As there is no official biography of Cleopatra, and we only know about her life from Greco-Roman scholars, there are several missing pieces, and some details are uncertain regarding her story. Cleopatra VII Philopator was born in early 69 BC, the daughter of pharaoh Ptolemy XII, a leader of the Macedonian dynasty that ruled over Egypt since the late 4th century BC, and to Cleopatra VI Tryphaena (so it is believed). As a princess, she learned ancient Greek philosophy and oratory. In 51 BC, her father died, and at 18, she and her 10-year-old brother Ptolemy XIII received the throne. It is believed that she married her brother, as was the costume among the Egyptian monarchs at the time. Her brother refused to acknowledge their co-ruling, and soon after they assumed power, a fight broke out between them, and she fled to Syria. There, she assembled an army, and in 48 BC, at 21, she led a war against her brother at Pelusium, the eastern border of Egypt. Around the same time, the Roman military leaders Pompey and Julius Caesar were at war. Pompey sought refuge in Alexandria, and Caesar followed him to Egypt, where he met Cleopatra. At first, the two allied to help each other mission, but it did not take long before they fell in love. With the support of the Romans, Cleopatra defeated her brother, who fled the country and presumably drowned in the Nile River. She restored the throne with her 12 years old brother and new husband, Ptolemy XIV. Caesar stayed with Cleopatra for a while before returning to Rome, and in 47 BC, at the age of 22, she gave birth to her first child, Ptolemy XV Caesarion (believed to be Caesar’s son). In the following year, Cleopatra, her brother-husband, and her child traveled to Rome to visit Caesar, returning to Egypt in 44 BC following Caesar’s murder. Not long after their return, Cleopatra’s agents killed Ptolemy XIV, and she became the sole ruler alongside her infant son. At this point, Cleopatra has established herself as the embodiment of the Egyptian goddess Isis. In 41 BC, Marc Antony, one of the three rulers who succeeded Caesar, summoned Cleopatra to Tarsus to answer questions about her part in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. She sailed into the Tarsus on a barge, wearing the robes of Isis. Antony, who associated himself with Bacchus, the god of fertility and wine, was captivated by her charisma and beauty, and their love affair had begun. Antony left his wife and traveled to Egypt with Cleopatra, where he treated her as an independent monarch, not a Roman empire representative. He helped her secure her position in front of her sister and supporters. The couple formed the Inimitable Livers, a drinking society inspired by the ecstatic festival Bacchanalia. In 40 BC, Antony returned to Rome, and Cleopatra gave birth to their twins, Cleopatra Selene (moon) and Alexander Helios (sun). The power couple continued to support each other in their political goals. To secure control over the eastern area of the Roman Empire, he needed her support financially and militarily. She wanted his help regaining control over Egypt’s eastern empire, which was taken over by the Romans during her father’s reign. Following their reunion in 37 BC, Cleopatra had her third child with Antony, Ptolemy Philadelphos. In 34 BC, Cleopatra and Antony returned to Egypt as triumphs following a successful military campaign in Armenia. In a celebration known as “the Donations of Alexandria,” the couple sat on golden thrones and declared their marriage, even though he was already married to Octavia, the sister of Octavian – his fellow ruler of the empire. It caused a dispute between the three rulers of the Roman empire, which escalated after Antony declared Caesarion, Cleopatra, and Caesar’s son, as the rightful heir of the Roman empire instead of Octavian. In 32 BC, Antony got stripped of all his titles, and Octavian declared war on Cleopatra. On September 2nd, 31 BC, Cleopatra and Antony’s forces got defeated in a sea battle at Actium, and Cleopatra’s ships fled to Egypt. On the attack on Alexandria, Antony received a massage that Cleopatra was killed and fell on his sword. When hearing the news and learning that Octavian plans to move her and her children to Rome, 39-year-old Cleopatra closed herself in her room and committed suicide. Her death ended the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt for almost 300 years. Read more...

