Wangari Maathai

Wangari Muta Mary Jo Maathai (1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011) was a Kenyan environmental  and political activist.She was educated in the United States at Mount St. Mount St. Scholastica and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In the 1970s, Maathai  founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 1986, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for "her contribution to sustainable development , democracy and peace." Maathai was an elected member of Parliament and served as assistant minister for Environment  and Natural Resources in the government of President Mwai Kibaki  between January 2003 and November 2005. In 2011, Maathai died of complications from ovarian cancer. 

                                                            

Wangari Maathai Quotes

"My inspiration partly comes from my childhood experiences and observations of Nature in rural Kenya. It has been influenced and nurtured by the formal education I was privileged to receive in Kenya, the United States and Germany. As I was growing up, I witnessed forests being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations, which destroyed local biodiversity and the capacity of the forests to conserve water."

From Wangari Maathai's Nobel Lecture, delivered in Oslo, 10 December 2004.

"Anybody can dig a hole and plant a tree. But make sure it survives. You have to nurture it, you have to water it, you have to keep at it until it becomes rooted so it can take care or itself. There are so many enemies of trees."
 

From the article "This Much I Know", The Observer Magazine, 8 June 2008.

Leymah Gbowee

Leymah Roberta Gbowee (born 1 February 1972) is a Liberian peace activist responsible for leading a women's peace movement that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. This led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, the first African nation with a female president. She, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman, were awarded the 2011Nobel Peace Prize"for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work.

The Oprah Magazine painted this backdrop:

The Liberian civil war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003 with only brief interruptions, was the result of economic inequality, a struggle to control natural resources, and deep-rooted rivalries among various ethnic groups, including the descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the country in 1847. The war involved the cynical use of child soldiers, armed with lightweight Kalashnikovs, against the country's civilian population. At the center of it all was Charles Taylor, the ruthless warlord who initiated the first fighting and would eventually serve as Liberian president until he was forced into exile in 2003.

                                                           

"Leymah bore witness to the worst of humanity and helped bring Liberia out of the dark. Her memoir is a captivating narrative that will stand in history as testament to the power of women, faith and the spirit of our great country."

                    

                         -Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize              

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an  African-American civil rights Activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement".

                                                                 

On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Parks' action was not the first of its kind to impact the civil rights issue. Others had taken similar steps, including Lizzie Jennings in 1854, Homer Plessy, in 1892, Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, and Claudette Colvin  on the same bus system nine months before Parks, but Parks' civil disobedience had the effect of sparking the  Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Parks' act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

                                                               

At the time of her action, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and had recently attended the Highlander Folk School,  a Tennessee center for workers' rights and racial equality. Nonetheless, she took her action as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years for her action, she suffered for it, losing her job as a seamstress in a local department store. Eventually, she moved toDetroit, Michigan, where she found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers. After retirement from this position, she wrote an autobiography and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years she suffered fromdementia, and became involved in a lawsuit filed on her behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast.