Defender
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Bryan Stevenson
Born in 1959, Bryan Stevenson grew up in rural southern Delaware and spent his early classroom years at a “colored” elementary school. By second grade, his school was formally desegregated, but Black kids still played separately from white kids and often continued to use the back door to enter the doctor’s office. Stevenson’s father took…
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Anonymous
Note: The account that follows was written on or around the year 2000. At the time, Sudan was in the midst of a perilous and ongoing state of repression. In 2019, then-President Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by the Sudanese army in response to popular protests, and a constitutional declaration was signed. Nonetheless, Sudan’s democratic transition…
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu was born in 1931 in Transvaal, South Africa. He had hoped to become a physician, but his family couldn’t afford medical school. Instead, he followed his father’s lead and became a teacher. When the government sanctioned a deliberately inferior system of education for black students, Tutu refused to cooperate and resigned his position…
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North Korean Human Rights Defenders
Joseph Kim was born and raised in North Korea. His father died of starvation when Joseph was 12 years old, and he was separated from his mother and sister. He spent the next three years living on the streets with other homeless children. In 2006, at age 15, Kim escaped to China, where missionaries and…
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Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson and Reverend Allyn Maxfield-Steele
Woodard Henderson, a self-proclaimed working-class Affrilachian (Black Appalachian), was born and raised in southeast Tennessee. She has been a Highlander board member since 2012 and co-executive director since 2017. All along, she has been an activist on issues of mountaintop removal mining and environmental racism, with a focus in central and southern Appalachia, and an…
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Jamie Nabozny
Jamie Nabozny was born in 1975 in Ashland, Wisconsin, a small town on the south shore of Lake Superior. From a young age, he knew he was gay and confided in his family, but he didn’t come out to friends and classmates. Nonetheless, in middle school he was the object of physical violence and degradation,…
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Harry Wu
Born in 1937 in Shanghai, Harry Wu was one of eight children of an affluent Roman Catholic family. He was educated at a Jesuit school before attending Beijing College of Geology in the late 1950s. In the throes of a Communist purge, his university was expected to turn over a quota of dissidents. Wu was…
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Frank Mugisha
Mugisha knew he was gay when he was a young teenager, but his Catholic faith told him to pray those feelings away. When he finally came out to his family, they tried many times to “cure” him. And though they were eventually accepting, they continued to wish he would not be so open with others.…
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Gábor Gombos
Gombos was born in Hungary in 1961 to a mother who battled severe depression. Her illness gave him glimpses into the Hungarian social care system at a very early age. Electroshock therapy was stealing her memory and personality, and years later, she was put under the care of the National Institute of Psychiatry after attempting…
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Lucas Benitez
Lucas Benitez was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and moved to Immokalee, Florida, at the age of 16 to work in the tomato fields. The wages were barely enough to live on, and workers faced a climate of intimidation, fear, and violence. The grueling conditions angered him, and he had to act. Benitez got together with…
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Dolores Huerta
Huerta was born in 1930 in a small mining town in New Mexico—her father was a farmworker and miner who became a state legislator, and her mother was a waitress, cannery worker, and activist with an entrepreneurial and independent spirit that greatly influenced her daughter. In spite of prejudice against Hispanics, young Huerta excelled in…
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Marian Wright Edelman
Marian Wright Edelman was born in 1939 in Bennettsville, South Carolina. She was the youngest of five children. It was the Jim Crow era South, with laws mandating every manner of exclusion for African Americans—always segregated and separated. There were drinking fountains labeled for “colored” people, restaurants could refuse service, and public buses had a…
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