Zitkála-Šá was born and grew up on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her mother was a Yankton Dakota, and her father was a Frenchman who left the family when she was young. In 1884, at the age of eight, she was sent to the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. At school, she was forced to cut her long hair, forbidden to speak any language other than English, and given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons. She found joy in learning to play the violin and read and write. In 1887, after years of forced assimilation, Zitkála-Šá returned to the reservation, realizing that she was no longer related to the Yankton traditions. At 15, she returned to the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute. After graduation, she joined a teacher training program at Earlham College in Indiana, one of a few Native American students. She continued to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. At the time, Zitkála-Šá began collecting traditional oral stories of various Native tribes and translating them into English and Latin. In 1899, at 23, she began to teach music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a similar institute to the one she attended as a child. She felt uneasy with the school’s discipline methods, which stripped children of their Native American cultural identities and treated them harshly. She began writing essays for numerous national magazines, including Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly, expressing her criticism of the American Indian boarding school system and shattering the racist portrayal of Native Americans as ignorant savages by presenting them as generous and loving people. As a result of her publications, she got fired, not before they sent her to the Yankton Reservation to recruit new students. On her arrival, she discovered that her family had fallen into poverty and that white settlers had occupied the Dakota lands under the Dawes Act of 1887. In 1901, at 25, she returned to the reservation to take care of her mother and began to work as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office (BIA) at Standing Rock Indian Reservation. In that same year, she published Old Indian Legends, a collection of Dakota stories she gathered over time. In the following year, she married Raymond Talesfase Bonnin, who was half Sioux and half Euro-American. The BIA sent them to the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah. There, Zitkála-Šá worked at the reservation’s school and became involved with the Society of the American Indians (SAI), which worked to preserve the Native American culture and fought for full citizenship rights for American Indians. In 1916, Zitkála-Šá and her husband relocated to Washington, DC, where she worked as a liaison between the SAI and the BIA and edited the SAI’s magazine, writing articles on issues such as land allotment, the contribution of Native American soldiers in WW1, and corruption within the BIA. Over the next decade, she published her most famous work, including American Indian Stories (1921), Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes (1921), Legalized Robbery (1923), which detailed the mistreatment of Native Americans in Oklahoma. In 1924, she founded the Indian Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, working there as a researcher, and traveling on speaking tours on its behalf, promoting the preservation of Native American cultural identities and citizenship rights. She lobbied for a government investigation of the exploitation of Native Americans in Oklahoma after discovering oil on their lands and advocated for voter registration among Native Americans. In 1926, she founded and served as president of the National Council of American Indians, promoting citizenship rights, health care, educational opportunities, and cultural recognition and preservation. Zitkála-Šá’s persistence paid off in 1928 when she was chosen as an adviser for the Meriam Commission, which passed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which returned some lands to their original populations, and encouraged tribes to re-establish self-government and manage their lands. She continued to be active and served as a spokesperson for the Native community for the rest of her life. She died at the age of 61. Read more...

