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Algerian activist, was born in the Casbah of Algiers to a middle-class family. Djamila Boubacha (also spelled Boupacha) is one of the many young Algerian women who mobilized in the fight against French colonialism under the aegis of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). She was a liaison agent for the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN; National Liberation Front) whose main task was to act as a go-between for FLN fighters in the maquis (guerrilla army) and the civilian population in the cities, towns, and villages. She was arrested on 10 February 1960, at the age of twenty-two, and illegally detained for allegedly planting a bomb that was defused before it could detonate in the student restaurant at the University of Algiers. Her trial was scheduled for 17 June 1959 although there were no witnesses who could identify her nor any proof that she had deposited ...

the last state president of apartheid South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was born in Johannesburg on 18 March 1936, the son of a leading National Party (NP) politician. Widely known, from his initials, as F. W., the younger de Klerk practiced law before entering politics. After being elected as a member of Parliament for the Vereeniging constituency in 1972, he rose rapidly through the ranks of the NP until he became leader of the party in early 1989 and state president in September that year. He held that position until May 1994, when Nelson Mandela succeeded him. He then became one of two deputy-presidents under Mandela until mid-1996, when he left the government of national unity and became leader of the opposition in Parliament. He retired as leader of the NP and from politics in September 1997.

De Klerk was a key figure in ...

Myrlie Williams was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and raised by her grandmother, McCain Beasley, and her aunt, Myrlie Beasley Polk. She married civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1951. Together they worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its mission to end racial discrimination and segregation in Mississippi.

In 1963 white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith assassinated Medgar Evers. After her husband's death, Evers-Williams moved her family to California, where she continued to work for the NAACP by speaking publicly about her struggles for black equality. With William Peters, she coauthored For Us, the Living (1967). In 1987 Evers-Williams became the first black woman to serve as commissioner on the Los Angeles board of public works. She was elected vice chairperson of the NAACP in 1994, and in 1995 she became the organization s first ...

civil rights activist and chairperson of the NAACP. Raised by her grandmother and aunt in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Myrlie Beasely entered Alcorn A&M College in 1950 to study education and music. Shortly after enrolling she met an upperclassman, Medgar Wylie Evers, and the couple married in 1951. The next year they moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where Medgar Evers became field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Ignoring threats from white racists, Myrlie and Medgar Evers participated wholeheartedly in the civil rights movement, but on 12 June 1963 Medgar Evers was shot and killed. His assailant, a segregationist named Byron De La Beckwith, was captured and tried but not convicted. For thirty years Myrlie Evers fought for a retrial, and on 5 February 1994 Beckwith was finally convicted of murder. The trial was dramatized in the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi.

Following ...

peace activist, social worker, women's rights advocate, and 2011Nobel Laureate, was born on 1 February 1972 in central Liberia and raised in the country's capital, Monrovia. Her father worked as the head radio technician and liaison to the United States for the government of Liberia's National Security Agency. Her father was hired under President William Tolbert, was arrested and jailed for nine months when Samuel Doe seized power in 1980, and was reinstated upon his release. He resigned with the election of Charles Taylor in 1997 and became head of security at St. Peters Catholic Church. Her mother was a dispensing pharmacist at several hospitals in Monrovia before the outbreak of war.

Gbowee graduated from B.W. Harris Episcopal High, one of Monrovia's best high schools. In March 1990 she began classes at the University of Liberia with the dream of becoming a doctor ...

The second of three children of Obadiah and Bernice (McMurry) Scott, Coretta Scott King grew up in rural Alabama, where she helped her family harvest cotton and tend their farm. Her father hauled lumber for a white sawmill owner, a job that enabled him to purchase and operate his own sawmill. The local white community resented her father's success. Vandals allegedly burned his sawmill, and the Scotts' house, to the ground. King was deeply shaken by her family's trials. She dreamed of moving to the North, and she diligently focused on her education, enrolling in a local private high school, where she pursued her talent for music. In 1945 she won a scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She studied music and elementary education and in 1948 debuted as a vocalist at the Second Baptist Church. Also while at Antioch, she performed in a program with Paul ...

The founding president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia, Coretta Scott King emerged as an African American leader of national stature after the death in 1968 of her husband Martin Luther King Jr.

Born in Marion, Alabama, Coretta Scott spent her childhood on a farm owned by her parents, Obie Leonard Scott and Bernice McMurry Scott. By the early 1940s, her father’s truck-farming business had become increasingly successful, prompting harassment from white neighbors. The family suspected that resentful whites may have been responsible for a 1942 fire that destroyed the Scott family s home Hoping for better opportunities for their offspring Obie and Bernice Scott encouraged their three children to excel in school Coretta Scott graduated from Lincoln High School a private black institution with an integrated faculty and then followed her older sister Edyth to Antioch College in ...

