People
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José Ramos-Horta
Jose Ramos-Horta is famous for his uncompromising and indefatigable work on behalf of the people of East Timor, who were brutally invaded by Indonesia In 1975. Muslim West Timor became part of Indonesia In 1946, while East Timor, settled In 1520 by the Portuguese with a different language, religion, and customs, remained a colony until…
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Marina Pisklakova
Marina Pisklakova is Russia’s leading women’s rights activist. She studied aeronautical engineering in Moscow, and while conducting research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, was startled to discover that family violence had reached epidemic proportions. Because of her efforts, Russian officials started tracking domestic abuse and estimated that, in a single year, close to 15,000…
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Van Jones
Van Jones is the founding director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Founded in 1996 and named for an unsung civil rights heroine, the Center challenges human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system. A project of the Ella Baker Center, Bay Area Police Watch is committed to stopping police misconduct and…
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Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela is one of the world’s most revered statesmen, who led the struggle to replace the apartheid regime of South Africa with a multiracial democracy. Jailed for 27 years, he emerged to become the country’s first black President and to play a leading role in the drive for peace in other spheres of conflict.…
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John Lewis
One of the most courageous people the civil rights movement ever produced, U.S. Congressman John Lewis has dedicated his life to protecting human rights, securing civil liberties, and building what he described as “The Beloved Community” in America. The “conscience of the U.S. Congress” grew up as the son of sharecroppers. He was inspired by…
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Jimmy Carter
Born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States, studied science at the United States Naval Academy and helped develop the nuclear submarine. Eventually returning to Plains, where he became involved in community work, Carter became governor of Georgia in 1971. Carter was elected president of the United States…
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Jody Williams
Jody Williams has dedicated her life to achieving a global ban on antipersonnel landmines, which still claim thousands of innocent lives every year. In 1992, she launched the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), to end the production, trade, use and stockpiling of landmines, a weapon that has been in existence since the U.S. Civil…
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Erin Merryn
At age six, Erin experienced sexual abuse for the first time by a neighbor at a friend’s sleepover. Just a few weeks shy of her seventh birthday in 1992, Erin was raped by the same person. Threatened and scared, Erin went to bed every night crying, having nightmares, afraid to tell anyone what had happened…
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Mairead Corrigan Maguire
Mairead Corrigan Maguire was not actively involved with the Northern Ireland peace movement until she came face-to-face with violence in 1976. On August 10th, Danny Lennon and John Chillingworth of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), were driving through Belfast, with a rifle in their car. The IRA wanted to form a united Ireland through…
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Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel was brought up in a closely knit Jewish community in Sighet, Transylvania (Romania). When he was fifteen years old, his family was herded aboard a train and deported by Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp. Wiesel’s mother and younger sister died at Auschwitz—two older sisters survived. Wiesel and his father were then taken…
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Kateryna Yushchenko
A child of Ukrainian WWII immigrants to Chicago, she came to Ukraine in 1991 to run the US-Ukraine Foundation, which she co-founded to support democratic and free market development in newly-independent Ukraine. Before moving to Ukraine, Kateryna held positions at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Department of Treasury, The White House, State Department, and…
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Dr. Helen Bond
Dr. Bond is a University Professor in the School of Education at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and the former Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. She is also a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar to India, co-chair of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN USA), and executive council member to…
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