Annelies Marie Frank was born to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power as the German chancellor, the family moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where her father opened a local branch of the fruit extract company Opekta. 4 years old Anne quickly adjusted to her new home. She attended the 6th Montessori School, learned Dutch, and made friends. In May 1940, when Anne was 11 years old, Germany invaded the Netherlands and applied its antisemitic laws to the local population. Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes, and they were not allowed to visit parks, go to the cinema, or shop in non-Jewish businesses. Within a year, Anne and her older sister, Margot, were transferred to a segregated Jewish school, and her father was forbidden from owning his business but remained in charge behind the scenes with the help of his Christian associates. On her 13th birthday, Anne received a red-and-white checkered autograph book, which she used as her diary, referring to it as a friend named Kitty. She started documenting her life, describing her experiences as a teenage Jewish girl under the Nazi regime. Over time, with the growing deportation of Jews from the Netherlands, the Franks planned to escape from the country, but after their Visa application to the US was declined, they arranged a hiding place in Anne’s father’s office. A call-up notice for Margot to report for relocation to a work camp forced them to vacate their home ten days earlier. On July 6th morning in 1942, the Frank family moved into the secret annex – a three-story narrow space above the Opekta offices at Prinsengracht 263, with a door covered by a bookcase to hide its entrance. In the following month, Hermann and Auguste Van Pels and their 16 years old son Peter joined the annex, and in November, Fritz Pfeffer, who was a friend of the family, moved in too. Their only connection to the outside world was Otto’s colleagues, especially his secretary Miep Gies, who risked their lives to smuggle them food, supplies, and information about political developments. The life of the eight residents in the small annex was very stressful. They lived in constant fear of being discovered, keeping quiet during the day so they wouldn’t get detected by the people who worked in the offices downstairs. Believing they would return to school, Anne and her sister continued to study, and Anne spent most of her time reading books and expressing her thoughts and feelings in her diary. In her writing, Anne described her day-to-day life, from ordinary activities and her anger and frustration at her mother and sister to thoughts of the unknown future, hopes, and dreams. The diary is a reflection of a typical adolescent in an abnormal reality. She detailed her fear of capture alongside her evolving relationship with Peter Van Pels and their first kiss. She also wrote short stories and started a novel, sharpening her writing skills in the ambition of becoming a writer or a journalist. As time went on, Anne began to address more abstract and existentialistic subjects, such as human nature and her belief in God. When she heard on a radio broadcast that the exiled Dutch Minister of Education is planning to collect and publish diaries and documents written during the war, Anne began to rewrite her diaries into a running story, titled The Secret Annex. On the morning of August 4th, 1944, after two years in hiding, the German secret police stormed into the annex and arrested its inhabitants. They were taken to an overnight interrogation, relocated to an overcrowded detention house, and two days later, they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp. On September 3rd, the Frank family was deported on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz concentration camp. Arriving after a three-day journey in a packed cattle wagon, the Franks survived the selection, while 549 out of 1,019 passengers were sent directly to the gas chambers. Though Anne stayed with her sister and mother, she was separated from her father, never seeing him again. Over the next two months, Anne was forced to hard labor during the days and crammed into overcrowded barracks during the nights. According to women who survived Auschwitz, Anne’s friendliness and kind nature enabled her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother and sister. Both Anne and her sister became infected with scabies and moved into an infirmary. On October 28th, 1944, Anne and her sister were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Northern Germany. Their mother stayed in Auschwitz, where she died of disease and starvation. In February 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp and killed 17,000 prisoners, among them 15 years old Anne and 18 years old Margot. When the war ended, Anne’s father returned to Amsterdam, the only one of the annex’s residences to survive. His former colleagues, Jan and Miep Gies, gave him Anne’s diary and belongings, which they had saved after their arrest, hoping to return them to her. He was determined to publish Anne’s diary to show the world what she and millions of other children went through during the war. In 1946, a newspaper article about the diary was published under A Child’s Voice. A year later, an edited edition of the diary was published in the Netherlands under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944). Throughout the years, the book has been retitled The Diary of Anne Frank, translated into more than 70 languages, and sold over 30 million copies worldwide, making Anne one of, if not the most known, Holocaust victims. Read more...

