Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor and film director. He is known for his roles as mentally disturbed outsiders and rebels. He earned prizes from the Cannes Film Festival and Venice International Film Festival as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. Hopper studied acting at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and the Actors Studio in New York. Hopper also began a prolific and acclaimed photography career in the 1960s.
Melissa Lou Etheridge is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and guitarist. Her eponymous debut album was released in 1988 and became an underground success. It peaked at No. 22 on the Billboard 200 and its lead single, "Bring Me Some Water", garnered Etheridge her first Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female in 1989. Her second album, Brave and Crazy, appeared that same year and earned Etheridge two more Grammy nominations. In 1992, Etheridge released her third album, Never Enough, and its lead single, "Ain't It Heavy", won Etheridge her first Grammy Award.
Andrew Myles Cockburn is a British journalist and the Washington, D.C., editor of Harper's Magazine.
James Morris Lawson Jr. was an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.
Amanda Lucy Foreman is a British-American biographer and historian. Her books include Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, A World on Fire, and The World Made by Women. She also wrote and starred in a four-part documentary regarding the role of women in society, entitled The Ascent of Woman. Currently, she is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal bi-weekly 'Historically Speaking' and an Honorary Research Senior Fellow in the History Department at the University of Liverpool.
Hendrik Hertzberg is an American journalist, best known as the principal political commentator for The New Yorker magazine. He has also been a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and editor of The New Republic, and is the author of ¡Obámanos! The Rise of a New Political Era and Politics: Observations & Arguments. In 2009, Forbes named Hertzberg one of the "25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media," placing him at number seventeen.
Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his naturalistic paintings of black people that reference the work of Old Master paintings. In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former President Barack Obama's portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007 and describes his paintings as "heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."
Georgios Mylonas was a Greek Center Union politician and government minister. He was a close aide to Greek statesman and premier Georgios Papandreou, and was repeatedly elected deputy for the Ioannina seat with the Center Union. Mylonas had served as an undersecretary to the premier's office and education undersecretary from 1963 to 1965. He assumed the transport ministry in the first post-junta government in 1974 and was Minister for Culture from 1989 to 1990. Mylonas was the author of the book Escape From Amorgos, detailing his escape from the island, where he was exiled during the 1967-1974 military dictatorship. The escape was organized by his then, son-in-law Elias B.M. Kulukundis and his daughter Eleni Mylonas with the help of Maria Becket.
Eric J. Etheridge is an American journalist and photographer who was the initial editor, in 1995, of George, the magazine co-founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" is a 2009 non-fiction book edited by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, author of several books on race and director of Vanderbilt University's African American and Diaspora Studies, concerning the "A More Perfect Union" speech of then-Senator Barack Obama.
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.
Charles Grier Sellers Jr. was an American historian. Sellers was best known for his book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846, which offered a new interpretation of the economic, social, and political events taking place during the United States' Market Revolution.
Freedom Riders is a 2010 American historical documentary film, produced by Firelight Media for the twenty-third season of American Experience on PBS. The film is based in part on the book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by historian Raymond Arsenault. Directed by Stanley Nelson, it marked the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride in May 1961 and first aired on May 16, 2011. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The film was also featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show program titled, Freedom Riders: 50th Anniversary. Nelson was helped in the making of the documentary by Arsenault and Derek Catsam, an associate professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland is an American civil rights activist who was active in the 1960s. She was one of the Freedom Riders who was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961, and was confined for two months in the Maximum Security Unit of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. The following year she was the first white student to enroll at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi and served as the local secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Henry "Hank" James Thomas is an African American civil rights activist and entrepreneur. Thomas was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who traveled on Greyhound and Trailways buses through the South in 1961 to protest racial segregation, holding demonstrations at bus stops along the way.
Helen Singleton was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement, most notable for her participation as a Freedom Rider in Jackson, Mississippi.
Margaret Winonah Beamer Myers was an American political activist, who, in 1961 at the age of 19, became a Freedom Rider. Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and following years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960). She was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi and spent almost six months in Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm, the oldest prison and the only maximum-security prison for men in the state of Mississippi. Of all the Freedom Riders, white or black, Winonah Beamer served the longest sentence and was the only Freedom Rider who served her full term.
Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be For Labor When It's Flat on Its Back is a 1991 book by Thomas Geoghegan. It was reissued by The New Press in 2004. It chronicles Geoghegan's work with labor unions in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly his efforts to help steel workers at South Deering's Wisconsin Steel mill.
Sara Jane "Sally" Rowley was an American jewelry-maker and civil rights activist.
