Notable Peace & Justice Activists Posters “Ba...-”
with curriculum enrichment resources for social studies classrooms, teachers, home schoolers, offices.

Joan Baez
Ella Baker
Emily Greene Balch

Roger Nash Baldwin
Thomas Banyacya
Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Joan Baez
b. 1-9-1941; Staten Isl, NY

Folk singer Joan Chandos Baez is known for her songs that deal with social issues and her activism in civil and human rights, nonviolence, and environmentalism.

• guitar posters

Ella Baker
b. 12-13-1903; Norfolk, VA
d. 12-13-1986; NYC

Ella Josephine Baker, a leading African American civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s, worked behind-the-scene over five decades.

Ella Baker quotes ~
• “One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.”
• “I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. . .”

Emily Greene Balch
b. 1-8-1867; Boston, MA
d. 1-9-1961; NYC

Emily Greene Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 as the “Honorary International President, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom”, (shared with John Mott).

Balch was also a professor of economics and sociology.

Emily Greene Balch quote ~
• “Men who are scandalized at the lack of freedom in Russia do not ask themselves how real is liberty among the poor, the weak, and the ignorant in capitalist society.”

Roger Nash Baldwin
b. 1-21-1884; Wellesley, MA
d. 8-26-1981; NYC

Roger Nash Baldwin was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and served as its executive director until 1950.

Baldwin taught sociology at Washington University (St. Louis, MO), worked as a social worker,and spent a year in jail as a conscientious objector to WWI. Cases he was involved with include the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, and challenging the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses.

Roger Baldwin narrated the documentary The Wobblies, available online 1:28:39

Roger Nash Baldwin quotes ~
• “I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people.”
• “The smallest deed is better than the grandest intention.”

Thomas Banyacya portrait by Frank Szasz

Thomas Banyacya
(1909-1999)

Thomas Banyacya was internationally recognized keeper of the ancient Hopi prophecy, warns of a gourd of ashes so hot it would burn a hole in the Earth - an atomic bomb.

He travelled tirelessly on behalf of the Hopi elders since the 1940s, proclaiming the importance of caring for the Earth and the value of traditional wisdom.

Teaching a Native American worldview that everything has spirit, he encouraged us to enter the realm of spirit, to see as the wind sees, to talk with the animals, and to welcome everything on Earth.

He told how native people are caring for the Earth with songs and spirituals, “You will learn from us the sacredness of everything.”

Mr. Banyacya was in Lawrence, KS for the dedication on the Haskell Medicine Wheel, as were Jake Swamp and Leon Shenandoah. (On the link you will have to scroll down the page to see an aerial image of the ceremony.)

• Thomas Banyacya

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, née Aikin
b. 6-20-1743; Leicestershire, England
d. 3-9-1825; Stoke Newington

Ann Laetitia Barbauld is remembered most today as a teacher and author of primers for children. In the Georgian era she was highly respected as poet, essayist, political writer, editor, and critic, writing on citizen ethics, identity politics, church-state relations, and empire. After her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven critizing England's participation in the Napoleonic Wars was savaged by critics, she never published again.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld quote ~
• “I do not know how to rejoice at this victory, splendid as it is, over Buonaparte [sic], when I consider the horrible waste of life, the mass of misery, which such gigantic combats must occasion.”

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment

Clara Barton
b. 12-25-1821; Oxford, MA
d. 4-13-1912

Humanitarian Clara Barton was a teacher and nurse who is remembered for her work with wounded in the American Civil War and organizing the American Red Cross. The International Committee of the Red Cross had been established in Europe “to protect the victims of international and internal armed conflicts ... the war wounded, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants.” Barton could only ‘sell’ the idea of the Red Cross with the expanded vision including any great national disaster because post-Civil War Americans could not imagine the US would ever be involved in another conflict as horrendous as the Civil War.

Clara Barton quotes ~
• “I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.”
• “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.”
• “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.”

Marie Bashkirtseff
b. 11-11-1858; Ukraine
d. 10-31-1884; Paris (tuberculosis)

Marie Bashkirtseff, born to a wealthy Russian noble family, studied painting and wrote articles for Hubertine Auclert's French feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne. She is most noted today for her personal journals, published as "I am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff", describing, among other things, the struggles of women artists.

Marie Bashkirtseff quotes ~
• “The expectation of an unpleasantness is more terrible than the thing itself.”
• “I long to see everything, to know everything, to learn everything!”
• “I was born to be a remarkable woman; it matters little in what way or how. ... I shall be famous or I will die.”