Born Beverly Sainte-Marie on the Piapot reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Canada. When she was an infant, her mother died in a car accident, and a couple of Mi’kmaq ancestry from Wakefield, Massachusetts, adopted her. At the age of 3, she taught herself to play the piano. At 16, she taught herself to play guitar and compose her own songs. After graduating high school, she studied Oriental philosophy and education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. At the time, she began performing in coffeehouses, and in 1962, after receiving her degree, she moved to NYC. She became part of the bohemian art scene of Greenwich Village and soon went on tours, playing mainly at folk festivals and Indigenous reservations in Canada and the US. In 1963, a praising review in The New York Times led to a contract with Vanguard Records, and in the following year, 29-year-old Sainte-Marie released her first album, It’s My Way!. In the album, she used Indigenous vocal techniques and expressed her views on the treatment of Indigenous peoples, as can be seen in the song Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, in which she addressed Indigenous land rights and intercultural relationships. In her sixth album, Illuminations, she used electronically synthesized and manipulated instrumental sounds, becoming the first quadraphonic electronic vocal album to be recorded. In 1976, she released her 12th album, Sweet America, which included the song Starwalker – the first Indigenous-pop song, or powwow rock as Sainte-Marie dubbed it. At 35, she took time off from recording to spend time with her son. She began to paint, score films, and participate in various radio and TV shows. She joined the cast of Sesame Street for several years to raise awareness of Native American cultures. In 1982, she composed the song Up Where We Belong for the film An Officer and a Gentleman, for which she received an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe. During this period, Sainte-Marie also began experimenting with computer-based visual art, exhibiting her work in museums across North America. After 16 years, Sainte-Marie resumed her recording career with the release, via the Internet, of her 14th album Coincidence and Likely Stories. Four years later, she released the collection album Up Where We Belong. It awarded her the Juno Award for Best Music of Aboriginal Canada Recording. In 2017, at 76, she released her 17th album, titled Medicine Songs. For which was awarded the Juno Award for Indigenous music album of the year and the Indigenous Music Awards for Best Folk Album. Sainte-Marie used her music and voice to advocate for various political causes. She was a loud advocate against the Vietnam War and was part of the militant American Indian Movement. She claimed that her activism caused her to be blacklisted by the US administration and limited her radio airplay and performances. In 1969, she founded the Nihewan Foundation for American Indian Education and built the curriculum for its Cradleboard Teaching Project – a partnership between Native and non-Native American communities that facilitates communication through computer networking. She often made public speeches to promote social issues of the Indigenous people and served as spokesperson for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Read more...

Thocmentony, “Shell Flower,” was her given name in the Northern Paiute tribe in the Humboldt Lake area in Nevada. When she was six years old, she moved with her family near Stockton, California, and, at 13, she and her sister went to live with a settler family at Carson City, Nevada as a companion for the family’s daughter. There, she established her English and adopted the name Sarah. When she returned to California two years later, she shortly attended a convent school before she was forced to leave due to complaints from parents of white students. During the Paiute War of 1860, Native Americans and settlers were frequently attacking one another. Winnemucca and her family members escaped to San Francisco. In the next five years, the family made a living by performing on stage as the “Paiute Royal Family.” In 1868, Winnemucca, among 500 Paiute survivors, moved to Fort McDermit military camp, where she began to use her skills as an interpreter. Three years later, the tribe relocated to the new Malheur Reservation in Oregon; there, she worked as an interpreter and as an assistant teacher at the local school. During the Bannock War in 1878, Winnemucca’s father, among other tribe members, had been taken hostage. She volunteered to save them and went to scout the Bannock territory. She covered more than a hundred miles before she located the Bannock camp, releasing the prisoners and gathering valuable intelligence for the US army. Afterward, she became a close associate of the commanding General, assisting with other missions that required her talents as scouter and interpreter. At the end of the war, the Paitus tribe was forced to move to the Yakama Reservation, suffering neglect and deprivation. Outraged by the reservation conditions, for the next five years, Winnemucca advocated and delivered hundreds of speeches regarding the injustice against Native Americans. She campaigned for the cause wherever she could, addressing army officers, senators, and legislators and securing thousands of signatures for a petition granting reservation lands for the Native Americans. Sadly, her efforts were fruitless. During her lecturing tour, she met Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann, who encouraged her to assemble her speeches into a book. In 1883, she published her autobiography “Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims,” becoming the first Native American woman to publish a book and the first to secure her copyright registration in the US. Her writings were a rare and valuable description of the life of the Northern Paiute and the impact of the white settlers on them. In 1884, at the age of 40, Winnemucca returned to live in Nevada, where she and her brother established a school for Paiute children, teaching them Native American culture and languages. Three years later, the school was shut down due to an act that ruled that Native children can only study in English schools managed by settlers. In 1887, after her second husband died, Winnemucca moved to live with her sister in Henry’s Lake, Idaho. She passed away four years later at the age of 47. Read more...

