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Malcom X

Medium: Television, newspapers, and magazines.

Activism: Black nationalism and self-defense.

Organization: Organization of Afro-American Unity, and Civil Rights Activist

3 Sentences:

Malcom X was seen as a prominent figure who stood up for Black nationalism, fighting against racism by any means, even if it meant using violence. He was able to become a co-founder of Afro-American Unity with the intent to help others learn self-defense and determination. He participates in many debates and forums, including television, radio stations, and universities. programs

Example - "You get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it."

Islamhttps://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=262e5aa7d453848a4668e87ad968412142245eb7c030855563e9984d4fb309c3JmltdHM9MTc1OTYyMjQwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=02b3c709-adc2-6e45-10e5-d23dac466f9b&psq=Malcolm+X%3a+Biography%2c+Civil+Rights+Activist%2c+Nation+of+Islam&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmlvZ3JhcGh5LmNvbS9hY3RpdmlzdHMvbWFsY29sbS14

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DIRECTIONS: Hine used the MEDIUM of photography and journalism to further his cause. He was an ACTIVIST.

In this PADLET post your finding on:

Research an Activist.

Activist Name

Medium

Activism

Organization

3 sentnecee explenation of:

Who they are

What they stand for

What they have done/ conributed

1 example

* please include a picture!

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Activist: Lewis Hine

Medium- Photographer and Journalist

Activist: Aganst child Labor Laws

Organization: National Child Labor Committee

3 sentnecee explenation of:

Who they are: Lewis Hine was an american Sociologist and Muckruker.

What they stand for: Active during the progressive ear and great depression, Hine used his photography and journalism to fight against child labor.

What they have done/ conributed- Through his work, he played a large role in the passing of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which establised minimum wadge, the 40 hour work week, and established child labor standards.

1 example :"bodies of work" Lewis Hine by Susie Allen https://mag.uchicago.edu/hine

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Medium- Speeches, Sermons, Television, Imagery, and Visuals.

Activist- Human and equal rights for African Americans

Organization- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Who are they- Martin Luther King was an activist fighting for human and equal rights fr Aficain Americans

What they stand for - Martin Luther King Jr. stood for nonviolent civil rights, equality for African Americans and other marginalized groups, and the creation of a "Beloved Community" characterized by peace, justice, and harmony.

What they have done/contributed- Martin Luther King Jr contributed nonviolent leadership, and major civil rights campaigns, he end discimanation but did not oficialy end slavery.

One example is the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956):

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/montgomery-bus-boycott

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-Writer who wrote about his experiences for slavery and arguments against it.

-Was a vehement and clear writer against slavery.

-He was apart of a predominantly black Methodist church, but mostly wrote and worked on his own with very little affiliation with an organization.

Frederick Douglass was a freed slave who wrote about his experiences. He was an abolitionist writer and speaker.

He has written an autobiography about his life that made many realize the horrors of enslaving other humans. He argued that it was deeply un-American and unconstitutional to allow slavery to continue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_the_Slave_Is_the_Fourth_of_July%3F#Speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” A powerful speech about the injustice of slavery, and how it rejects the constitution and shams some from it’s guaranteed freedoms.

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-Activist: Greta Thunberg

-Medium: Social Media platforms

-Activism: climate activist leader, A Swedish leader in global fight against climate change

-Organization: Friday for future, A global climate strike movement founded in 2018

Who Greta Thunberg is: Greta is a Swedish climate activist famous for Founding the “Fridays for future” movement, it involves school, strikes for climate action.

What Greta stands for: Greta stands for climate, justice, and urgent action on the climate crisis'.

What Greta has done/contributed: Greta has contributed significantly by raising global awareness of climate crises and inspire action inability with her foundation Fridays for future movement.

-Example: https://thegretathunbergfoundation.org/

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Activist: Susan B. Anthony

Medium: Speeches, conventions, and organizations

Activist: Women's rights activist

Organization: National Woman Suffrage Association

Who they are: Susan B. Anthony was a writer known for her passionate speeches against slavery and for women's rights.

What they stand for: Susan B. Anthony was a suffragist who believed in equal pay and equality under God.

What they have done/contributed: While she tirelessly fought for women's rights, women couldn't vote until 14 years after her death; however, the 19th Amendment is sometimes referred to as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

1 example: National Women's History Museum

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/susan-b-anthony

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Activist: Elisa Aaltola

-Medium: Writer

-Activism: Animal Rights Activist

-Organization: Animalia, a Finnish Animal Rights group

-Who they are: Elisa Aaltola is an animal rights activist who uses her writing to spread awareness on animal cruelty.

-What they stand for: Elisa stands for helping animals and trying to inform people of the harm constantly happening to animals.

-What they have done/ contributed: Elisa has published 12 books and 50 peer-reviewed papers on animal philosophy to raise awareness.

-Example: https://unboundproject.org/elisa-aaltola/

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Activist: Malala Yousafzai

Medium- Public speaking, Writing, Education Advocacy

Activism- Girls' Education Rights

Organization- Malala Fund

Who is Malala Yousafzai:

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist who began to speak out for girls' education at a very young age.

What Malala stands for:

She stands for every girl to have the right to go to school and receive a quality education, despite receiving threats from the Taliban.

What she has done/contributes

She even survived an attack in 2012 and became the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner, and continues to fight for education rights globally.

One example:

Malala was a co-author of a book named I am Malala to share her story and raise awareness about educational equality

https://lgnavigators.weebly.com/uploads/5/8/5/2/58521739/i_am_malala_%E2%80%93_how_one_girl_stood_up_for_education_and_changed_the_world__young_readers_edition_.pdf

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Activist: Rosa Parks

Medium- Human rights activism in the form of direct civil disobedience, refusal to obey unjust laws, and protesting

Activist- Civil rights activism

Organization- Rosa Parks was the secretary of the NAACP group

3 sentence explanation:

Who are they? Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott by refusing to give up her seat on the bus.

What do they stand for? Rosa Parks stood for equality and progress towards change.

What have they done/contributed? Rosa Parks didn't give up her seat on the bus, causing the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

1 example: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/rosa-parks

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Activist: Cesar Chavez

Medium: Organizing strikes, Boycotts, and fasts.

Activism: Fair Wages and Improved Working Conditions.

Organization: United Farm Workers

3 sentence explanation of:

Cesar Chavez was a Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist.

He stands for civil rights, economic justice, and human dignity of farmworkers and other marginalized communities.

He has created the first successful farmworkers union in U.S. history and fought for their rights. Created safer working conditions and essential benefits like health coverage and pension plans for farmworkers.

1 example: https://www.history.com/articles/cesar-chavez

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Cesar Chavez

Medium - Grassroots organizing, nonviolent protests, and public awareness campaigns (via media)

Activism - Farm worker rights

Organization - United Farm Workers of America (UFW)

Who He Is - Cesar Chavez was a civil rights activist, Mexican-American labor leader, and co-founder of the UFW.

What He Stood For - Cesar Chavez stood for worker's rights, dignity for farm workers, and nonviolence.

What He Has Done - Cesar Chavez co-founded the UFW and led the Deleno Grape Strike (1965-1970)

Example - https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/workers-united-the-delano-grape-strike-and-boycott.htm

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Activist- Lizzie Velásquez

Medium- Motivational speaker, author, and social media platforms

Activist- Against bullying and wants to teach self-acceptance towards disability awareness

Organization- National center for learning Disabilities / Coalition of Texans with Disabilities and many more

Who they are - Lizzie Velásquez is a prominent activist and motivational speaker known for her advocacy against bullying and her own personal struggles with a rare genetic condition.

What they stand for- Lizzie Velásquez stands for anti-bullying advocacy, promoting kindness, self-acceptance, and the empowerment of people with disabilities.

What they have done/ contributed- Lizzie Velásquez has contributed to global conversations on bullying and body image by sharing her story through motivational speaking, authoring books, and advocating for anti-bullying legislation.

Example - A Brave Heart the Lizzie Velasquez Story | Full Documentary | Documentary Central

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Medium: Writing and speeches

Activism: Education Rights, changing the old school system to more "engaged, and hands-on" activities

Organizations: American Association of Professors, New York City Teachers Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Civil Liberties Union

Explanation: John Dewey was an activist, philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He stood for education rights and the idea of having "hands-on" activities, and followed the concept of "What the hand feels, the mind learns." Dewey made contributions in education and paved the way for progressive education and "learning by doing."

https://www.neh.gov/article/john-dewey-portrait-progressive-thinker

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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In July 1894, a train carrying a young philosopher from Ann Arbor, Michigan, pulled into Chicago Union Station. Its arrival was delayed by striking workers of the American Railway Union, who were made furious by the Pullman Company's decision to cut their wages. The strike ended two weeks later, took the lives of thirty people, and symbolized a rapidly changing America dominated by corporations that set laborers against owners.

The philosopher had entered a city whose population was exploding with immigrants, many of whom were illiterate; a city of half-built skyscrapers and noisome meatpacking plants; a city with a new university funded by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago, whose Gothic buildings and eminent faculty would rival those of Harvard and Yale. John Dewey had arrived to chair the philosophy and pedagogy department. Once in the city, he visited the strikers, applauded their "fanatic sincerity and earnestness," praised their leader Eugene Debs, and condemned President Cleveland's suppression of the strike. Worried about working for a university dedicated to laissez-faire capitalism, Dewey found himself becoming more of a populist, more of a socialist, more sympathetic to the settlement house pioneered by Jane Addams, and more skeptical of his childhood Christianity. He would conclude that a changing America needed different schools.

In 1899, Dewey published the pamphlet that made him famous, The School and Society, and promulgated many key precepts of later education reforms. Dewey insisted that the old model of schooling-students sitting in rows, memorizing and reciting-was antiquated. Students should be active, not passive. They required compelling and relevant projects, not lectures. Students should become problem solvers. Interest, not fear, should be used to motivate them. They should cooperate, not compete.

The key to the new education was "manual training." Before the factory system and the growth of cities, children handled animals, crops, and tools. They were educated by nature "with real things and materials." Dewey lamented the disappearance of the idyllic village and the departure of children's modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience. He was, however, no reactionary: "It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices." Urban children needed to sew, cook, and work with metal and wood. Manual training should not, however, be mere vocational education or a substitute for the farm. It should be scientific and experimental, an introduction to civilization.

"You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing," asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in groups to make models of the spinning jenny and the power loom, they learned cooperation. Together they understood the role of water and steam, analyzed the textile mills of Lowell, and studied the distribution of the finished cloth and its impact on everyday life. They learned science, geography, and physics without textbooks or lectures. Learning by doing replaced learning by listening.

