Kidnapped as a child, bought his own freedom and wrote the book that turned Britain against the slave trade
By his own account seized from an Igbo village at about eleven, he survived the Atlantic crossing, saved for years to buy himself out of slavery, and…
The safe, conservative archbishop who became the voice of El Salvador's poor and was shot at the altar
Appointed because he would not make trouble, he was changed by the murder of a friend and spent three years reading out the names of the disappeared…
Congo's first elected prime minister, ousted and killed within months of independence
A former postal clerk and beer salesman who rose through Congolese nationalist politics to become the country's first prime minister, he was…
Led the Bristol Bus Boycott that helped bring Britain its first race relations law
A young youth worker who, in 1963, set a trap to prove a Bristol bus company would not hire Black crews, then organised a four-month boycott that the…
Read about two students jailed for a toast to freedom and founded Amnesty International
A London barrister who, in 1961, wrote a newspaper article asking readers to write letters on behalf of forgotten prisoners. Within a year it had…
Fifty years of direct action for gay rights, from a hostile by-election to trying to arrest Mugabe
An Australian-born campaigner who was vilified in a 1983 by-election, founded OutRage!, and has been beaten more than once for protests abroad.…
Left her husband and children to study in Japan, founded a women's journal and was beheaded at 31
A poet who unbound her feet, wore men's clothes and practised swordsmanship, she campaigned against foot-binding and arranged marriage and ran a…
Mexican anarchist journalist whose writing helped ignite the revolution he did not live to see
A lawyer's son turned radical journalist, he was jailed repeatedly in Mexico and the United States for exposing the Diaz dictatorship's abuses, and…
Nobel laureate who exposed the massacre of Maya villages during Guatemala's civil war
A Kʼicheʼ Maya woman who lost family members to army massacres during Guatemala's civil war, she took her country's treatment of its indigenous…
Her refusal to give up a bus seat sparked the modern civil rights movement
Often described as simply tired, she was in fact a trained activist who had spent a decade fighting segregation before the evening in 1955 that made…
Cigar maker who founded the American Federation of Labor and led it for nearly forty years
An English-born Jewish immigrant who worked as a cigar maker in New York tenements, he founded the American Federation of Labor and spent almost four…
Walked to her girls' school through hurled dung and stones, carrying a spare sari to change into
Married at nine and taught to read by her husband, she opened one of India's first schools for girls in 1848, sheltered pregnant widows, and died…
One of Iran’s first female judges, demoted to clerk after the revolution, who became a human rights lawyer
She was one of Iran’s first women judges, stripped of the bench in 1979, and rebuilt herself as a lawyer taking cases no one else would. She won the…
Came out to his fellow treason trialists and made gay rights part of the fight against apartheid
A township youth activist charged with treason, he told his co-accused in prison that he was gay, held his ground when some wanted him out, and built…
Walked out of slavery with her baby, went to court to get her son back, then spent forty years speaking
Born enslaved in New York, she left with her infant daughter, sued a white man for selling her son illegally and won, then renamed herself and…
Founded the Black Consciousness movement and died naked and shackled in police custody at 30
A medical student who argued that Black South Africans had first to free their own minds, he was banned, harassed and finally beaten to death by…
Voted illegally in 1872, was fined 100 dollars, and never paid a cent
A Quaker schoolteacher who spent fifty years travelling the United States for women’s suffrage, was arrested for voting, and died fourteen years…
Broke with her famous mother to fight for working women in the East End and against fascism in Ethiopia
A trained artist who gave up painting to organise the poorest women in Bow, she was expelled from her mother’s movement, jailed for sedition, and…
Trans activist and veteran of the Stonewall uprising who fought for the homeless and the poor
A homeless teenager of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent who took part in the Stonewall uprising, she spent her life fighting for transgender…
Rode 35,000 miles gathering the evidence that ended the British slave trade
He wrote a prize essay on slavery as a student, then realised he believed it. For the next fifty years he did the unglamorous work: interviewing…
Physicist turned campaigner for seed sovereignty and against corporate control of farming
Trained as a physicist, she turned to environmental activism after researching Himalayan deforestation, founded a seed-saving movement to resist…
Jailed under apartheid, paralysed at sixteen, he helped invent the social model of disability
A wheelchair user who came to Britain after prison and banning in South Africa, he co-founded the Union of the Physically Impaired Against…
Led 200 Gurindji stockmen and their families off a British cattle station and did not go back for nine years
A head stockman paid in flour and tea, he walked his people off Wave Hill station in 1966. What began as a strike for wages became a claim for land,…
Somali model who became a UN ambassador against female genital mutilation after surviving it
Cut at around the age of five and promised in marriage to a much older man at thirteen, she fled her nomadic family across the desert, later became…