Dorothy May Day was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Chicago, the third of five children. Even though Day’s parents were not devoted Christian, she had been interested in religion from a young age, reading the Bible, attending church, and studying catechism. At the age of 14, she was baptized and confirmed in an Episcopal church. She was also an enthusiastic bookworm, reading one book after another, from Russian literature to American social works, such as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, that shaped her way of thinking. After graduating high school, Day attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for two years before moving to NYC. There, she settled on the Lower East Side and became involved with the literary and liberal bohemia, having several love affairs. With a growing interest in social causes, she searched for ways to help the workers and the poor. She joined the Industrial Workers of the World and wrote for several Socialist publications. She was arrested numerous times for her involvement in protests, and in 1917, after being jailed for protesting for women’s suffrage in front of the White House, she went on a 10 days hunger strike. In 1921, she married Berkeley Tobey, and the newlyweds traveled to Europe. Away from politics, she began working on a semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, which was published three years later. By then, Day and her husband separated, and with the payments for selling the movie rights to her novel, she bought a beach house in Staten Island. At 28 years old, Day, who thought she could not have children due to traumatic abortion, was surprised to realize that she is pregnant from her boyfriend, Forster Batterham. During her pregnancy, her connection to Catholicism has increased, and by the time her daughter Tamar was born, she was baptized and joined the Roman Catholic Church. Over the next few years, she supported herself by writing columns for local newspapers and book reviews for Catholic publications, combining her two passions – Catholicism and social activism. In 1932, Day met Peter Maurin, and together they founded The Catholic Worker Movement. They published a newspaper titled “Catholic Worker,” in which they promoted Catholic teachings, pacifism, and social justice principles, especially highlighting the working conditions of women and African Americans. Soon, the paper gained popularity, and within three years, it was distributed to 150,000 subscribers. As part of the movement’s agenda of hospitality, Day co-founded the House of Hospitality, a settlement house providing food and clothing for those in need, as well as several communal living farms. The movement spread out of NYC, and by 1941 it had more than 30 communities in the US, UK, and Canada. Throughout her life, she was dedicated to promoting her socialist beliefs inside her faith, writing, protesting, and campaigning for causes such as disabling nuclear weapons, equal rights for people of color, and defending the poor and the homeless. In her last years, she lived in one of the settlement houses she established in NYC. When she was 83 years old, she died from a heart attack. To this day, The Catholic Worker Movement is active, with more than 200 communities in the US and abroad. Read more...

Sacagawea (also spelled Sacajawea) was born in Lemhi County, Idaho, the daughter of a Shoshone chief. Around the age of 12, she was captured by Hidatsa Indians, and at 13, she was sold to Toussaint Charbonneau – a French Canadian fur trader who was 20 years older than her. She was forced to marry him, becoming one of his wives. Afterward, they lived in the upper Missouri River area (today North Dakota) among the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians. In November 1804, the Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, reached the area on their way to explore the newly acquired western lands and finding a path to the Pacific Ocean. They built Fort Mandan and stayed there for the winter. Lewis and Clark searched for an interpreter who spoke Shoshone to accompany them up the Missouri River and found Sacagawea, who was then pregnant with her first child. In February 1805, Sacagawea gave birth to her first son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, and two months later, left with the expedition, the only woman among the 33 members. In addition to been an interpreter, Sacagawea proved to be a valuable asset to the group. She knew how to find and identify plants, roots, and berries for food and medical aid, and her knowledge of the Shoshone trails in the area helped the team to navigate through the mountain pass. As a native woman with a newborn baby traveling with a group of white men, her mere existence was a symbol of peace. On their journey, the expedition encountered a group of Shoshone Indians, and their leader was Sacagawea’s brother. Thanks to the family reunion, the corps bought horses from the Shoshone, which helped them cross the Rocky Mountains. In November 1805, the expedition reached the Pacific coast. When they cast a vote where they would build a fort for the winter, Sacagawea’s vote was counted equally to the other members of the corps.   In 1806, the corps traveled eastward, and when they reached the Mandan and Hidatsa, Sacagawea left the expedition. Three years later, she and her husband traveled to St. Louis and left their son under the care of Clark, who became his legal guardian. Not long after, Sacagawea had her second child, Lizette Charbonneau. According to historical documents, Sacagawea died in 1812 at the age of 24. However, some Native American oral traditions suggest that she did not die but left her husband and married into a Comanche tribe before returning to the Shoshone in Wyoming, where she died in 1884. Read more...