Manual training revolved around the study of occupations to develop both the hand and the intellect. To know and to do were equally valuable. Cooperative learning encouraged a democratic classroom, which promoted a democratic society without elites, ethnic divisions, or economic inequality. Throughout his life, Dewey believed that humans were social beings inclined to be cooperative, not selfish individuals predisposed to conflict. Always he praised democracy as a way of life and scientific intelligence as the key to reform.

America in 1900 was preoccupied with the clash between capital and labor, debating how to make the worker more than an appendage to the machine. To science, geography, and physics, Dewey added another advantage: meaning. While the typical student did not go on to high school or attend college, manual training conducted by a skilled teacher could stimulate the imagination, enlarge the sympathies, and acquaint young people with scientific intelligence. Dewey was outraged that "thousands of young ones . . . are practically ruined . . . in the Chicago schools every year." His new education sought to encourage students to continue in school and combat the increase in juvenile delinquency. It looked to produce an inquiring student who could change America.

Running through The School and Society is a suspicion of the intellectual who wants to monopolize knowledge and keep it abstract. Dewey opposed the academic curriculum revolving around classical languages and high culture, which he believed suited an aristocracy, not a democracy. "The simple facts of the case are that in the great majority of human beings," he wrote, "the distinctively intellectual interest is not dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition." With more and more Americans enrolled in schools, educators had to acknowledge this fact. Learning had to be democratized and made relevant and practical. "The school must represent present life."

Who was this philosopher who believed that children are curious and good, who would introduce them to civilization through wool and cotton, who would create cooperative classrooms that would end divisions between managers and workers and democratize America? Dewey lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, wrote 37 books, and published 766 articles in 151 journals. In his lifetime, he was hailed as America's preeminent philosopher. Historian Henry Steele Commager called him "the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people." In China, he was called a "second Confucius."

John Dewey grew up in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a pious, high-minded mother and a well-read grocer father. Shy and withdrawn, the young Dewey read voraciously and graduated from the University of Vermont. Uncertain about a career, he moved to Oil City, Pennsylvania, to teach Latin and algebra at the local high school. An average teacher but an ambitious intellectual, he decided to become a philosopher and fought to gain admission to Johns Hopkins University, which was dedicated to original research. He graduated with a PhD in philosophy. The president of Johns Hopkins, Daniel Coit Gilman, encouraged Dewey to accept an offer to teach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor but suggested that he curtail his "reclusive and bookish habits."

At Michigan, a newly confident Dewey published a psychology textbook and fell in love with one of his students, Alice Chipman (later described by their daughter as a woman "with a brilliant mind which cut through sham and pretense"). Influenced by Alice, Dewey paid more attention to social problems. They started a family and, observing his children, he applied his psychological insights to their upbringing, becoming increasingly more interested in education, so that his children might escape what he felt were the shortcomings of the schools he attended as a child.

One of his students in Michigan described Dewey as "a tall, dark, thin young man with long black hair, and a soft, penetrating eye, and looks like a cross between a Nihilist and a poet." A colleague at Michigan found him "simple, modest, utterly devoid of any affectation or self-consciousness, and makes many friends and no enemies." Later associates would corroborate this positive portrait, stressing Dewey's ability to accept criticism, his willingness to give credit to others, and his intellectual and physical vigor. After a lunch (hosted by T. S. Eliot) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bertrand Russell praised Dewey: "To my surprise I liked him very much. He has a large slow-moving mind, very empirical and candid . . . [he] impressed me very greatly, both as a philosopher and as a lovable man." Self-effacing but not introspective, Dewey spoke little about himself, writing neither memoirs nor an autobiography.

Dewey, who seemed to fit the model of the quintessential reserved New Englander, was surprisingly complex. Arriving in Chicago during the strike, he mused, "I am something of an anarchist." Slightly bohemian, he encouraged his children to go barefoot even in winter, and he and his wife walked naked around the house. He socialized with radicals in Greenwich Village. To understand prostitution, he visited Chicago's brothels. He wrote passionate love letters to his wife and rhapsodized over the endearing qualities of his children. Once reclusive, he happily worked on philosophic tracts as his children crawled around his desk. His friend Max Eastman noted, "Dewey is at his best with one child climbing up his pants leg and another fishing in his inkwell." At the age of 58, he had a brief romance (possibly platonic) with Anzia Wezierska, who wrote novels and short stories about the immigrant experience. He wrote poems to her and for himself about the anxiety of philosophizing, poems without literary flair that he never expected would be published.

Away from his family, Dewey could slip into melancholy. In 1894, he wrote to Alice, "I think yesterday was the bluest day I have ever spent." He was twice visited by catastrophe. While vacationing in Italy in the fall of 1894, his youngest son, Morris, died of diphtheria at age two and a half, a loss from which he and Alice never fully recovered. Ten years later, during his second European trip, his eight-year-old son, Gordon, contracted typhoid fever and died in Ireland. "I shall never understand why he was taken from the world," wrote Dewey.

Dewey marched in a suffragette parade and campaigned for women's right to vote. He celebrated as his mentors Ella Flagg Young, the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, and Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House. He rejected his mother's query, "Are you right with Jesus?," but sprinkled his essay "My Pedagogic Creed" with religious imagery. Who were Dewey's heroes? Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, the apostles of democracy; William James, the founder of pragmatism; and Eugene Debs, the champion of radical reform.

Suspicious of capitalism, this philosopher, the father of six children, had to deal with money. He demanded raises from college presidents, taught extra classes, and moved from apartment to apartment nine times between 1905 and 1914 in a gentrified New York. A workaholic, he pounded away at his typewriter and stopped reading for six months because of eyestrain.

Why were students drawn to Dewey? He was not a mesmerizing lecturer, sitting at a table in front of the class with a single piece of paper and thinking aloud. Irving Edman (who became a philosopher) was initially repelled by this method, but looking over his notes, he soon realized "what had seemed so rambling . . . was of extraordinary coherence, texture and brilliance." Dewey's former student and later colleague, the philosopher J. H. Randall Jr., described a man who was "simple, sturdy, unpretentious, quizzical, shrewd, devoted, fearless, genuine." Dewey had, according to biographer Jay Martin, "a general spiritedness and joviality . . . that attracted people of all ages, genders and races."

After leaving Ann Arbor and following his dramatic entrance into Chicago during the Pullman Strike, Dewey spent ten years at the University of Chicago, becoming more radical and more famous. Before he published his groundbreaking essay, Dewey had to test his half-formed ideas in a real school, thus he and his wife ran the Lab School at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1905. Classes were small and select. Dewey drew on the expertise of Chicago's professors to create age-appropriate curriculums, stressing discovery and cooperation and the talents of creative teachers to implement it. The Dewey school was distinctly middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents.

Visitors came from all over America and Dewey's vision spread, so much so that he and his daughter Evelyn co-authored the 1915 book Schools of Tomorrow, a celebration of progressive pedagogy, complete with 27 photographs of children at work and play. In these schools, students visited fire stations, post offices, and city halls. They grew their own gardens, cooked, cobbled shoes, and tutored younger students. They staged plays dramatizing historical events. Pretending to be the heroes of the Trojan War, they held battles at recess with wooden swords and barrel-cover shields. Reading, writing, spelling, and calculating would be acquired naturally in conjunction with projects: "Studying alone out of a book is an isolated and unsocial performance," the Deweys reminded readers of Schools of Tomorrow. The schools portrayed were chiefly elementary, and it is important to remember that Dewey's reforms were rarely extended to rapidly growing high schools and less tractable adolescents.

Following a long-simmering conflict with University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper, Dewey-now prominent-moved to Columbia University in 1905. He remained there until 1930, teaching, lecturing in schools and community centers, traveling abroad to advise foreign educators, and writing articles for learned journals and popular magazines like the New Republic. Dewey believed that a philosopher should not only reflect but also act, both to improve society and to participate in "the living struggles and issues of his age." His tools: reason, science, pragmatism. His goal: democracy, not only in politics and the economy but also as an ethical ideal, as a way of life.

As an activist and public intellectual, Dewey made a stunning series of contributions. He founded the American Association of University Professors and helped organize the New York City Teachers Union. He supported efforts that led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. He worked in settlement houses to help assimilate immigrants, spoke out against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, defended Bertrand Russell when Russell's morals were questioned, and sided with historian Harold Rugg when Rugg's books were censored. In response to feelings of guilt he harbored about his support for World War I, Dewey led a crusade that culminated in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an influential though controversial treaty outlawing war.

During the 1920s, Dewey's influence became international. He traveled with Alice to Japan in 1919, where he criticized the emperor cult, and lived in China for more than two years, giving two hundred lectures. The Chinese called him "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science." His books have been translated into Mandarin, and scholars at the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University remind me that his emphasis on discovery and ethics has influenced contemporary Chinese educators trying to encourage creativity and virtue in students. Dewey went on to travel to Turkey, South Africa, and Mexico, advising governments on how to improve their educational systems. Today, in eleven countries, ranging from Italy to Argentina, that traditionally educate their students with lectures, memorization, and exams, there are Dewey centers that look to humanize education and consider the wider aspects of his philosophy.

John Dewey's seventieth birthday on October 20, 1929, just before the stock market crash, became a national event. He had received numerous honorary degrees, declarations from foreign nations, and a portrait bust by the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein. From all over the world came telegrams, including tributes from Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter. Twenty-five hundred notables crowded into the Astor Hotel's Grand Ballroom to hear Dewey compared to Ben Franklin and praised by historian James Harvey Robinson as "the chief spokesman of our age and the chief thinker of our days."

Not all Americans praised John Dewey. From his days at the Experimental School in Chicago until his death in 1952, he was the object of sharp criticism. Some parents in Chicago claimed that after a morning of chaotic play in the Dewey school, they had to teach their children how to read and write. Immigrants in New York City violently protested against manual training in 1915. They wanted a classical education so that their children could go to college and become professionals. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr found Dewey's view of human nature too optimistic, his view of society utopian.

The controversy surrounding Dewey continued after his death. "The 1950s was a horrible decade for progressive educators," notes educational historian Diane Ravitch. In Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (1953), Arthur Bestor mocked the fad of "life adjustment" and called for a return of the "academic curriculum." Admiral Hiram Rickover, the father of the nuclear-powered submarine, attributed Russia's achievement with Sputnik to Dewey and his followers. In Life magazine, President Eisenhower blamed America's educational failings on "John Dewey's teachings."

The controversy continues today. Analytic philosophers have little use for a sage who was not interested in arcane disputes over language. The champion of cultural literacy, E. D. Hirsch, insists that the education-school professors who lionize Dewey instruct future teachers to eschew facts, completion, testing, and lectures. In 2011, Human Events, a conservative weekly, listed Democracy and Education among the most dangerous books published in the past two hundred years.