The first black president of South Africa, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela became a worldwide symbol of resistance to the injustice of his country’s Apartheid system. Imprisoned for more than twenty-seven years, and before that banned from all public activity and hounded by police for nearly a decade, Mandela led a struggle for freedom that mirrored that of his black compatriots. After his 1990 release from Victor Verster prison, his work to end apartheid won him the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize (which he shared with South African president F. W. de Klerk) and then the presidency itself a year later.

Mandela’s father, Chief Henry Mandela, was a member of the Thembu people’s royal lineage; his mother was one of the chief’s four wives. Mandela was born in Mvezo, Umtata, but grew up in Qunu, a small village in what is now the Eastern Cape Province At the age of ...

The son of a hospital clerk, Anwar Sadat was born in Mit Abu al-Kawm, a village on the Nile delta. He was part of the first generation of Egyptian soldiers recruited from the middle class rather than the elite, and graduated from Cairo Military Academy in 1938. During World War II (1939–1945), Sadat was twice arrested for conspiring with the Germans’ campaign to drive the British from Egypt. In 1950 he joined the Free Officers Committee Organization, chaired by Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1952 he participated in Nasser’s overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy.

After Nasser was elected president of Egypt in 1956, Sadat held various offices in the government, including two terms as vice president (1964–1966 and 1969–1970). After Nasser’s death in September 1970 Sadat became president Although his political opponents considered him an interim leader he was elected president less than a ...

Egyptian army officer, nationalist, and president, was born in the village of Mit Abu al-Kum, Minufiyya Province, on 25 December 1918. An educated effendi, his father was an army clerk who served in the Sudan where he met Sadat’s mother. Sadat’s early years were spent in Mit Abu al-Kum under his grandmother’s care; the reunited nuclear family moved to Cairo in 1925 upon his father’s return from the Sudan. Sadat’s educational experience was diverse: early schooling in the village kuttab and briefly in a Coptic school in a neighboring village before moving to Cairo and attendance at a number of primary and secondary schools in Cairo before receiving his General Certificate of Education in 1936. He was admitted to the Royal Military Academy in 1936 as part of the first class admitted on a competitive basis. He graduated in 1938 and was commissioned into the Egyptian ...

also known as Madam Satan, a legendary and emblematic Brazilian malandro (roughly translated as “rascal” or “scalawag,” a person who behaves badly but in an amusingly mischievous rather than harmful way). Openly homosexual and illiterate, he was a transformative figure, representative of the marginalized urban culture during the twentieth century (i.e., internal immigrants, people of color who came from the impoverished and largely rural north looking for work in the metropoles of southern Brazil).

Santos was born on 5 February 1900 in Glória do Goitá in the southern rural zone of the state of Pernambuco located in northeastern Brazil to a family of extremely poor laborers He had seventeen brothers and sisters It is said that when he was 8 years old his mother traded him for a ewe and he began living with a horse trader He ran away soon after and found himself in Recife from where ...

There is some uncertainty about Betty Shabazz's origins and early life. Reportedly the daughter of Shelman Sandlin and a woman named Sanders, she was born Betty Sanders and grew up as a foster child in the Detroit, Michigan, home of a black family named Malloy. As a youth she was active in her local African Methodist Episcopal Church. She briefly attended Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama but moved to New York City to escape Southern racism and to study at the Brooklyn State Hospital School of Nursing. During her junior year, she attended the Nation of Islam's Temple No. 7 in Harlem. There she taught a women's health and hygiene class and was noticed by Malcolm X, who was a minister at the temple. He proposed to her by telephone from Detroit, and they were married in 1958.

Shabazz converted to Islam ...

“Don’t you let anybody believe that being married to one man all this long time, that we didn’t have our mountains, our valleys, and our downs,” declared Hajj Bahiyah Betty Shabazz, widow of the slain black Muslim civil rights leader Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz). The marriage was ended by tragedy: on 21 February 1965, while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, Malcolm X was assassinated. Shabazz remained devoted to the legacy of her husband by involving herself in civil rights, community issues, global affairs, and human rights activism, all of which kept her in the American consciousness and media. She was a leader, a teacher, and a mentor whose motto was “find the good and praise it.”

Shabazz was born in Detroit, Michigan, and adopted by Lorenzo Don and Helen Malloy an upper middle class couple She joined the local Methodist church and attended Northern ...

On 12 June 1963 a gunman waiting in the nearby woods fatally shot the first husband of Myrlie Beasley Evers Williams while he stood in the driveway of their home. Medgar Evers, a retired army veteran and a graduate of Alcorn A&M College, was serving as the Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP when his assassin, a fertilizer salesman named Byron De la Beckwith, took his life. Myrlie was left a widow with three children to rear. Two all-white juries were declared hung while hearing the case, but this did not deter Medgar Evers’s widow from pursuing justice. Her undying efforts, and those of other civil rights activists, resulted in the prosecutor’s office requesting a retrial in 1994. A jury of eight African Americans and four whites finally convicted the assassin on 5 February 1994, thirty years after he first stood trial.

Myrlie Beasley was ...