Dorothy Lee Bolden (October 13, 1923 - July 14, 2005) was the founder of the National Domestic Worker's Union of America and worked to fight for women's rights and bring segregation to an end. Bolden began working as a domestic worker at the age of nine. She would eventually utilize her past experiences to form the Domestic Worker's Union in Atlanta, Georgia. Through the Domestic Worker's Union, thousands of women have secured better pay and working conditions throughout the United States.
Frederick Douglass (February 1818 - February 20, 1885) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such great orator had once been a slave.
Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, be they white, black, female, Native American, or Chinese immigrants. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, as well as in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union with Slaveholders," criticized Douglass' willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020) was an American politician, statesman, and civil rights activist and leader who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020. He was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966.
Lewis was one of the "Big Six" leaders of groups who organized the 1963 Marc on Washington. He fulfilled many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States. In 1965, Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In an accident which became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers and police attacked the marchers, including Lewis.
Lewis also stood up for the injustice of other communities, including the Jewish community. In the wake of the 2014 Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting Lewis stated: "It is deeply tragic that such senseless brutality should occur on the eve of Passover, the time when Jews all over the world remember their liberation from slavery in Egypt thousands of years ago." Lewis was called a "hero", a "mensch" and "a special gift to the Jewish community" by those who knew and interacted with him.