Perhaps Dewey's greatest liability was his style. Concerning clarity, the nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer once wrote: "To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible effort." Dewey read Spencer but did not follow this advice. The editor of the New Republic regularly rewrote Dewey's submissions. Defenders detect profundity beneath obscurity and argue that Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical writing style. Critics demand clarity and example, maybe some rhythm and grace-missing in a philosopher who had no ear for music. I have met many contemporary teachers who have heard of John Dewey. I have not met one who has read his works, except reluctantly.

Of course, any philosopher who becomes famous can expect critiques and may become attractive to followers who will distort his or her message. The distortion will be magnified when the philosopher writes a lot, especially in an abstract and imprecise style. As a result, sweet-tempered John Dewey, who welcomed dialog and experimentation, is blamed for any change that opponents can label "progressive": open classrooms, cooperative learning, life adjustment, language reading, the attacks on Latin and canonical books, the slighting of the gifted and talented, declining test scores. The assaults can be expanded to include social ills as well as educational shortcomings: communism, creeping socialism, juvenile delinquency, declining patriotism, a weakened military, and a less productive economy. Both Catholics and Communists reviled Dewey.

Patiently, Dewey defended himself. He reminded his educational disciples that students should not be allowed to do whatever they please, that planning and organization must accompany freedom, and that teachers should be guides as well as subject matter experts. While many forms of progressive education were spreading in America, he insisted in his 1938 book, Experience and Education, that education should not be without direction.

What are we to make of John Dewey? His FBI file mentioned his carelessly combed gray hair, disheveled attire, and monotonous drawl. They might have added that he was agnostic in religion and radical in politics. He was a good husband and father and a generous colleague. Optimistic, hard-working, idealistic, he rejected the Lost Generation's cynicism and Sigmund Freud's pessimism and preoccupation with the unconscious. Biographer Alan Ryan notes, "He was uninterested in either his own or other people's private miseries." He did not comment on sexuality, the obsession of contemporary America. Unlike evolutionary psychologists, he believed nurture was more powerful than nature. He overcame a natural timidity to become a giant in the world of philosophy and insisted on a new role for the philosopher, combining contemplation with action.

The words authority, discipline, deferred gratification, tradition, hierarchy, and order, were not part of his vocabulary. He favored community, equality, activity, freedom. He had no use for McGuffey Readers, designed to instill character, patriotism, and love of God. He criticized the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the New Deal. He believed in unions, strikes, government planning, and redistribution of income. Opposed to laissez-faire capitalism, he was convinced that leaders were more dangerous than the masses.

Rejecting the specialization of contemporary philosophers, Dewey tackled logic, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. He commented on war and peace, labor unions, and capitalists. Above all, he transformed schools, connecting students to real life, encouraging them to become critical thinkers and idealists.

What is Dewey's legacy? President Lyndon Johnson (once a teacher) extolled "Dr. Johnny" and connected Dewey's ideas to the Great Society. Southern Illinois University has created a center for Dewey studies and published 37 volumes of his writings as well as twenty-four thousand pieces of his correspondence. The former editor, Larry Hickman, tells me there has been a revival of interest in Dewey after years of neglect. He argues that Dewey's pluralism encourages "global citizenship." He notes that after World War II, Japanese educators turned to Dewey and adds that he has a following among millions of Japanese Buddhists.

There is a John Dewey Society in America and John Dewey Study Centers around the world. Deborah Meier, the only elementary school teacher ever to receive a MacArthur "Genius" award, repeatedly cites Dewey's influence on her democratic, project- and community-based schools. The Coalition for Essential Schools, whose slogan is "less is more," is based on Dewey progressivism. Left-leaning public intellectuals and professors Cornel West and Noam Chomsky champion Dewey as an enemy of elites and founder of participatory democracy. The late Richard Rorty, an iconoclastic and controversial but prominent philosopher, rediscovered Dewey in the 1980s and praised Dewey's pragmatism, political engagement, and vision for a democratic utopia (which Rorty says will never happen).

Echoing Dewey's conclusion in "My Pedagogic Creed," many contemporary psychologists insist that human beings are wired to be social, craving group activity and connections. In addition to evidence from brain imaging unavailable in Dewey's time, they cite the ubiquity of iPhones and the power of Facebook. Communitarians who feel America's celebration of individualism has gone too far quote Dewey.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," advised Robert Browning, Dewey's favorite poet. Dewey was a radical reformer, a socialist, a secular humanist, a meliorist, even a utopian. He dreamed of an America without sexism or racism or ethnic divisions, a community that respected capitalists as well as craftspeople and that cultivated both science and art. His dense, turgid philosophical tracts are now of interest primarily to academicians; his more readable journalism remains of use to historians; his educational writings prove the most influential.

Contemporary Americans have opted for testing, standards, competition, choice, and academic curriculums. Education reports emphasize national security, jobs, and the achievement gap, not discovery, manual training, or community. Deliberately antiprogressive charter schools, such as the KIPP Schools and Success Academies, try to overcome the achievement gap and end poverty by content, competition, and discipline. They stress grit, not joy. Teachers, denied the status Dewey thought so important, still stand in front of the class and talk. Progressive schools are few and seem most effective in small schools staffed by "true believers."

Still, glimmers of Dewey's dream remain. In the New Haven middle school of my thirteen-year-old grandson, the social studies teacher started the year by asking, "Why study history?" The mathematics teacher showed the movie Stand and Deliver. The language arts teacher asked each student to share with the class their thoughts about their individually selected summer reading book. My grandson chose a trilogy, The Hunger Games, not in the canon. The science teacher asked them to construct a model bridge out of one piece of paper and Scotch tape. To build community, the principal suspended classes, led the students outside, and asked each to start a conversation with someone he or she had not talked to before that morning.

Today most K-12 teachers still believe in content, competition, evaluation, and discipline. Simultaneously, they believe in relevance, projects, group learning, and choice. The Common Core Standards, approved by most states, stress rigor but at the same time emphasize inquiry and understanding. John Dewey would be moderately pleased with a pragmatic nation that combines traditional education with the insights of progressives.

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John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker

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His ideas altered the education of children worldwide

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Activist: Martin Luther King Jr.

Medium: Writings, Speeches, Sermons, Imagery, nonviolent protest

Activist: Racial Equality/Civil Rights Activist

Organization: Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Who they are: Martin Luther King Jr was a Racial Equality/Civil Rights activist, and he spoke in front of thousands of people in hopes of giving equality to black people and fighting for justice.

What they stand for: Martin Luther King Jr stood for equality and civil rights, and that racial inequality, segregation, and discrimination should not exist.

What they have done/contributed: Martin Luther King Jr contributed much to the world; he led organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, started protests for the rights of colored Americans, gave a speech, "I Have a Dream," which motivated many people to end discrimination peacefully; his legacy and impact will be remembered to this day.

1 Example: "Martin Luther King, Jr." by Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Luther-King-Jr?utm_source=chatgpt.com

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Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.-died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee) was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement's success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics, such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Early years

King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern Black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King's father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as "Sweet Auburn," the bustling "Black Wall Street," home to some of the country's largest and most prosperous Black businesses and Black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family.

This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot the time when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents' permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. "Negroes and whites go [to] the same church," he noted in a letter to his parents. "I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere." This summer experience in the North only deepened King's growing hatred of racial segregation.

At Morehouse, King favored studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged. King's mentor at Morehouse was the college president, Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King's father. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the African American community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the Black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage King. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948.

King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of Crozer's student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, "The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation." From Crozer, King went to Boston University, where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own theological and ethical inclinations, he studied man's relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman."

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Martin Luther King, Jr. | Biography, Speeches, Facts, & Assassination | Britannica

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Martin Luther King, Jr., was a visionary leader and advocate for equality who spearheaded the civil rights movement in America through nonviolent protests, inspiring lasting change and leaving an enduring legacy.

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Dolores Huerta

Medium-community organizing and social activism

Activist-fighting for the rights of farmworkers, women, and marginalized communities, particularly in the realm of voting rights

Organization-National Farm Workers Association

Who are they-Dolores Huerta is an American labor leader and feminist activist.

What they stand for-Dolores Huerta stands for labor rights, women's rights, voting rights, and the power of grassroots democracy, famously coining the rallying cry "¡Sí se puede!" or "Yes, we can!".

What they have done-establish rights for marginalized communities by co-founding the United Farm Workers, leading strikes and boycotts to improve farm worker conditions, and founding the Dolores Huerta Foundation to advocate for social justice, voter education, and community organizing

An example-https://doloreshuerta.org/

https://ufw.org/

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Activist: Malcom x

Medium: Speeches and Writings for an African American Revolutionary.

Organization: Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU)

Malcolm X was an American Black rights activist. He stood for black empowerment, racial justice, and economic equality. Malcolm X has stood up for Black nationalism and self-determination.

one example: Malcolm X | The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

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Greta Thunberg

medium: Social Media, Public Speaking, Journalism

Activism: Climate Change and Environmental Protection

Organization: Fridays for Future

3-Sentence Explanation:

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish environmental activist know for inspiring millions of young people to demand stronger action against climate change. She stands for protecting the planet, reducing carbon emissions, and holding world leaders accountable for environmental damage. Thunberg has spoken at the United Nations, led global climate strikes, and brought international attention to the climate crisis.

Example:

She started the "Fridays for Future" Movement by skipping school to protest outside the Swedish Parliament, sparking global youth climate strikes

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiAt9CZ5IuQAxVjle4BHWYtGrkQFnoECCMQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffridaysforfuture.org%2F&usg=AOvVaw2yKlK4nz1DS4YaHqBSH1uq&opi=89978449

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Medium: Public Speaking, Writing, & Opportunity for Education to African Americans

Activist: Economic self-sufficiency of African Americans to earn basic rights and respect

Organization: Tuskegee University/Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute

Who Are they: Booker T. Washington was an educator & principle, as well as "the most the most influential spokesman for Black Americans between 1895 and 1915."

What did they stand for: Booker T. Washington was an advocate for the idea of the Black population in America becoming economically stable by their own efforts before fighting for their civil rights completely

What have they done: Booker T. Washington led the development of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now known as Tuskegee University, as the founder, and principle of the institute for the remainder of his life. Here, Black Americans would gain the opportunity to advance themselves in all areas of life. Whether it be literature, science and mathematics, or even specified skills for trade like agriculture, or anything else.

Example: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tuskegee-University

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Activist: Henry Bergh

Medium: Direct confrontation, and founding of organization

Activist against: Mistreatment of animals

Organization: Founder of the ASPCA

Who he was: Henry Bergh was a very wealthy man who had inherited wealth from his father

What he stood for: Henry stood for the protection of animals from abuse and neglect by their owners

What he has done: Henry created the ASPCA(the source of all the commercials with the sad dogs) as well as being one of the first voices trying to get animal protection laws created.

