Gave up engineering to raid carpet looms and stone quarries and bring enslaved children out
For forty years he has led physical rescues of children from bonded labour in India, lost colleagues to violence, and pushed the campaign that…
A writer who took on Shell and the Nigerian military over his people’s land, and was hanged for it
A popular novelist and television writer who turned to organising the Ogoni people against the oil pollution of their delta homeland, he was tried by…
The Filipino organiser who started the Delano grape strike and then asked César Chávez to join
A cannery worker with a sixth-grade education and seven fingers, he led the Filipino farm workers who walked out of the vineyards in September 1965,…
Organised the women who sat in the sun for months until Liberia’s warlords made peace
A trauma counsellor who had spent years listening to child soldiers, she gathered Christian and Muslim women in white to protest until the civil war…
Talked students out of Tiananmen Square, then spent the rest of his life in and out of prison for his ideas
A literary critic who flew home from New York to join the 1989 protests, he helped negotiate the students’ safe exit, refused to leave China…
Sold into slavery by his own father at ten, he freed himself and then hundreds of others through the courts
Born free in Bahia and sold to pay his father's gambling debts, he learned to read at seventeen, proved his own freedom, and became a self-taught…
Led India to independence with marches, fasts and a refusal to hit back
A shy lawyer thrown off a South African train for the colour of his skin, he developed nonviolent resistance into a weapon that helped end British…
Shot for going to school, she became the youngest Nobel laureate in history
As a schoolgirl she spoke out against the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education. Shot in the head at 15, she recovered and turned her voice into a global…
Saudi activist jailed for filming herself driving, a founder of the campaign that ended the ban
A single mother working in cybersecurity, she filmed herself driving in Saudi Arabia, where women were forbidden to, and was jailed for it, turning a…
Built a newsroom to hold the Philippine government to account and was arrested for it
A former CNN bureau chief who co-founded the news site Rappler, she documented the killings of the drug war and the troll networks behind the…
Rio city councillor from a favela who was assassinated for challenging police violence
Raised in one of Rio de Janeiro's poorest favelas, she became a Black, bisexual city councillor who investigated police killings and militia…
A homeless drag queen of the Stonewall era who housed the kids the movement forgot
She arrived in New York in 1963 with fifteen dollars and a bag of clothes, was a fixture of the Stonewall era, and with Sylvia Rivera set up a…
Led the movement that ended legal segregation in America and was killed at 39
A young Baptist minister thrust into leading a bus boycott at 26, he was arrested 29 times, stabbed, bombed, wiretapped and finally shot, in thirteen…
Mobilised the housewives of Govan against wartime rent rises and forced a change in the law within weeks
A carpet printer's daughter who organised the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915, sending women with flour bombs to see off the bailiffs. The Rent…
Went to a union meeting to report on it for her Tory father and ended up leading the women chainmakers
She founded the National Federation of Women Workers, forced Parliament to set minimum wages in the sweated trades and led the ten-week strike of…
The first Black woman to publish an account of her enslavement in Britain, and to petition Parliament
Sold away from her mother at twelve and worked for years in the salt ponds of Turks Island, she walked out of her owners' house in London in 1828 and…
Lost her Indian status for marrying a white man and spent thirty years getting the law changed
Under Canada's Indian Act, a Mohawk woman who married a non-Indian lost her status, her home and the right to be buried with her family. She…
Led decades of protest against a dam project that displaced hundreds of thousands in India
A social worker who gave up an academic career to live among villagers facing eviction for a giant dam project, she founded the Narmada Bachao…
Led the peaceful campaign for votes for women for more than fifty years and lived to see it won
She joined the suffrage movement as a teenager and led its largest, law-abiding wing through decades of defeats, insisting that patient argument…
Irish-born organiser who spent her later decades leading strikes of American miners and mill children
Widowed and left destitute after losing her husband and four children to yellow fever and her livelihood to the Chicago fire, she remade herself in…
Survived ISIS captivity and told her story to the world so that others would not have to
A Yazidi villager from northern Iraq, she was 21 when ISIS killed her mother and six brothers and sold her into slavery. She escaped, chose to speak…
An Iranian lawyer sentenced to 38 years and 148 lashes for defending women who removed their headscarves
She took the cases nobody else would, juveniles on death row and women arrested for protesting the hijab, and has served years in Evin prison for it,…
Took her baby in a pram to Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia
One of eight people who sat down on Red Square in August 1968, she founded the underground bulletin that recorded Soviet human rights abuses and was…
Spent 27 years in prison and walked out to lead his country to democracy
Sentenced to life for fighting apartheid, he emerged after 27 years without bitterness and negotiated a peaceful transition to become South Africa’s…
