Patricia Stephens Due was born on December 9, 1939 in Quincy, Florida. At age 13, she and her sister challenged Florida’s “Jim Crow laws” by standing in a “whites only” line at a local Dairy Queen. As a college student at Florida A&M University, she rallied for justice for Betty Jean Owens--Patricia’s friend, fellow student and a survivor of one of the most high-profile sexual assault cases in the state of Florida in May 1959.

Hankins is the founder of Break the Cycle. Break the Cycle works with teenagers and young adults on how to build healthy relationships and to have a world without abuse!

In 1953 Shirley Chisholm campaigned for the first-ever Black judge in Brooklyn, an effort that formed the Belford-Stuyvesant Political League which advocated for civil rights issues. Chisholm left the “BSPL” in 1958 after disagreements over the amount of power women members should have in the group.

Chris Womendez and Cherie Jimenez: Womendez and Jimenez lived in the same apartment building in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1975 and they were both survivors of domestic violence. After discovering they both had escaped their abusive husbands, they realized that there are so many other women who need a place to stay. On New Year’s Day 1976 they decided to open their homes to these women and their children.

When Daisy was three years old her mother was murdered by three white men. Despite her young age the death of her mother made a big impact on her life journey. From then on she dedicated her life to fighting against racial injustice.

Robinson was very active in the Women’s Political Council (WPC). After Robinson was kicked off a bus for sitting in the 5th row in Montgomery she made the segregation of the bus seating her top priority. 

Mary was born in and raised in the Jim Crow south, a teacher who earned a doctorate degree in education from Columbia and directed the English department at Alabama State University. She was the founder of the Women’s Political Council in 1946, the organization which would spearhead and organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955.

Born into slavery, Ida was the main source of support for her siblings by 16 and became a teacher and journalist, co-owning the Memphis Free Speech, one of the first publications to report on lynchings and sexual violence in the American south. Her newspaper office was ransacked and destroyed by a White mob; death threats forced her from Tennessee.

Tarana Burke is most notably known for starting the #Metoo hashtag in 2006! After graduating Burke encountered numerous women of color that were survivors of sexual violence. She started using #MeToo on MySpace to show other survivors they are not alone. She said she created the phrase to give “empowerment through empathy.”

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917 to sharecroppers in Mississippi, the granddaughter of an enslaved woman. She worked picking cotton from age six, full time at 12 to help support the large family, as the youngest of 20 children. In 1961 at age 44, she had surgery for a uterine tumor and received a non-consensual hysterectomy—part of the forced sterilization methods in the U.S. to “control population” of targeted populations, such as poor Black women.