Exmaple: the laws he has passed are the baseline for most anticruelty laws now https://www.animallaw.info/article/development-anti-cruelty-laws-during-1800s

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The reason we now see photos of sad animals on TV is partly due to the legacy of Henry Bergh, New York-born founder of the ASPCA. Science History Images/Alamy; Shutterstock

Henry Bergh was born in 1813, the son of a wealthy shipbuilder with a thriving business on the East River. He inherited a substantial fortune the year he turned 30, and for much of his life, there was little to indicate that he would amount to much of anything. He went to Columbia, but never graduated. He married an Englishwoman, then spent years traveling around Europe with her.

When he came back to New York, Bergh attempted to make a name for himself as an author and a playwright, failing miserably. "I wondered at his persistence," said one theater manager, who found "positively no merit" in his writing. Even a close friend admitted that he had no sense of humor.

Then, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln sent Bergh to Russia as part of the diplomatic corps, and his life changed forever.

There, he saw a peasant whipping his horse in a St. Petersburg street and ordered his driver to stop the carriage. Confronted, the peasant dropped his whip in terror, Bergh said - and it was then, he realized, that gentle persuasion would not convince men to abandon cruelty - they had to be cowed into submission.

This moment gave Bergh the spark to eventually found the ASPCA, writes Ernest Freeberg in " A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement " (Basic Books), out now - and finally create the legacy he yearned for.

Bergh returned to Manhattan inspired. By 1866, he'd convinced state legislators in Albany to grant him a charter for an "American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and served as the nonprofit organization's first head, taking no salary.

He plunged into the role with enthusiasm, whether he was stopping streetcars pulled by tired horses (ignoring any traffic that backed up behind him), or demanding that master showman P.T. Barnum stop feeding live rabbits to snakes in his downtown Manhattan museum.

Bergh said he found "supreme joy" in his work, which helped make him one of the city's biggest celebrities in the decades after the war. Whispers followed him as he stalked the streets, and parents would point out the "tall, elegant" crusader to their children.

Eventually his fame spread beyond the city, as he began accepting invitations to give lectures to animal-welfare groups across the United States. Five years after the ASPCA's founding, French-born New Yorker Louis Bonard helped secure the organization's future for good.

Bonard was known to his neighbors on Wooster Street as a miser who spent his days holed up in his rundown apartment. It turned out, though, that he was sitting on a fortune he'd made as a fur trader before coming to the city - and, on his deathbed, he sought Bergh out, offering the ASPCA his entire estate of roughly $100,000, just shy of $2 million in 2020 dollars.

Bonard's family, who hadn't seen or spoken to him in years, challenged the will, claiming he was insane. They said Bonard wanted to be reincarnated as an animal and hoped his bequest would give him absolution from the violence of his past career. But the courts sided with the ASPCA, and Bergh used the inheritance to expand the foundation's offices.

And yet, Bergh showed little joy in success. His "melancholy air" and "sad expression" was observed by reporters throughout his life. Convinced that animal rights would only be achieved through brutal repercussions, he openly fantasized about seeing men who beat horses stripped of their shirts, bound and flogged until they bled, describing the notion as "charming."

As the years passed, his entire life became wrapped up in the ASPCA. His wife, suffering from a brain disease, moved to a sanitarium outside the city, leaving him on his own except for two adult nephews who occasionally stayed with him at the family's home on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village and helped manage the foundation.

In the end, the physical exertion of constantly confronting animal abusers on the streets of Manhattan took its toll on Bergh, who died in the middle of a blizzard in early 1888, his heart weakened by bronchitis. Though the press revelled one last time in the image they had created of the 74-year-old activist as a "crank" and "the oddest of men," his longtime adversary P.T. Barnum pushed through the snow to attend the funeral for the "kind, noble-hearted man" he considered - despite their many public feuds - as one of his "oldest and most valued friends."

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How a rich layabout became an accidental activist who founded the ASPCA

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Henry Bergh was born in 1813, the son of a wealthy shipbuilder with a thriving business on the East River. He inherited a substantial fortune the year he turned 30, and for much of his life, there ...

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Medium- Speeches, writer, interviews, and co-founder of a support education program.

Activist- Girls' education and women's rights.

Organization- Malala Fund

Malala Yousafzai is an author and an activist who is fighting for girls' education and women's rights.

Malala Yousafzai stands for her belief that a girl has every right to learn, no matter where she's from or what challenges she goes through.

Malala Yousafzai has spoken out for the girls and women, co-founded the Malala fund, written a book, and survived an assassination attempt.

Ex: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/12/malala-yousafzai-united-nations-education-speech-text

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Medium: Television, newspapers, and magazines

Activist: Civil rights activist and Black empowerment.

Organization: Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU)

3 Sentence Portion

Who are they: Malcolm X was a prominent figure in the Civil Rights movement and was an African American revolutionary, and Muslim minister, and a human rights activist. He was sadly assassinated when he was only 39 years old.

What do they stand for: Malcolm stood for a couple of things, one of them being Black nationalism, racial pride, and also self-defense for African Americans.

What have they done/contributed: Malcom X has done a lot of contributing when he was alive, some but not limited to organizing temples, cofounded an organization for Afro-American unity, and finally reframed the word "Black" from an insult to something that is a source of pride.

1 example:

https://nhcje.org/blog/malcolm-x-from-radical-empowerment-to-global-solidarity

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- Medium: Photography, Journalism

- Activism: Chicano Rights, Cultural Preservation

- Organization: Chicano Movement

- Who they are: Raul Ruiz is an American physician and politician, currently serving as a U.S. Representative from California.

- What they stand for: He advocates for affordable healthcare, veterans’ services, and immigration reform, drawing from his background as a doctor and son of farmworkers.

- What they have done/contributed: Ruiz has worked to expand access to healthcare in underserved communities and played a key role in legislation supporting public health and disaster response efforts.

Example: https://www.axios.com/2025/05/09/library-of-congress-chicano-journalist-raul-ruiz?

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Medium: Skilled conductor for the Underground Railroad

Activist: Rescued around 70 enslaved people.

Organization: Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes.

Who is she: American abolitionist and social who escaped slavery and fought against it.

What she stands for: Shows and inspires the symbol or courage, strength, and determination.

What she has done: Guided over 300 enslaves, to freedom fought for the Union, even working as a nurse to the Union during the dreaded Civil War from 1861-1865.

Example: Harriet Tubman

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Activist: Nelson Mandela

Medium: Speeches, writing, leadership

Activist: Anti-Apartheid activist, equal rights for everyone

Organization: African National Congress (ANC)

3 sentence explanation of:

- Who they are: Nelson Mandela was a South African politician and eventually became the first black president of South Africa through what he did as an activist.

- What they stand for: He stood for equality and fought against racial segregation. Mandela did this through having negotiations with the apartheid government after staying in prison for 27 years.

-What they have done/contributed: Established democracy and united everyone South Africa peacefully. And once he became president, he created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to uncover human right violations that happened during apartheid to heal violators and became a symbol of social justice.

Example: Nelson Mandela's role in the fight against apartheid in South Africa - World History Edu

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Activist: Nelson Mandela

Medium- Politics, writing, and speaking out.

Organization- Nelson Mandela Foundation and African National Congress

Who are they? Nelson Mandela was a South African revolutionary political leader who fought for equality during the Apartheid.

What do they stand for? Nelson Mandela was a symbol who stood for equality, peace, and freedom for his country.

What have they done/contributed? Nelson Mandela ended apartheid which were racist laws that oppressed black people. He became president and made South Africa into a democratic country.

Example- Nelson Mandela held many protests against the Apartheid.

https://humanrights.ca/exhibition/mandela-struggle-freedom

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Activist: Colin Kaepernick

Medium- Social media, public speaking, sports

Activist- Racial justice and police brutality awareness

Organization: Know Your Rights Camp

3 sentences explanation of:

Who they are: Colin Kaepernick is a former NFL quarterback who became a civil rights activist after protesting police violence by kneeling during the national anthem.

What they stand for: He stands for racial equality, justice for victims of police brutality, and the fight against systemic oppression.

What they have done/contributed: Kaepernick founded the "Know Your Rights Camp" to educate and empower youth of color, and he has donated millions to social justice causes.

1 Example: "Know Your Rights Camp" Colin Kaepernick founded.

https://www.knowyourrightscamp.org/

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Medium- digital media

Activist- Christian values, supporting Trump, conservative views, reaching out to youth

Organization- Turning Point USA

3 sentence explanation-

Charlie Kirk was a political activist who co-founded the organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and that held political debates mainly on college campuses. Charlie Kirk stood for the support of the MAGA movement, as well as conservative values, along with that he stood for the rights of the second amendment. He contributed to these beliefs by helping found TPUSA, hold debates to see others' views, and post of social media for awareness of what he stood for.

1 Example: "Turning Point USA"

https://tpusa.com

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Activist: Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton

- Medium: Philanthropy, Letter Writing, Public Advocacy

- Activism: Orphan Care, Historical -Preservation, Women's Role in Society

- Organization: Graham Windham Orphanage

- Who they are: Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton was the wife of Alexander Hamilton and a dedicated philanthropist in early American history.

- What they stand for: She stood for caring for children who were orphans and preserving the legacy of her husband, Alexander Hamilton.

- What they have done/contributed: After her husband’s death, Eliza co-founded the first private orphanage in New York City (Graham Windham), raised funds for charity, and worked for 50 years to preserve Alexander Hamilton’s legacy.

Example: https://www.elizasstory.org/

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Activist: Helen Keller

Medium: Writing, public speaking, and travel

Activism: Women's rights, disability rights, and pacifism.

Organization: Goodwill Ambassador, Co-Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, and American Foundation for the Blind

3 Sentence Explanation:

Who She Is: Helen Keller was a blind and deaf American author, activist, and disability rights advocate.

What She Stands For: Keller stands for social justice and the rights of women, the disabled, and workers.

What She Has Done: Keller played a large role in founding the ACLU in 1920, who work to improve health for vulnerable populations, and she pioneered advocacy for the disabled.

Example:

https://www.fsklions.org/helen-keller-speech/

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Medium- Public speaking, writing, organize events, and petitions

Activist- Women rights and social justice

Organization- Women's Loyal National League (WLNL) and National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)

Who they are - Susan B. Anthony was a American activist who fought for women's right to vote and the end of slavery.

What they stand for - Susan B. Anthony stood for equal rights, especially fighting for women’s right to vote, the end of slavery, and creating the organization: National Woman Suffrage Association.

What they have done/contributed - Susan B. Anthony helped lead the fight for women’s right to vote, co-founded major women’s rights organizations, gave hundreds of speeches, and pushed for laws that upped equality and ended slavery.

