101 Changemakers

Michele Bollinger lives in Washington, DC where she teaches high school social studies. Dao X. Tran is an editor based in the Bronx, New York. Dao is currently working on the Domestic Worker Oral History Project. When not reading for work and pleasure, she enjoys time with her daughter Quyen, a changemaker of a different sort.

101 Real Change Makers

1.Tecumseh
2.Oscoela
3.Red Cloud
4.Crazy Horse
5.Nathan Bacon
6.Daniel Shays
7.Grimke Sisters
8.Susan B. Anthony/Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Lucretia Mott
9.David Walker (early Black abolitionist)
10.Denmark Vesey (planned a slave rebellion)
11.Nat Turner
12.Henry Highland Garnet (Black abolitionist, organized black troops)
13.Frederick Douglass
14.Harriet Tubman
15.John Brown
16.WEB DuBois
17.Queen Liliuokalani
18.Mark Twain
19.August Spies
20.Albert and Lucy Parsons
21.Mary Elizabeth Lease, populist
22.Ida B. Wells
23.Margaret Sanger
24.Upton Sinclair
25.Clarence Darrow
26.Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
27.Helen Keller
28.Eugene Debs
29.Big Bill Haywood
30.Joe Hill
31.Mary Harris “Mother” Jones
32.Hulet Wells (Seattle 1919)
33.Hubert Harrison
34.Paul Robeson
35.Harry Bridges
36.The Dunne Bros.
37.Genora Dollinger
38.Angelo Herndon
39.Emma Goldman
40.A. Philip Randolph
41.John L. Lewis
42.Langston Hughes
43.Richard Wright
44.Harry Hay
45.Del Martin/Phyllis Lyon/Barbara Gittings (Daughters of Bilitis)
46.Jeanette Rankin (1st woman in Congress, founding member of Women’s Int’l League for Peace and Freedom)
47.Fred Korematsu (Japanese American who refused to report to internment camp; Korematsu vs. United States)
48.Henry A. Wallace
49.Cesar Chavez
50.Dorothy Height, National Council of Negro Women
51.Claudette Colvin
52.Rosa Parks
53.Bayard Rustin
54.Melba Beals and the Little Rock 9
55.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
56.Malcolm X
57.Ella Baker
58.Fannie Lou Hamer
59.Stokely Carmichael
60.Diane Nash
61.John Lewis
62.Angela Davis
63.Huey Newton
64.Shirley Chisolm
65.Muhammad Ali
66.Leonard Peltier
67.Dennis Banks/AIM
68.Philip and Daniel Berrigan
69.Billie Jean King
70.Ralph Nader
71.Rachel Carson
72.Howard Zinn
73.Dolores Huerta
74.Edward Said
75.June Jordan
76.Harvey Milk
77.Winona LaDuke
78.Jesse Jackson
79.Cleve Jones
80.Laila Al-Arian
81.Noam Chomsky
82.Ryan White
83.Constance McMillen
84.COLAGE members (or affiliated with) who testified on behalf of their gay parents’ right to marry
85.Elvira Arellano and son Saul Arellano

Other possibilities – more writers, academics, artists
1.Bessie Smith
2.Gertrude Stein
3.Audre Lorde
4.John Reed
5.Jacob Lawrence
6.Ben Shahn
7.Clifford Odets
8.August Wilson
9.Lorraine Hansberry
10.Orson Wells
11.Marlon Brando
12.Bob Dylan
13.Betty Friedan
14.Gloria Steinem
15.Susan Brownmiller
16.Martina Navratilova
17.Gloria Anzaldua
18.Barbara Smith
19.James Baldwin
20.Tony Kushner
21.Larry Kramer (ACT UP)
22.Eqbal Ahmad
23.Daniel Ellsberg
24.Ralph Johns – Son of Syrian immigrants, Greensboro NC store owner during the sit-ins, supportive of black students
25.Frances Perkins