People
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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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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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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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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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Bedford-Stuyvesant
In 1964, with the cooperation of fellow senator Jacob Javits and Mayor John Lindsay, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy set into motion the Special Impact Program, an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act of the same year. A study of the problems facing Bedford-Stuyvesant, the city’s largest non-white community, was launched in 1967, and RFK subsequently…
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Dr. Rami Nashashibi
Rami Nashashibi was born in Amman, Jordan, lived in Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Italy during his teenage years, and moved to Chicago at age 19. There he earned a B.A. from DePaul University in 1995 and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2010. Nashashibi is a MacArthur Fellow and the founder…
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Betty Williams
Betty Williams didn’t start off as an activist. She was a Protestant office receptionist from West Belfast. In 1976, she witnessed a horrific tragedy in which three innocent children were killed by the swerving car of an Irish Republican Army gunman. The shock motivated her to launch an appeal against the meaningless use of violence…
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Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo
A Roman Catholic bishop, Belo played a vital and ongoing role in bringing peace to his country, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, during the Indonesian occupation that stretched from 1975 to 1999. He was born in 1948 in Wailakama, a small, rural village in East Timor, where he grew up in a farming family and…
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Dalai Lama
The 14th Dalai Lama was born in 1935 in a small village in Tibet, and at the age of 2, he was recognized as the reincarnation of the previous dalai lama. It is believed that dalai lamas are manifestations of the bodhisattva of compassion and the patron saints of Tibet—beings who have vowed to be…
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Ruby Bridges
Ruby Bridges was born on September 8, 1954, in Tylertown, Mississippi, the oldest of farmers Lucille and Abon Bridges’ five children. When she was 2 years old, her family moved to New Orleans in search of a better life. Perhaps it is no coincidence that 1954 also marked Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S.…
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