Example -https://lewissuffragecollection.omeka.net/items/show/1123

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Activist: Dolores Huerta

Medium - Public speaking, community organizing, protests.

Activist - Farmworkers rights, labor rights, and womens rights.

Organization - United Farm Workers and the Dolores Huerta Foundation

3-sentence explanation - Dolores Huerta is a Mexican American leader who helped start a group called the "United Farm Workers" with Cesar Chavez. She believes everyone should be treated fairly and get good pay and safe places to work. Due to her hard work, many farm workers gained better rights.

1 example - https://www.history.com/articles/dolores-huerta-cesar-chavez-farm-workers?

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Medium- Peaceful activism, writing, and advocating for human rights

Activism- Human rights activist

Organization- Independent Chinese PEN Center

Who they are: Liu Xiaobo was a Chinese literary critic, human rights activist, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

What they stand for: Liu stood for a more democratic China and fundamental human rights.

What they have done/contributed: Liu often spoke out against the Chinese government and has been detained or imprisoned many times because of his writing and activism.

1 Example: The hunger strike he did with others at Tiananmen Square on June 2nd, 1989.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2010/xiaobo/biographical/

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Activist: Maya Angelou

Medium: Writer, Poet, and Speaker

Activism: Civil Rights and Racial Equality

Organization: Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Who they are: Maya Angelou was an American author, poet, and civil rights activist.

What they stand for: Angelou used her writing and voice to stand up for racial and gender equality, speaking out against discrimination and injustice.

What they have done/contributed: Through her poetry, books, and civil rights work with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, she inspired generations to fight for equality and self-worth.

Example: Maya Angelou Foundation

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Medium- used a combination of painting, writing, and international diplomacy

Activist- pursuit of global peace and spiritual development through art and culture

Organization- Agni Yoga Society, the Master Institute of United Arts, the Roerich Pact and its associated Banner of Peace initiative, and also participated in groups like the Society for the Encouragement of Art and the Gorky Commission

Who they are: Nicholas Roerich was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure.

What they stand for: Nicholas Roerich stood for global peace through the use of art and culture, consisting of the central idea "Pax Cultura," using thousands of unique and vivid paintings to communicate his message to the world.

What they have done/contributed: Nicholas Roerich initiated the "RoeRich Pact" Treaty, also known as the "Red Cross of Culture," to safeguard museums, monuments, and educational institutions from destruction during war.

1 Example: "Roerich Pact and The Banner of Peace" signing of the Roerich Pact in the White House.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.roerich.org%2Froerich-pact.php&psig=AOvVaw2c1n_VdZ2rhognGYMEOytH&ust=1759807024105000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBYQjRxqFwoTCIico5jOjpADFQAAAAAdAAAAABBr

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Medium - Books, and talking in his classrooms

Activist - Education for children, and the concept of "learning by doing."

Organization - American Association of University Professors, New York City Teachers Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and American Civil Liberties Union

Who they are - John Dewey was an activist, psychologist, and philosopher who advocated for progressive education and the concept of "learning by doing."

What they stand for - Dewey stood for democracy in both education and politics.

What have they done/contributed - Dewey paved the way for the development of pragmatism and progressive education.

Example - Experience and Education by John Dewey, 1938

https://www.neh.gov/article/john-dewey-portrait-progressive-thinker

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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In July 1894, a train carrying a young philosopher from Ann Arbor, Michigan, pulled into Chicago Union Station. Its arrival was delayed by striking workers of the American Railway Union, who were made furious by the Pullman Company's decision to cut their wages. The strike ended two weeks later, took the lives of thirty people, and symbolized a rapidly changing America dominated by corporations that set laborers against owners.

The philosopher had entered a city whose population was exploding with immigrants, many of whom were illiterate; a city of half-built skyscrapers and noisome meatpacking plants; a city with a new university funded by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago, whose Gothic buildings and eminent faculty would rival those of Harvard and Yale. John Dewey had arrived to chair the philosophy and pedagogy department. Once in the city, he visited the strikers, applauded their "fanatic sincerity and earnestness," praised their leader Eugene Debs, and condemned President Cleveland's suppression of the strike. Worried about working for a university dedicated to laissez-faire capitalism, Dewey found himself becoming more of a populist, more of a socialist, more sympathetic to the settlement house pioneered by Jane Addams, and more skeptical of his childhood Christianity. He would conclude that a changing America needed different schools.

In 1899, Dewey published the pamphlet that made him famous, The School and Society, and promulgated many key precepts of later education reforms. Dewey insisted that the old model of schooling-students sitting in rows, memorizing and reciting-was antiquated. Students should be active, not passive. They required compelling and relevant projects, not lectures. Students should become problem solvers. Interest, not fear, should be used to motivate them. They should cooperate, not compete.

The key to the new education was "manual training." Before the factory system and the growth of cities, children handled animals, crops, and tools. They were educated by nature "with real things and materials." Dewey lamented the disappearance of the idyllic village and the departure of children's modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience. He was, however, no reactionary: "It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices." Urban children needed to sew, cook, and work with metal and wood. Manual training should not, however, be mere vocational education or a substitute for the farm. It should be scientific and experimental, an introduction to civilization.

"You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing," asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in groups to make models of the spinning jenny and the power loom, they learned cooperation. Together they understood the role of water and steam, analyzed the textile mills of Lowell, and studied the distribution of the finished cloth and its impact on everyday life. They learned science, geography, and physics without textbooks or lectures. Learning by doing replaced learning by listening.

Manual training revolved around the study of occupations to develop both the hand and the intellect. To know and to do were equally valuable. Cooperative learning encouraged a democratic classroom, which promoted a democratic society without elites, ethnic divisions, or economic inequality. Throughout his life, Dewey believed that humans were social beings inclined to be cooperative, not selfish individuals predisposed to conflict. Always he praised democracy as a way of life and scientific intelligence as the key to reform.

America in 1900 was preoccupied with the clash between capital and labor, debating how to make the worker more than an appendage to the machine. To science, geography, and physics, Dewey added another advantage: meaning. While the typical student did not go on to high school or attend college, manual training conducted by a skilled teacher could stimulate the imagination, enlarge the sympathies, and acquaint young people with scientific intelligence. Dewey was outraged that "thousands of young ones . . . are practically ruined . . . in the Chicago schools every year." His new education sought to encourage students to continue in school and combat the increase in juvenile delinquency. It looked to produce an inquiring student who could change America.

Running through The School and Society is a suspicion of the intellectual who wants to monopolize knowledge and keep it abstract. Dewey opposed the academic curriculum revolving around classical languages and high culture, which he believed suited an aristocracy, not a democracy. "The simple facts of the case are that in the great majority of human beings," he wrote, "the distinctively intellectual interest is not dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition." With more and more Americans enrolled in schools, educators had to acknowledge this fact. Learning had to be democratized and made relevant and practical. "The school must represent present life."

Who was this philosopher who believed that children are curious and good, who would introduce them to civilization through wool and cotton, who would create cooperative classrooms that would end divisions between managers and workers and democratize America? Dewey lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, wrote 37 books, and published 766 articles in 151 journals. In his lifetime, he was hailed as America's preeminent philosopher. Historian Henry Steele Commager called him "the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people." In China, he was called a "second Confucius."

John Dewey grew up in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a pious, high-minded mother and a well-read grocer father. Shy and withdrawn, the young Dewey read voraciously and graduated from the University of Vermont. Uncertain about a career, he moved to Oil City, Pennsylvania, to teach Latin and algebra at the local high school. An average teacher but an ambitious intellectual, he decided to become a philosopher and fought to gain admission to Johns Hopkins University, which was dedicated to original research. He graduated with a PhD in philosophy. The president of Johns Hopkins, Daniel Coit Gilman, encouraged Dewey to accept an offer to teach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor but suggested that he curtail his "reclusive and bookish habits."

At Michigan, a newly confident Dewey published a psychology textbook and fell in love with one of his students, Alice Chipman (later described by their daughter as a woman "with a brilliant mind which cut through sham and pretense"). Influenced by Alice, Dewey paid more attention to social problems. They started a family and, observing his children, he applied his psychological insights to their upbringing, becoming increasingly more interested in education, so that his children might escape what he felt were the shortcomings of the schools he attended as a child.

One of his students in Michigan described Dewey as "a tall, dark, thin young man with long black hair, and a soft, penetrating eye, and looks like a cross between a Nihilist and a poet." A colleague at Michigan found him "simple, modest, utterly devoid of any affectation or self-consciousness, and makes many friends and no enemies." Later associates would corroborate this positive portrait, stressing Dewey's ability to accept criticism, his willingness to give credit to others, and his intellectual and physical vigor. After a lunch (hosted by T. S. Eliot) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bertrand Russell praised Dewey: "To my surprise I liked him very much. He has a large slow-moving mind, very empirical and candid . . . [he] impressed me very greatly, both as a philosopher and as a lovable man." Self-effacing but not introspective, Dewey spoke little about himself, writing neither memoirs nor an autobiography.

Dewey, who seemed to fit the model of the quintessential reserved New Englander, was surprisingly complex. Arriving in Chicago during the strike, he mused, "I am something of an anarchist." Slightly bohemian, he encouraged his children to go barefoot even in winter, and he and his wife walked naked around the house. He socialized with radicals in Greenwich Village. To understand prostitution, he visited Chicago's brothels. He wrote passionate love letters to his wife and rhapsodized over the endearing qualities of his children. Once reclusive, he happily worked on philosophic tracts as his children crawled around his desk. His friend Max Eastman noted, "Dewey is at his best with one child climbing up his pants leg and another fishing in his inkwell." At the age of 58, he had a brief romance (possibly platonic) with Anzia Wezierska, who wrote novels and short stories about the immigrant experience. He wrote poems to her and for himself about the anxiety of philosophizing, poems without literary flair that he never expected would be published.

Away from his family, Dewey could slip into melancholy. In 1894, he wrote to Alice, "I think yesterday was the bluest day I have ever spent." He was twice visited by catastrophe. While vacationing in Italy in the fall of 1894, his youngest son, Morris, died of diphtheria at age two and a half, a loss from which he and Alice never fully recovered. Ten years later, during his second European trip, his eight-year-old son, Gordon, contracted typhoid fever and died in Ireland. "I shall never understand why he was taken from the world," wrote Dewey.

Dewey marched in a suffragette parade and campaigned for women's right to vote. He celebrated as his mentors Ella Flagg Young, the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, and Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House. He rejected his mother's query, "Are you right with Jesus?," but sprinkled his essay "My Pedagogic Creed" with religious imagery. Who were Dewey's heroes? Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, the apostles of democracy; William James, the founder of pragmatism; and Eugene Debs, the champion of radical reform.

