A miner's wife whose five-woman hunger strike brought down a dictatorship's grip on Bolivia
She organised the housewives of a tin-mining camp, told a United Nations women's conference that its concerns were not hers, and in 1977 began a…
Paralysed by polio, he fought his way into Berkeley and launched the independent living movement
Paralysed from the neck down at 14, he was refused a high school diploma, refused by his university, and told he was unemployable. He built the…
A university gardener who found out he did not own his island and took the case that ended terra nullius
Exiled from Murray Island as a teenager, he learned over lunch with two historians that Australian law did not recognise his family's land. Ten years…
Distrusted charismatic leaders, including King, and built the student movement that changed the South
For fifty years she did the organising that history books skip: travelling the South for the NAACP, setting up King's office, and then making sure…
Exposed the British concentration camps of the Boer War and was deported for her trouble
A Cornish rector’s daughter who at 40 had barely begun her life went to South Africa alone, documented the deaths of thousands of women and children…
Founded the suffragettes and was jailed and force-fed in the fight for votes for women
A Manchester widow with five children who decided that polite petitions had failed, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union and led a militant…
A Mississippi sharecropper who was beaten in jail for trying to vote and told the nation about it
The youngest of twenty children, she picked cotton from the age of six and did not know she had the right to vote until she was 44. Trying to use it…
Refused to report for internment in 1942 and spent forty years clearing his name
A welder from Oakland who defied the order removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast, lost at the Supreme Court and was shunned in the camps,…
Taught himself to read in secret, escaped slavery at 20, and became the most famous Black man in America
Born into slavery in Maryland, he learned his letters against the law, fought back against a slave-breaker, escaped in a borrowed sailor’s outfit,…
Organised the market women of Abeokuta and forced a king off his throne over an unjust tax
A teacher who built a union of tens of thousands of women traders, she led the protests that abolished a tax on women and briefly toppled the ruler…
Led 27 village women to stand between the loggers and the trees of Reni, and the loggers left
A widow who could not read, she led the women of a Himalayan village to block the felling of their forest in 1974 while the men had been called away.…
Sat alone outside the Swedish parliament at 15 and started a global movement of school strikes
A quiet, autistic schoolgirl who stopped eating and speaking for months over the climate, she skipped school to protest alone in August 2018. Within…
Escaped slavery and then went back, again and again, to lead others out
She freed herself in 1849 and made around 13 return trips into slave-holding territory, guiding some 70 people to freedom without ever losing one. In…
One of the first openly gay elected officials in America, shot dead after eleven months in office
A closeted New York businessman until his forties, he moved to San Francisco, ran for office three times and lost, then won, helped defeat an…
Deaf and blind from infancy, she spent fifty years lobbying, fundraising and arguing for the rights of others
The famous childhood story ends where her real work began: decades of campaigning for blind people, workers, women's suffrage and civil liberties, in…
Took off her veil at Cairo railway station and founded the Egyptian women's movement
Raised in a harem and married at thirteen, she led women onto the streets in the 1919 revolution, founded the Egyptian Feminist Union and won a legal…
Investigated lynching when it could get her killed, and was run out of Memphis for telling the truth
Orphaned at 16, she raised her siblings and became a journalist. After friends were lynched in 1892, she documented hundreds of killings, lost her…
Pakistani child sold into bonded labour at four who became a symbol against child slavery
Sold by his family to a carpet maker as a small child to repay a debt, he escaped bonded labour at around ten, campaigned internationally against the…
Went totally deaf as an MP at 45, stayed in the Commons and won compensation for thalidomide children
A former labourer and crane driver who lost all his hearing after a routine operation went wrong, he decided against resigning and became the…
Told the manager she was a lion, not a monkey, and led the Grunwick strikers for two years
A film-processing worker from Gujarat via Tanzania, she walked out of a north London factory in 1976 and became the face of a strike that drew…
Had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and spent 33 years in Congress making good trouble
The son of Alabama sharecroppers who practised preaching to the family chickens, he was beaten as a Freedom Rider, spoke at the March on Washington…
Spent sixteen years fighting laws that let police detain any woman they suspected of prostitution
After her daughter’s death she went looking for people worse off than herself and found them in Liverpool’s workhouse. She then took on Victorian…
Called a fire hazard at five, she sued for the right to teach and led a 26-day sit-in for disability rights
Polio left her using a wheelchair from infancy. She was barred from school, then from teaching, and in 1977 helped occupy a federal building for 26…
Wheelchair user and businessman known as the father of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Left paralysed by polio as a teenager, he built a business career in Asia before devoting himself to disability rights, touring every US state to…
