Founded the first Black-led labour union to win a contract from a major American company
A Florida-born son of a preacher, he organised Pullman sleeping car porters into the first Black-led union recognised by a major US corporation, then…
Raised a non-violent army of 100,000 Pashtuns and spent a third of his life in prison for it
Known as the Frontier Gandhi, he built schools and a disciplined movement of unarmed Pashtun volunteers against British rule, then was jailed for…
Robben Island prisoner for 26 years who became the moral conscience of the new South Africa
A young Indian South African drawn into resistance politics as a teenager, he was sentenced to life alongside Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial and…
A sacked sub-postmaster who spent twenty years proving the Post Office had prosecuted the innocent
When the Horizon computer system showed shortfalls he could not explain, he refused to sign for them and lost his post office. He then found the…
A Zulu chief who chose the ANC over his chieftaincy and became Africa's first Nobel Peace laureate
A mission-school teacher and elected chief, he was told to choose between his position and the ANC. He chose the ANC, was banned for the rest of his…
Nurse, midwife and mother who held a family and a movement together through decades of bans and prison
While her husband Walter served 26 years on Robben Island she raised their children, delivered babies in Soweto, was banned, detained and charged…
Founded Belarus's human rights centre and received the Nobel Peace Prize in a prison cell
A literature scholar who set up Viasna in 1996 to help the families of political prisoners, he has been jailed twice for it, most recently sentenced…
Agronomist who led Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde toward independence and was killed before it came
Trained as an agricultural engineer, he turned his knowledge of rural poverty into a guerrilla movement against Portuguese colonial rule, building…
Built the Soviet hydrogen bomb, then spent twenty years fighting the state that gave him everything
The physicist behind the Soviet H-bomb turned against nuclear testing, then against the system itself. He lost his privileges, his medals and his…
Reported the war in Chechnya from the ground for seven years until she was shot in her own lift
A journalist for Novaya Gazeta who documented torture, disappearances and the killing of civilians in Chechnya, she was detained by troops, poisoned…
The crane operator whose sacking started the strike that became Solidarity
An orphaned farm servant turned welder, she was fired from the Gdańsk shipyard five months before retirement for organising a free trade union. The…
A Lancashire mill girl who became the only working-class woman in the suffragette leadership
She started in a cotton mill at ten and lost a finger to the machinery. A heckle at a Liberal rally in 1905 sent her to prison and turned her into…
Went looking for her disappeared son and founded the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
A housewife from Avellaneda who, after months of being turned away by officials, gathered thirteen other mothers in the main square of Buenos Aires…
Born an untouchable, he wrote India's constitution and led half a million people out of the caste system
The boy made to sit on a sack in the corner of the classroom earned doctorates in New York and London, fought Gandhi over the rights of the…
Organised the March on Washington in eight weeks and was written out of the story for being gay
A Quaker pacifist who taught Martin Luther King the methods of nonviolence, served time on a chain gang and in federal prison, and was pushed to the…
Led her Lenca community against a dam on a sacred river and was murdered for winning
A Honduran indigenous leader who forced the world’s largest dam builder to abandon a project on the Gualcarque river, she was shot dead in her home a…
Wrote the novel that turned Europe against war and persuaded Alfred Nobel to fund a prize for peace
An impoverished countess who eloped with her employer's son, she published Lay Down Your Arms in 1889, founded the Austrian Peace Society and became…
Turned farm workers no one thought could be organised into a union that won contracts
A migrant worker with an eighth-grade education, he founded the United Farm Workers, led a five-year grape strike and boycott, and fasted for 25 days…
A rubber tapper who learned to read at 18 and stood in front of chainsaws to save the Amazon
He led fellow rubber tappers in peaceful standoffs against ranchers clearing the forest they lived from, invented the idea of extractive reserves,…
Photocopied 7,000 pages of secret Vietnam history at night and faced 115 years in prison for it
A Pentagon analyst who had helped write the study showing that four presidents had misled the public about Vietnam, he leaked it to the press in 1971…
A one-woman newsroom who exposed corruption at the top of Maltese politics and was killed by a car bomb
Her blog was read by more people than all of Malta's newspapers combined. She named ministers in the Panama Papers, faced dozens of libel suits and…
Uganda's first openly gay activist, who won a court case against a tabloid that called for him to be hanged
A teacher who came out on his return from South Africa and spent years campaigning against Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill. Weeks after winning a…
The archbishop who took on apartheid from the pulpit and then chaired the commission that heard its crimes
A teacher who quit rather than teach under apartheid’s inferior schooling for Black children, he became the voice of the struggle when its leaders…
Co-founded the farm workers’ union, negotiated its first contracts and coined "Sí, se puede"
A schoolteacher who quit because she could not bear to see her pupils come to class hungry, she organised alongside César Chávez for decades, raised…