Suspicious of capitalism, this philosopher, the father of six children, had to deal with money. He demanded raises from college presidents, taught extra classes, and moved from apartment to apartment nine times between 1905 and 1914 in a gentrified New York. A workaholic, he pounded away at his typewriter and stopped reading for six months because of eyestrain.

Why were students drawn to Dewey? He was not a mesmerizing lecturer, sitting at a table in front of the class with a single piece of paper and thinking aloud. Irving Edman (who became a philosopher) was initially repelled by this method, but looking over his notes, he soon realized "what had seemed so rambling . . . was of extraordinary coherence, texture and brilliance." Dewey's former student and later colleague, the philosopher J. H. Randall Jr., described a man who was "simple, sturdy, unpretentious, quizzical, shrewd, devoted, fearless, genuine." Dewey had, according to biographer Jay Martin, "a general spiritedness and joviality . . . that attracted people of all ages, genders and races."

After leaving Ann Arbor and following his dramatic entrance into Chicago during the Pullman Strike, Dewey spent ten years at the University of Chicago, becoming more radical and more famous. Before he published his groundbreaking essay, Dewey had to test his half-formed ideas in a real school, thus he and his wife ran the Lab School at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1905. Classes were small and select. Dewey drew on the expertise of Chicago's professors to create age-appropriate curriculums, stressing discovery and cooperation and the talents of creative teachers to implement it. The Dewey school was distinctly middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents.

Visitors came from all over America and Dewey's vision spread, so much so that he and his daughter Evelyn co-authored the 1915 book Schools of Tomorrow, a celebration of progressive pedagogy, complete with 27 photographs of children at work and play. In these schools, students visited fire stations, post offices, and city halls. They grew their own gardens, cooked, cobbled shoes, and tutored younger students. They staged plays dramatizing historical events. Pretending to be the heroes of the Trojan War, they held battles at recess with wooden swords and barrel-cover shields. Reading, writing, spelling, and calculating would be acquired naturally in conjunction with projects: "Studying alone out of a book is an isolated and unsocial performance," the Deweys reminded readers of Schools of Tomorrow. The schools portrayed were chiefly elementary, and it is important to remember that Dewey's reforms were rarely extended to rapidly growing high schools and less tractable adolescents.

Following a long-simmering conflict with University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper, Dewey-now prominent-moved to Columbia University in 1905. He remained there until 1930, teaching, lecturing in schools and community centers, traveling abroad to advise foreign educators, and writing articles for learned journals and popular magazines like the New Republic. Dewey believed that a philosopher should not only reflect but also act, both to improve society and to participate in "the living struggles and issues of his age." His tools: reason, science, pragmatism. His goal: democracy, not only in politics and the economy but also as an ethical ideal, as a way of life.

As an activist and public intellectual, Dewey made a stunning series of contributions. He founded the American Association of University Professors and helped organize the New York City Teachers Union. He supported efforts that led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. He worked in settlement houses to help assimilate immigrants, spoke out against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, defended Bertrand Russell when Russell's morals were questioned, and sided with historian Harold Rugg when Rugg's books were censored. In response to feelings of guilt he harbored about his support for World War I, Dewey led a crusade that culminated in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an influential though controversial treaty outlawing war.

During the 1920s, Dewey's influence became international. He traveled with Alice to Japan in 1919, where he criticized the emperor cult, and lived in China for more than two years, giving two hundred lectures. The Chinese called him "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science." His books have been translated into Mandarin, and scholars at the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University remind me that his emphasis on discovery and ethics has influenced contemporary Chinese educators trying to encourage creativity and virtue in students. Dewey went on to travel to Turkey, South Africa, and Mexico, advising governments on how to improve their educational systems. Today, in eleven countries, ranging from Italy to Argentina, that traditionally educate their students with lectures, memorization, and exams, there are Dewey centers that look to humanize education and consider the wider aspects of his philosophy.

John Dewey's seventieth birthday on October 20, 1929, just before the stock market crash, became a national event. He had received numerous honorary degrees, declarations from foreign nations, and a portrait bust by the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein. From all over the world came telegrams, including tributes from Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter. Twenty-five hundred notables crowded into the Astor Hotel's Grand Ballroom to hear Dewey compared to Ben Franklin and praised by historian James Harvey Robinson as "the chief spokesman of our age and the chief thinker of our days."

Not all Americans praised John Dewey. From his days at the Experimental School in Chicago until his death in 1952, he was the object of sharp criticism. Some parents in Chicago claimed that after a morning of chaotic play in the Dewey school, they had to teach their children how to read and write. Immigrants in New York City violently protested against manual training in 1915. They wanted a classical education so that their children could go to college and become professionals. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr found Dewey's view of human nature too optimistic, his view of society utopian.

The controversy surrounding Dewey continued after his death. "The 1950s was a horrible decade for progressive educators," notes educational historian Diane Ravitch. In Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (1953), Arthur Bestor mocked the fad of "life adjustment" and called for a return of the "academic curriculum." Admiral Hiram Rickover, the father of the nuclear-powered submarine, attributed Russia's achievement with Sputnik to Dewey and his followers. In Life magazine, President Eisenhower blamed America's educational failings on "John Dewey's teachings."

The controversy continues today. Analytic philosophers have little use for a sage who was not interested in arcane disputes over language. The champion of cultural literacy, E. D. Hirsch, insists that the education-school professors who lionize Dewey instruct future teachers to eschew facts, completion, testing, and lectures. In 2011, Human Events, a conservative weekly, listed Democracy and Education among the most dangerous books published in the past two hundred years.

Perhaps Dewey's greatest liability was his style. Concerning clarity, the nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer once wrote: "To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible effort." Dewey read Spencer but did not follow this advice. The editor of the New Republic regularly rewrote Dewey's submissions. Defenders detect profundity beneath obscurity and argue that Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical writing style. Critics demand clarity and example, maybe some rhythm and grace-missing in a philosopher who had no ear for music. I have met many contemporary teachers who have heard of John Dewey. I have not met one who has read his works, except reluctantly.

Of course, any philosopher who becomes famous can expect critiques and may become attractive to followers who will distort his or her message. The distortion will be magnified when the philosopher writes a lot, especially in an abstract and imprecise style. As a result, sweet-tempered John Dewey, who welcomed dialog and experimentation, is blamed for any change that opponents can label "progressive": open classrooms, cooperative learning, life adjustment, language reading, the attacks on Latin and canonical books, the slighting of the gifted and talented, declining test scores. The assaults can be expanded to include social ills as well as educational shortcomings: communism, creeping socialism, juvenile delinquency, declining patriotism, a weakened military, and a less productive economy. Both Catholics and Communists reviled Dewey.

Patiently, Dewey defended himself. He reminded his educational disciples that students should not be allowed to do whatever they please, that planning and organization must accompany freedom, and that teachers should be guides as well as subject matter experts. While many forms of progressive education were spreading in America, he insisted in his 1938 book, Experience and Education, that education should not be without direction.

What are we to make of John Dewey? His FBI file mentioned his carelessly combed gray hair, disheveled attire, and monotonous drawl. They might have added that he was agnostic in religion and radical in politics. He was a good husband and father and a generous colleague. Optimistic, hard-working, idealistic, he rejected the Lost Generation's cynicism and Sigmund Freud's pessimism and preoccupation with the unconscious. Biographer Alan Ryan notes, "He was uninterested in either his own or other people's private miseries." He did not comment on sexuality, the obsession of contemporary America. Unlike evolutionary psychologists, he believed nurture was more powerful than nature. He overcame a natural timidity to become a giant in the world of philosophy and insisted on a new role for the philosopher, combining contemplation with action.

The words authority, discipline, deferred gratification, tradition, hierarchy, and order, were not part of his vocabulary. He favored community, equality, activity, freedom. He had no use for McGuffey Readers, designed to instill character, patriotism, and love of God. He criticized the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the New Deal. He believed in unions, strikes, government planning, and redistribution of income. Opposed to laissez-faire capitalism, he was convinced that leaders were more dangerous than the masses.

Rejecting the specialization of contemporary philosophers, Dewey tackled logic, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. He commented on war and peace, labor unions, and capitalists. Above all, he transformed schools, connecting students to real life, encouraging them to become critical thinkers and idealists.

What is Dewey's legacy? President Lyndon Johnson (once a teacher) extolled "Dr. Johnny" and connected Dewey's ideas to the Great Society. Southern Illinois University has created a center for Dewey studies and published 37 volumes of his writings as well as twenty-four thousand pieces of his correspondence. The former editor, Larry Hickman, tells me there has been a revival of interest in Dewey after years of neglect. He argues that Dewey's pluralism encourages "global citizenship." He notes that after World War II, Japanese educators turned to Dewey and adds that he has a following among millions of Japanese Buddhists.

There is a John Dewey Society in America and John Dewey Study Centers around the world. Deborah Meier, the only elementary school teacher ever to receive a MacArthur "Genius" award, repeatedly cites Dewey's influence on her democratic, project- and community-based schools. The Coalition for Essential Schools, whose slogan is "less is more," is based on Dewey progressivism. Left-leaning public intellectuals and professors Cornel West and Noam Chomsky champion Dewey as an enemy of elites and founder of participatory democracy. The late Richard Rorty, an iconoclastic and controversial but prominent philosopher, rediscovered Dewey in the 1980s and praised Dewey's pragmatism, political engagement, and vision for a democratic utopia (which Rorty says will never happen).

Echoing Dewey's conclusion in "My Pedagogic Creed," many contemporary psychologists insist that human beings are wired to be social, craving group activity and connections. In addition to evidence from brain imaging unavailable in Dewey's time, they cite the ubiquity of iPhones and the power of Facebook. Communitarians who feel America's celebration of individualism has gone too far quote Dewey.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," advised Robert Browning, Dewey's favorite poet. Dewey was a radical reformer, a socialist, a secular humanist, a meliorist, even a utopian. He dreamed of an America without sexism or racism or ethnic divisions, a community that respected capitalists as well as craftspeople and that cultivated both science and art. His dense, turgid philosophical tracts are now of interest primarily to academicians; his more readable journalism remains of use to historians; his educational writings prove the most influential.

Contemporary Americans have opted for testing, standards, competition, choice, and academic curriculums. Education reports emphasize national security, jobs, and the achievement gap, not discovery, manual training, or community. Deliberately antiprogressive charter schools, such as the KIPP Schools and Success Academies, try to overcome the achievement gap and end poverty by content, competition, and discipline. They stress grit, not joy. Teachers, denied the status Dewey thought so important, still stand in front of the class and talk. Progressive schools are few and seem most effective in small schools staffed by "true believers."

