Black Lives Matter founders, Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists among USA TODAY Women of the Century
Scroll below through the list of our Women of the Century from Civil Rights, and it’s no surprise that women were granted the right to vote. The activists on this list – from Gloria Steinem to Dorothy Height to Dolores Huerta – have spent their entire lives fighting to better the world for other people, refusing to be swayed or discouraged by the obstacles in their path. Women like Marsha P. Johnson, Felicitas Mendez and Marcia Greenberger have created a better life for young girls today. Some of these women, like Rosa Parks, are household names. Others, like Cristina Jiménez Moreta, are in the early days of their activism.
As USA TODAY, in commemoration of the 100 year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, recognizes Women of the Century in Civil Rights, all of these fearless leaders are ones to follow.
Jane Addams
First American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
(1860-1935)
Born in the small farming town of Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams in 1931 became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams was active in the women’s suffrage movement and a well-known pacifist, especially after America’s entry into World War I. She gave lectures on peace, rising to chair of the Women’s Peace Party in 1915 and helping found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919.
Black Lives Matter founders
Alicia Garza (1981- ), Patrisse Cullors (1983- )
Opal Tometi (1984- )
In 2013, after Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted, three organizers started Black Lives Matter, a political group that’s responsible for the largest civil rights movement since the 1960s. Black Lives Matter has grown into a global organization spanning more than 40 chapters. In addition to founding BLM, Alicia Garza is the special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Patrisse Cullors’ memoir, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” is a New York Times bestseller; and Opal Tometi is the former executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.
Mary McLeod Bethune
Education pioneer
(1875-1955)
A former cotton picker born into an enslaved family in South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune began a school for Black girls that became Bethune-Cookman College in 1929. Once women earned the right to vote, she taught reading so voters could pass the literacy test, which was put in place to suppress Black voting. She served on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unofficial “Black Cabinet” and became the highest-ranking African American woman in government when FDR named her director of the Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration.
