Sue Sanders
British activist Sue Sanders is an educator and feminist activist for LGBTQIA+ and disability rights.
Category Archives: Activism
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Opal Lee
In 2021, Juneteenth was officially recognized as a federal holiday in the United States thanks in large part to the then-94-year-old Opal Lee.
Dr June McCarroll
June McCarroll was a doctor in early 1900s Indio, California, a “tiny, tough-talking lady who often strapped on a six-shooter to make house calls.” But for all the good she did as a physician, she saved far more lives by taking up the cause of road safety when she was 40 and semi-retired.
Kimberly Bryant
Kimberly Bryant founded Black Girls Code in 2011 to create pathways that she didn’t have in the 1970s, and that she didn’t see for her own daughter decades later.
Dawn M Blackman Sr.
As Dawn M. Blackman Sr. tells the story, “I was a city girl … I did not know a thing about gardening. Then, in 2003, I started gardening with 10 neighborhood children.” That project, started in her 50s, grew into Randolph Street Community Garden.
Harriett Jenkins
Harriett Jenkins did her part to diversify NASA as the assistant administrator for equal opportunity programs from 1974 to 1992.
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan was an acclaimed mycologist, King’s College graduate, and Head of the Botany Department (as well as first female professor) at Birkbeck College long before she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War I, and was made chief controller of the women deployed to France.
Jessica Mitford
Jessica Mitford was born in 1917, one of the six renowned Mitford sisters from an aristocratic English famil, and would go on to become the “queen of the muckrakers.”
Edwina Brocklesby
Edwina Brocklesby, who would go on to be the U.K.’s oldest Ironman triathlete and founder and director of Silverfit, which promotes physical activity among older people, “didn’t do any exercise at all until I was 50.”
Estella Mims Pyfrom
Estella Mims Pyfrom was 72 when, in 2009, she founded Estella’s Brilliant Bus with $900,000 of her retirement savings. The mobile learning lab was equipped with more than a dozen computers and travels to underserved and under-resourced Florida communities, providing residents with access to technology and education.