Still, glimmers of Dewey's dream remain. In the New Haven middle school of my thirteen-year-old grandson, the social studies teacher started the year by asking, "Why study history?" The mathematics teacher showed the movie Stand and Deliver. The language arts teacher asked each student to share with the class their thoughts about their individually selected summer reading book. My grandson chose a trilogy, The Hunger Games, not in the canon. The science teacher asked them to construct a model bridge out of one piece of paper and Scotch tape. To build community, the principal suspended classes, led the students outside, and asked each to start a conversation with someone he or she had not talked to before that morning.

Today most K-12 teachers still believe in content, competition, evaluation, and discipline. Simultaneously, they believe in relevance, projects, group learning, and choice. The Common Core Standards, approved by most states, stress rigor but at the same time emphasize inquiry and understanding. John Dewey would be moderately pleased with a pragmatic nation that combines traditional education with the insights of progressives.

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John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker

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His ideas altered the education of children worldwide

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Malcolm x

Mediums- Telavision and radio, Newspapers, speeches and debates

Activism- black power  black self defense

Malcolm X was an American minister and black nationalist. He advocated for black power and black-self defense. He opened a new idea to fighting against segregation.

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https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/malcolm-x

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Legendary actor-activist Ossie Davis, in eulogizing him, spoke of Malcolm X's remains being consigned to earth, not as a man, but as a seed that would return. Upon return, Malcolm X would reveal himself to the world "for what he was and is - a Prince - our own Black shining Prince! - who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so."

Despite being one of the world's most recognizable activists, Malcolm X was a figure in a constant state of social, intellectual, and spiritual evolution and change. One way that change can be seen is how he identified himself throughout his lifetime. Born Malcolm Little, before becoming known as Detroit Red, then Malcolm X, and finally, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, he was a person who embodied self-determination and transformation.

The museum commemorates Malcolm X's life and legacy, acknowledging the magnitude of his presence and the transformative power of his messages.

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, Malcolm X was the fourth of seven children born to Earl Little and Louise Norton. His parents were members of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) - with his father serving as the Omaha chapter president and his mother, the division secretary. The UNIA stressed Black pride, economic independence, and a celebration of African history and culture - principles that shaped Malcolm X's early childhood and later shaped his messages of political self-determination, personal and racial pride, and social responsibility.

Devoted Husband and Father
Those principles also nurtured a bond between Malcolm X and his wife, Dr. Betty Shabazz (Dean Sanders), whom he married in 1958. Born in Georgia and reared in Detroit, Shabazz trained as a nurse at Brooklyn State Hospital School of Nursing. Shabazz met Malcolm X at a Nation of Islam meeting where he spoke and found that they shared a deep commitment to human rights.

Shabazz described her husband as gentle and kind, with a tremendous sense of humor, and an intellectual who read complex books in hours. She also noted Malcolm X's courage in facing racism, divisions within the Nation of Islam, and a rising tide of racial and social unrest.

"I am very grateful that I had the conference experience to be around him for years and experience a Black man who was goal-oriented and had a lot for his people. And made his contribution as he should and as we all should, but without fear. He feared God, and that was it."
Dr. Betty Shabazz

His fearlessness was witnessed by his daughters, who, while understanding the fight against injustice their father undertook, saw him first and foremost, as 'Dad.'

"The man we knew was warm, gentle, empathetic, with a famously electric smile. He was a family man. I remember his great sense of humor, and that he loved jazz music, literature and possibility. He studied history, nature and the arts. He had a butterfly collection! He read poetry to his wife. He was a bright intellect, influenced by his upbringing," Ilyasah Shabazz said of her father Malcolm X.

"Before we understood the icon that is Malcolm X, our mother made sure that we knew him primarily as "Daddy" or "Mommy's husband" - the loving and compassionate man, that we knew about the importance of his love and compassion, about his intelligence and commitments! It was at school where I learned about him as one of the leaders in the civil rights movement. That was where I learned of racism and injustice."
Ilyasah Shabazz

Electrifying Orator
Following in the nationalist tradition of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X spoke to millions of African Americans who had been cast off, relegated, and abused by society in the hopes of igniting in them a sense of self-worth and racial pride. In addition to promoting clean living, including healthy eating, exercise and avoiding intoxicants, Malcolm X encouraged Black people to take a firm grip of political power.

Through hundreds of speeches, Malcolm X also addressed the injustices that marginalized communities faced. In a Brown University speech Malcolm X gave on May 11, 1961, for instance, he said: "There are 20 million so-called 'negroes' here in America. Twenty million ex-slaves. Twenty million second-class citizens. No matter what other classification you try to put on them, you can't deny that we are ex-slaves. You cannot deny that we are second-class citizens. And the fact that we are second-class citizens means someone has done us an injustice and deprived us of that which is ours by right."

Cherished Friend and Companion
Malcolm X was friend to many and cherished by all of them. As a global activist, Malcolm X's friendships spanned the globe and included heads of state, childhood acquaintances, celebrities, and other freedom-loving activists.

Among them, legendary and award-winning poet Maya Angelou, who counted Malcolm X with having an incredible sense of humor and a man who truly loved Black people. The two met when Malcolm X visited Ghana seeking support for a charge against the United States in the United Nations for racial crimes against African Americans. At the time, Angelou was residing in Ghana with her son, Guy.

"He was one of the most courageous persons I know. Courage is the most important virtue of them all because without courage you cannot practice any other virtue consistently. You can't be consistently kind, consistently fair, merciful, just, loving... you just cannot. Malcolm having said all whites were blue-eyed devils, he went to Mecca and came to West Africa, and he said, I have met white skinned, blue-eyed men who I've openly called 'brother.' I was wrong. It takes a great deal of courage to say that... So, among other things, his courage and his exquisite sense of humor, young people should be reading."
Maya Angelou

Malcolm X epitomized provider, protector, teacher, and companion through the examples he set for the many people around him. As a husband to his wife, Dr. Betty Shabazz, and father to their daughters Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, Gamilah, and Malaak, Malcolm X showed himself to be spiritually grounded. His family witnessed his prayer life, the tenacity and courage from which he drew great oratorical skill, and a stalwart perseverance to address friends, foes, strangers, and comrades with unmatched compassion.

References

NMAAHC

Ossie Davis. " Eulogy for Malcolm X" Faith Temple Church of God in Christ, New York City - February 27, 1965

American Visionary Project, Video, Maya Angelou: Malcolm X. American Visionary Project
PBS, The American Experience: Timeline of Malcolm X's Life

Ilyasah Shabazz. Essence, "What My Dad, Malcolm X, Taught Me," Essence Magazine, May 19, 2023.

Interview with Betty Shabazz, The Repository, Washington University in St. Louis . Eyes on the Prize Series, 1988. (30:58)

NPR, Lost Malcolm X Speech Heard Again 50 Years Later

ICIT Digital Library, Malcolm X's Speech After the Firebombing (Feb. 14, 1965)

Yuri Kochiyama #16: Meeting Malcolm X.

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Malcolm X epitomized provider, protector, teacher, and companion through the examples he set for the many people around him.

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Activist. Ida B Wells

Medium: Journalist and Civil Rights Leader

Activist: Against racial injustice, lynching, and for woman's rights

Organization: National Association of Colored Woman (Co founder of NAACP)

Who are they: Ida B Wells was an African Americian journalist, writer, and early leader in both the civil rights and woman sufferage movements.

What they stand for: She fought for racial and gender equality. She used her journal to expose racial violence and demand justice and politcal power for woman.

What they have done/contributed: Through her investigative reporting, she documented and publicized lynchings across the U.S. She co-founded the NAACP and the Alpha sufferage Club, helping black woman gain politcal influence. Her work challenged racism and sexism in American Society.

Example: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/16/8979771/ida-b-wells-lynching-data?utm_

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Hello and welcome friend, first off, did you know an activist is someone who is active in campaigning for change, normally on political or social issues, and Jesus Christ, whether you think him to be the Christ or not, did fall into these categories.

Acrivist: Jesus Christ of Nazareth

Medium: Public speaking, unity of people, bringing joy to all areas of life, community action, and storytelling to make hard concepts easy to understand.

Activisum: Social Justice, compassion for the marginalized, and spiritual reform.

Who He is: Jesus Christ of Nazareth was a first-century Jewish teacher and public figure, and showed the truth behind religious, political, and social norms of his time, offering the right way through all these things.

What He stands for: He would go on to advocate for love, inclusion, and forgiveness, care for the poor and sick, and the outcast, standing in strength against systems of oppression and hypocrisy.

What He has done: Through his teachings, actions, and execution, and historically recorded resurrection even outside of biblical texts, and carved in stone in Rome to this day, with 500 eyewitnesses, He has sparked a movement of people around love, justice, and spiritual transformation, and all of this has shaped billions over 2000 years globally.

1 example: https://www.bethinking.org/jesus/ancient-evidence-for-jesus-from-non-christian-sources

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Activist: Ruby Bridges

Medium : Writer and public speaker

Activist: Civil rights

Organization: Ruby Bridges Foundation(founded in 1999)

3 sentence explanation of

Who are they: Ruby Bridges is an American activist who became a symbol for equal education. She was the first African American child to attend an all-white school.

What they stand for: She stands for civil rights and equal access to education for all students.

What they have contributed: Through her bravery and endurance, Ruby Bridges helped inspire nationwide change by challenging racial barriers in the education system. Eventually, she founded the Ruby Bridges Fountain which works toward creating equal opportunities in education.

1 example: "https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ruby-bridges

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Activist: Malcolm X

Medium- Speeches, Public speaking, Print, Writing, Media, and interviews.

Organization- Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU)

Who are they- Malcolm X was an African american Muslim minister and also human rights activist.

What they stand for- Malcolm X stood and fought for freedom,equality, and also the dignity for African Americans.

What they have done/contributed- He was a major leader when it came to the fight for racial equality and black empowerment during the 1950's-1960's while taking apart of protests but emphasized self-defense and didn't promote the "peaceful protest".

1 Example- "Record of the Week: Malcolm X Protests at DOJ" Malcolm X by RediscoveringBlog.

https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2015/02/12/rotw-malcolm-x-protests-doj/

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Activist: Rigoberta Menchu

Medium: Oral storytelling, which was later written.

Activist: Human Rights Activist.

Organization:

She founded the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation, which helps Indigenous communities, specializing in survivors of violence. By promoting justice, human rights, and education for those in need.

She also founded the first indigenous-led party in Guatemala. (WINAQ)

3 Sentence Explanation:

Who she is:

Rigoberta Menchu is a K'iche Maya activist from Guatemala who fights for indigenous and human rights.

What she stands for:

She stands for justice, equality, and peace, especially for Indigenous people and women.

