In 1884, she tried to enroll her eight-year-old daughter Mamie at a white public school in San Francisco. When school authorities turned Mamie away because of her Chinese ancestry, Mary and her husband sued the Board of Education. The lawsuit became a landmark civil rights case for public school desegregation.
Seeds of commitment to Palestinian liberation began to sow in Souheir Edelbi at a young age as she learned about the Nakba and oppression faced by Palestinians from her father.
No historian has done more to recover the stories of enslaved African-Americans than Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as wide acclaim.
Catherine “Kitty” Payne was an enslaved woman in the U.S. in the 1800s
Serena, a Native American woman, filed a civil lawsuit in 1974 seeking damages for violations of her constitutional rights to procreate and bear children
As a Yale Law graduate and the first Asian American woman lawyer in Hawai’i, she became an advocate for Chinese Americans, restored U.S. citizenship for her family, and fought for broader immigrant rights.
Anna Bennett Bland was a principal in a court case that resulted in the Virginia General Assembly losing its status as the court of last appeal in the colony.
Anjali Sharma’s passion for climate justice goes beyond her concern for the environment and includes supporting First Nations people, racial equality, gender equality and marginalised communities.
American teacher and civil rights activist
Jane Webb was a free, mixed-race woman in colonial Virginia who sued her husband’s enslaver when he refused to live up to the terms of a contract that would have freed her husband and the bound Webb children.