Pocahontas, named Amonute at birth, and later Matoaka, was born in Tidewater, Virginia. She was the favorite daughter of the Powhatan chief of the Powhatan empire, one of the tribes in the Tidewater region. Pocahontas was about 10-11 years old when she first met the English colonists who settled in the area. According to the colonist Captain John Smith, when he was captured by a Powhatan hunting party, they were about to execute him, when Pocahontas saved his life. Today, historians believe that Smith never was meant to be killed, and the alleged execution was some kind of ceremony. After that event, Pocahontas befriended Smith, often visiting him in the colony, bringing food to the settlers, and helping negotiations with the Powhatan. In 1609, Smith returned to England for medical treatment, but Pocahontas was told he died. Afterward, she stopped visiting the settlers for a few years, probably because of her marriage in 1610 to a Powhatan man called Kocoum. In 1613, when Pocahontas was about 17 years old, she was captured by an English captain named Samuel Argall. With the assistance of a chief of the Patawomeck tribe, where she visited at the time, Pocahontas was lured onto Argall’s ship and taken as ransom in exchange for English prisoners and stolen tools and weapons. Her father released several prisoners but refused to return the tools and weapons, so Pocahontas was held as a prisoner in the Henricus colony in Virginia. Though she was in captivity, Pocahontas was treated well, and she was embraced by the colony’s minister, who helped her improve her English and taught her about the Christian religion and customs. Eventually, she converted and was baptized, taking the Christian name of Rebecca. While in Henricus, she met John Rolfe, a widower and tobacco farmer. In 1614, the couple got married, and in the following year, their son Thomas was born. The marriage of Pocahontas and Rolfe symbolized a union between the Patawomeck and the settlers and fostered peace in the area; that period became known as the “Peace of Pocahontas.” In 1616, Pocahontas, her child, and husband, with a group of other Native Americans, traveled to England by the Virginia Company of London to indicate the Virginia colony’s success in “taming the savages.” Although in Powhatan culture, Pocahontas was not a princess, she was presented as one to the English public. She attended social gatherings such as plays and balls and was even presented to the King and the royal family. Pocahontas and her family stayed in England for a year before returning to Virginia. On the first day of the voyage, she became ill, probably with lung disease, and soon had to be taken off the ship. She passed away a few days later, at the age of 21. Her assumed burial place is at St George’s Church, Gravesend, Kent. The story of Pocahontas, the “Indian princess,” has been romanticized in the Anglo-American culture and was interpreted by various artists and writers. By the 19th century, it changed into a love story between her and John Smith, as later depicted in the 1995 Disney movie, and the emphasis became on the alleged beneficial blending and cooperation between the colonialists and the Native Americans. Read more...

