Sultan was just 24 years old when he began his work on behalf of children in his homeland of Mozambique. He was a teacher at the start of the brutal civil war in Mozambique (1985-1992) which left 2 million children dead, 250,000 displaced, 200,000 orphaned, and numerous others drafted into the fighting as child soldiers.…
Pérez Esquivel was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1931. Despite family poverty, he attended school and trained as an architect and sculptor—his large-scale murals and other work reflect his faith in humankind and foundational belief in God. He was also a professor of architecture for 25 years. But he worried about human rights abuses…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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.…
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…
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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