotlight. Pesticide companies responded by launching a smear campaign against her, fueled by personal attacks. In a television interview, Carson said, “man’s endeavors to control nature by his powers to alter and to destroy would inevitably evolve into a war against himself, a war he would lose unless he came to terms with nature.” She died of breast cancer in 1964 at the age of 57.
17) Dorothea Lange, documentary photographer
CREDIT: Wikimedia commons
An American documentary photographer, Dorothea Lange became famous for photos of migrant farm workers she took during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration, a federally funded project that was part of the New Deal. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey on May 26, 1895, Lange went on to attend the New York Training School for Teachers, but decided to take a photography course at Columbia University, taught by Clarence H. White. Her work documenting farm workers, and later prisoners at Japanese internment camps, became hugely important to documenting American history. Her photographs of the camps were censored by the U.S. government. In 1940, Lange became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1965, she died of esophageal cancer.
18) Emma Goldman, radical activist and organizer
CREDIT: AP Photo
One of the great agitators in American history, Emma Goldman was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in what is now Lithuania in 1869. She immigrated to New York with her family in 1885. “She quickly earned a reputation as an anarchist and feminist who delivered fiery speeches; J. Edgar Hoover once called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” She once said she did not believe in marriage, “I believe that when two people love each other that no judge, minister, or court, or body of people, have anything to do with it.” Her tactics were radical, and the man who assassinated President William McKinley did so after attending one of her speeches, so she was charged with involvement in the act. She was also connected to an attempt to kill capitalist Henry Clay Frick. Eventually she was deported to the Soviet Union in 1919, but she didn’t care for Soviet Russia either, and she spent some time in Toronto continuing her activism work. She suffered a stroke during an activism planning meeting on February 17, 1940, after which she was hospitalized and diagnosed with several illnesses, including diabetes. Unable to speak after the stroke, she continued her work through written correspondence. Eventually, she died on May 14 of that year.
19) Malcolm X, intellectual father of black nationalism
CREDIT: AP Photo/Eddie Adams, File
Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. He later became one of the most controversial figures in the American civil rights movement, urging his followers to defend themselves “by any means necessary.” Living at the same time as his nonviolent counterpart, Martin Luther King Jr., he is often regarded as a minor figure in the movement even though his role is still highly influential among black intellectuals, including President Barack Obama. As a child, his family was subjected to horrifying violence at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. He adopted the name Malcom X when he became a convert to the Nation of Islam, a combination of black nationalism and Islam, and said the X was a rejection of his “slave” name. His popular book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, predicted he would be more influential in his death than in his life and laid the foundation for the Black Nationalism movement. He was assassinated by another black Muslim in 1965 at a rally for his organization in New York City.
20) Susan B. Anthony, suffragist
CREDIT: Library of Congress
A women’s suffragist and activist, Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 in Massachusetts as the oldest of seven children. She founded the New York Women’s State Temperance Society, which both sought the women’s right to vote and fought domestic violence against spouses (many believed alcohol was the cause of abuse). She founded a women’s version of the temperance movement after she was blocked from speaking at an event because she was a woman. She was also active in the abolitionist movement and was once arrested for attempting to vote in her hometown. She helped create the International Council of Women, which still exists today and published a weekly women’s rights publication called The Revolution. Controversially, she opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote, on the grounds that it enfranchised all men but excluded women. Anthony died in 1906 at the age of 86 of a heart condition, but after her death, she was co-opted by the anti-abortion movement. Some believe that writings attributed to Anthony alluded to anti-choice beliefs, and an election PAC in her name works to elect pro-life candidates, many of whom are men. However, historians dispute this interpretation of the work, saying there’s no evidence to support the idea that Anthony opposed abortion.
21) Eugene Debs, union organizer and socialist presidential candidate
CREDIT: AP Photo
Born on November 5, 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Eugene Debs was a union organizer, founding the Industrial Workers of the World, and a five-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. Starting to work on the railroads at the age of 14, Debs quickly became interested in union organizing. He married Kate Metzel, but the two had no children. Debs orchestrated a successful strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894. After the strike, he became a featured speaker in the Socialist Party, and ran for president under the party’s banner in 1900 unsuccessfully. He ran three more times unsuccessfully, but then turned his attention to advocating for peace, traveling to Ohio to make a famous anti-war speech in 1918. He was arrested for the speech and convicted under the wartime espionage act. He was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison. It was during his imprisonment that he conducted his fifth and final run for president. President Warren G. Harding pardoned Debs on Christmas Day in 1921, commuting his sentence to time served. But his health suffered from his time in prison, and he went to Lindlahr sanitarium outside the city of Chicago in 1926. There, he died.
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