What she has done/contributed:

She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and started a foundation to support education, culture and human rights in her community.

1 Example: (Biographical)

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1992/tum/biographical/

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R igoberta Menchú was born on January 9, 1959 to a poor Indian peasant family and raised in the Quiche branch of the Mayan culture. In her early years she helped with the family farm work, either in the northern highlands where her family lived, or on the Pacific coast, where both adults and children went to pick coffee on the big plantations.

Rigoberta Menchú soon became involved in social reform activities through the Catholic Church, and became prominent in the women's rights movement when still only a teenager. Such reform work aroused considerable opposition in influential circles, especially after a guerilla organization established itself in the area. The Menchú family was accused of taking part in guerrilla activities and Rigoberta's father, Vicente, was imprisoned and tortured for allegedly having participated in the execution of a local plantation owner. After his release, he joined the recently founded Committee of the Peasant Union (CUC).

In 1979, Rigoberta, too, joined the CUC. That year her brother was arrested, tortured and killed by the army. The following year, her father was killed when security forces in the capital stormed the Spanish Embassy where he and some other peasants were staying. Shortly afterwards, her mother also died after having been arrested, tortured and raped. Rigoberta became increasingly active in the CUC, and taught herself Spanish as well as other Mayan languages than her native Quiche. In 1980, she figured prominently in a strike the CUC organized for better conditions for farm workers on the Pacific coast, and on May 1, 1981, she was active in large demonstrations in the capital. She joined the radical 31st of January Popular Front, in which her contribution chiefly consisted of educating the Indian peasant population in resistance to massive military oppression.

In 1981, Rigoberta Menchú had to go into hiding in Guatemala, and then flee to Mexico. That marked the beginning of a new phase in her life: as the organizer abroad of resistance to oppression in Guatemala and the struggle for Indian peasant peoples' rights. In 1982, she took part in the founding of the joint opposition body, The United Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition (RUOG). In 1983, she told her life story to Elisabeth Burgos Debray. The resulting book, called in English, I, Rigoberta Menchú, is a gripping human document which attracted considerable international attention. In 1986, Rigoberta Menchú became a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the CUC, and the following year she performed as the narrator in a powerful film called When the Mountains Tremble, about the struggles and sufferings of the Maya people. On at least three occasions, Rigoberta Menchú has returned to Guatemala to plead the cause of the Indian peasants, but death threats have forced her to return into exile.

Over the years, Rigoberta Menchú has become widely known as a leading advocate of Indian rights and ethno-cultural reconciliation, not only in Guatemala but in the Western Hemisphere generally, and her work has earned her several international awards.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.

Selected Bibliography

By Rigoberta Menchú Tum

Crossing Borders: An Autobiography. New York: Verso, 1998. (First published in Italian, October 1997, and in Spanish, April 1998.)

I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Edited and introduced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. New York and London: Verso, 1984. (Her life story, based on a week of recorded interviews with the editor, a Latin American anthropologist, who revised and arranged the transcripts. The original Spanish title in 1983 was "My Name is Rigoberta Menchú and This is How My Consciousness Was Raised." Translated into more than twelve languages and received several international awards. The autobiography became a most influential image internationally of the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army in peasant villages during the civil war. In 1999 a controversy arose over its credibility, see Stoll below.

Calvert, Peter. Guatemala. A Nation in Turmoil. Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1985. (Excellent historical introduction to Guatemala's social and economic problems, with the comparative perspective of other volumes in Westview's series on the Nations of Contemporary Latin America. By a British scholar.)

Hooks, Margaret, ed. Guatemalan Women Speak. Introduction by Rigoberta Menchú Tum. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1991.

Perera, Victor. Unfinished Conquest. The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Univ. of California Press, 1993. (By a native Guatemalan, whose story of the civil conflict is based on both personal experience and scholarship. With an important bibliographical essay.)

Simon, Jean-Marie. Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.

Sommer, Doris. "No Secrets: Rigoberta's Guarded Truth." Women's Studies 20 (1991): 51-72. (Analyses I, Rigoberta as an example of women's testimonial literature and discusses implications of the contrasts between Rigoberta's mother tongue and Spanish, a hierarchical language with gender concepts very different from Quiché.)

Stoll, David. Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. Stoll's critical examination of Rigoberta's autobiography, based on local interviews and documentary sources, shows that parts of her own and her family history are not correct, even when she speaks as an eyewitness of events described. Stoll approves of her Nobel prize and has no question about the picture of army atrocities which she presents. He says that her purpose in telling her story the way she did "enabled her to focus international condemnation on an institution that deserved it, the Guatemalan army". As an anthropologist who has studied the Mayan peasants, however, he feels that by inaccurately portraying the events in her own village as representative of what happened in all such indigenous villages in Guatemala, she gives a misleading interpretation of the relationship of the Mayan peasants to the revolutionary movement. Asked about Stoll's allegations, Professor Geir Lundestad, the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, declared that the decision to award the prize to Menchú "was not based exclusively or primarily on the autobiography", and he dismissed any suggestion that the Committee should consider revoking the prize.

Tedlock, Dennis, transl. Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. (The sacred text of the Maya.)

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished inNobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

To cite this section
MLA style: Rigoberta Menchú Tum - Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2021. Thu. 20 May 2021. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1992/tum/biographical/>

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See them all presented here.

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R igoberta Menchú was born on January 9, 1959 to a poor Indian peasant family and raised in the Quiche branch of the Mayan culture. In her early years she helped with the family farm work, either in the northern highlands where her family lived, or on the Pacific coast, where both adults and children went to pick coffee on the big plantations.

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Activist: Mahatma Gandhi

Medium: Campaigns, protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience

Activism: An Indian Civil rights activist

Organization: Gandhi was the leader of the Indian National Congress

Who they are:

An Indian lawyer who engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and wanted to spread peace

What they stand for:

Gandhi fought against British colonial rule over India and preached nonviolent and peaceful methods of protest

What have they done:

He organized and led the Indian nationalist movement, which freed them from British rule in 1947

One example:

He organized the Salt March in 1930 where thousands walked 240 miles to protest civilly against a heavy salt tax from Britain.

https://www.history.com/articles/salt-march

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Salt March: Definition, Date & Gandhi | HISTORY

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The Salt March of 1930 was a bold act of nonviolent civil disobedience led by Mohandas Gandhi to protest and put an e…

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Medium: Used Television, Public Speeches, and pictures to show his Philosophical and Ideological ideas to others.

Activist: Stood for equal rights for African Americans.

Organizations: Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

3 Sentences:

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American activist who advocated for equal rights and spoke from the heart about how the world should end segregation and racism. Martin Luther King Jr. changed the world by playing a very crucial part in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation based on identity and race.

Example: "I have a dream" https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/martin-luther-king-jr

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Medium- Writing, Speeches, Organizations like her own like the Ruby Bridges Foundation.

Activists- Human and equal rights for Black Americans in education.

Organization- The Ruby Bridges Foundation

Sentence Explanation:

Who they are: Ruby Bridges was a black American child activist still today a vocal advocate for equality.

What they stand for: During the Civil rights movement, Ruby Bridges was the first black American to attend an all white school, using speeches and her presence to cement her place as one of the many great American activists.

What she has contributed : Ruby Bridges became a symbol of courage and resilience in the Civil Rights movement, and broke down the doors for many other Black Americans seeking education in predominantly white spaces, such as her Elementary school, William Frantz Elementary School in 1960.

1 Example - https://www.nps.gov/people/rubybridges.htm

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Activist: Malala Yousafzai

Medium: Writing, Advocacy Campaigns, and Public Speaking

Activism: Girls Education and Women's Rights

Organization: Malala Fund

Who they are: Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner.

What they stand for: Malala stands for education rights for girls around the world.

What they have done/contributed: After surviving an attack by the Taliban, she founded the Malala Fund to promote education and help empower girls around the world.

Example: The Malala Fund

https://malala.org

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Activist: Rosa parks

medium- media, photography, and platform articles

activist-Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American civil rights activist

organization-National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

3 sentence explanation-

who they were- American civil rights activist known for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery Alabama, in 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

what they stand for- defiance against racial segregation inspiring the civil rights movement and leading to segregation on public buses

what they have done/contributed to- she was a symbol of power of nonviolent protest. Parks was a dedicated civil rights activist long before this event, having served as a secretary for the NAACP, and she continued her work for equality throughout her life

example-https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/rosa-parks

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On December 1,1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of going to the back of the bus, which was designated for African Americans, she sat in the front. When the bus started to fill up with white passengers, the bus driver asked Parks to move. She refused. Her resistance set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4th, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. As a child, she went to an industrial school for girls and later enrolled at Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes (present-day Alabama State University). Unfortunately, Parks was forced to withdraw after her grandmother became ill. Growing up in the segregated South, Parks was frequently confronted with racial discrimination and violence. She became active in the Civil Rights Movement at a young age.

Parks married a local barber by the name of Raymond Parks when she was 19. He was actively fighting to end racial injustice. Together the couple worked with many social justice organizations. Eventually, Rosa was elected secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

By the time Parks boarded the bus in 1955, she was an established organizer and leader in the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. Parks not only showed active resistance by refusing to move she also helped organize and plan the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Many have tried to diminish Parks' role in the boycott by depicting her as a seamstress who simply did not want to move because she was tired. Parks denied the claim and years later revealed her true motivation:

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Parks courageous act and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott led to the integration of public transportation in Montgomery. Her actions were not without consequence. She was jailed for refusing to give up her seat and lost her job for participating in the boycott.

After the boycott, Parks and her husband moved to Hampton, Virginia and later permanently settled in Detroit, Michigan. Parks work proved to be invaluable in Detroit's Civil Rights Movement. She was an active member of several organizations which worked to end inequality in the city. By 1980, after consistently giving to the movement both financially and physically Parks, now widowed, suffered from financial and health troubles. After almost being evicted from her home, local community members and churches came together to support Parks. On October 24th, 2005, at the age of 92, she died of natural causes leaving behind a rich legacy of resistance against racial discrimination and injustice.

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Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Find out more about her at womenshistory.org.

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Activist: Malcolm X

Medium: Speeches, Public speaking, Print, Writing, Media, and interviews.

Activist: Was a public speaker for the rights an repsects of African Americans. He fought for Freedom for the black race.

Organization: Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU)

Who are they: Malcolm X was an African American Muslim minister and also human rights activist.

What they stand for: Malcolm X stood and fought for freedom, equality, and also the dignity for African Americans.

What they have done/contributed: He was a major leader when it came to the fight for racial equality and black empowerment during the 1950’s-1960’s while taking apart of protests but emphasized self-defense and didn’t promote the “peaceful protest.”

1 Example: Malcolm X https://www.britannica.com/biography/Malcolm-X