Born in Connecticut and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, following her father’s job as an Episcopal priest. That same year, her father died in a car accident, hit by a drunk driver. Her mother worked at a daycare and had to depend on social security to support her five children. In the following years, Stevens was sexually abused by the man who replaced her father in the church. She chose Math as her major at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. After graduation, she participated in an internship at Bread for the World and led the youth program at the Kanuga Conference Center of the Episcopal church. At 24, she began her path to become a reverend, enrolling in Vanderbilt Divinity School, where she met her husband, Marcus Hummon. During that time, she volunteered in non-profit organizations, helping homeless women and women who struggle with addictions. After her ordination, she continued to help those in need while working at the Church of the Resurrection in Franklin, Tennessee. At the age of 32, she was appointed as the Chaplain of St. Augustine’s Chapel. In 1997, Stevens founded a residential program, originally called Magdalene, to provide two years of free housing to women survivors of prostitution, trafficking, and addiction, giving them a chance to rebuild and restart their lives in a community. In 2001, she added the social enterprise arm of the organization, now called Thistle Farms, to employ and provide income to residents and graduates of the program. The organization now includes Thistle Farms Global Shared Trade, which supports 1,400 artisan survivors in 20 countries, and a national network to provide young organizations with mentoring and resources.   Read more...

Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to parents of mixed racial origins. At age 3, her mother had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and not long after, her father also passed away in tragic circumstances. She was raised by her mother’s family in North Carolina and then New York City. Her application to Columbia University was declined because of her gender, so she attended Hunter College, as one of few students of color, and earned a degree in English. At the time, she secretly married William Roy Wynn, but she soon regretted that decision, disgusted by the act of having sex, and they parted a few months after. At 28, she applied to the University of North Carolina, this time she was rejected because of her race. Trying to change the university’s position, she wrote to various officials, from the university president to the US President. While on a bus at Petersburg, Virginia, she and her friend moved from the broken seats in the black section and sat in the white section. Refusing to return to the back, they were arrested and convicted of disorderly conduct (15 years before Rosa Parks). The Workers’ Defense League paid for their release. Murray’s personal experience with injustice led her to pursue a career in civil rights law, and at the age of 31, she began to study law at Howard University. Being the only woman in her department, she became utterly aware of sexism and discrimination against women, especially black women. She labeled this behavior as “Jane Crow,” by which she emphasized the struggle of African-American women for racial and gender equality. Murray graduated first in her class, but because of her gender, she was denied the fellowship at Harvard University, traditionally given to the class’s valedictorian. Instead, she did her post-graduate studying at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. At the age of 36, one year after passing the bar exams, she was hired as the state’s deputy attorney general and became the first African-American person to serve in this position. In that year, she was named “woman of the year” by the National Council of Negro Women.   In 1950, Murray published the book “States’ Laws on Race and Color” – an examination of the segregation laws in the US, in which she encouraged civil rights lawyers to claim segregation laws as unconstitutional instead of unequal. Later the book was credited as “The bible of the civil rights movement” and became a turning point for assessing segregation cases. After coining the term 20 years earlier, in 1965, she published the article “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” in which she examines Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implications on women, comparing discriminatory laws as applied to women and men under Jim Crow Laws. The next year, she co-founded the National Organization for Women, as a parallel organization to the NAACP, focusing on women’s rights. In 1966, alongside Dorothy Kenyon, she argued a case in which the court ruled that jury selection cannot be discriminated by race or sex. Throughout her life, although she struggled with her sexual and gender identity, she was open about being a gender-nonconforming person, claiming she has an “inverted sex instinct.” She shortened her name to the gender non-specific “Pauli” and wished for a monogamous married life in which she was the man. She cut her hair short and wore pants instead of skirts. During the 1940s, she pursued hormone treatments to correct what she referred to as “personal imbalance,” and she even asked for an abdominal surgery to test if she had hidden male sex organs. Today she is recognized as one of the earliest transgender figures in US history. At the age of 62, Murray resigned from her academic position and enrolled in a General Theological Seminary. Five years later, she became the first African-American woman priest to be ordained by the Episcopal church. For the next seven years until her death in 1985, she ministered to the sick at a parish in Washington, DC.     More About Pauli Murray: Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice Pauli Murray In Her West End Neighborhood Walking Tour   Read more...