Notable people who served as members with the Volunteers in Service to America program include the following:
Gerry Larson
Carl Schurz was a German-American revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer. He migrated to the United States after the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and became a prominent member of the new Republican Party. After serving as a Union general in the American Civil War, he helped found the short-lived Liberal Republican Party and became a prominent advocate of civil service reform. Schurz represented Missouri in the United States Senate and was the 13th United States Secretary of the Interior.
Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) is a social democratic organization established in 1972 as the successor of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). The SPA had stopped running independent presidential candidates though retains the term "party" in their name.
James Edmund Groppi was an erstwhile Catholic priest and noted civil rights activist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He became well known for leading numerous protests, many times being arrested during them. In 1976, he was excommunicated by the church for marrying. In 1985, he died of brain cancer at the age of 54.
James Gregory was an American character actor who played roles such as Schaffer in Al Capone (1959), the McCarthy-like Sen. John Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the audacious General Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), and crusty Inspector Frank Luger in the television sitcom Barney Miller (1975–1982).
The Menominee are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans officially known as the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. Their land base is the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. Their historic territory originally included an estimated 10 million acres (40,000 km2) in present-day Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The tribe currently has about 8,700 members.
The Meskwaki, also known by the European exonyms Fox Indians or the Fox, are a Native American people. They have been closely linked to the Sauk people of the same language family. In the Meskwaki language, the Meskwaki call themselves Meshkwahkihaki, which means "the Red-Earths", related to their creation story.
Indian termination describes United States policies relating to Native Americans from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It was shaped by a series of laws and practices with the intent of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream American society. Cultural assimilation of Native Americans was not new; the belief that indigenous people should abandon their traditional lives and become what the government considered "civilized" had been the basis of policy for centuries. What was new, however, was the sense of urgency that, with or without consent, tribes must be terminated and begin to live "as Americans." To that end, Congress set about ending the special relationship between tribes and the federal government.
In the United States, black conservatism is a political and social movement rooted in African-American communities that aligns largely with the American conservative movement, including the Christian right. Black conservatism emphasizes social conservatism, traditionalism, patriotism, capitalism and free markets. What characterizes a 'black conservative' has changed over time, and proponents do not necessarily share the same political philosophy.
The Department of Kansas was a Union Army command department in the Trans-Mississippi Theater during the American Civil War. This department existed in three different forms during the war.
Events from the year 1891 in the United States.
Carl Gershman served from 1984-2021 as the founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private, congressionally-funded, grant-making institution that supports non-governmental groups working for democracy around the world. During his presidency, NED’s annual congressional appropriation grew from $18.5 million in 1984 to $300 million a year in 2021, when it funded nearly 2,000 projects in 100 countries.
Bernice Robinson (1914–1994) was an American activist in the Civil Rights Movement and education proponent who helped establish adult Citizenship Schools in South Carolina. Becoming field supervisor of adult education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), she led political education workshops throughout the south, in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other states to teach adult reading skills so that blacks would be able to pass literacy tests to vote. Between 1970 and 1975, Robinson worked for the South Carolina Commission for Farm Workers, supervising VISTA workers and directing day care centers. In both 1972 and 1974, she unsuccessfully ran for the South Carolina House of Representatives, becoming the first African American woman to run for a political office in the state.