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

Frances Power Cobbe
William Cobbett
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody
Levi Coffin

William Sloane Coffin
John Amos Comenius
Barry Commoner

Frances Power Cobbe
b. 12-4-1822; Dublin, Ireland
d. 4-5-1904

Frances Power Cobbe was a social reformer, feminist theorist, and pioneer animal rights activist.

Frances Power Cobbe quotes ~
• “I think it is worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and ‘manage’ by base arts a husband or a father, — I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.”
• “...men give us most rarely that which we really want, not favor, but — Justice. Nothing is easier than to coax them to pet us like children, nothing more difficult than to persuade them to treat us like responsible human beings.”
• “Science is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.”
• “So immense are the claims on a mother, physical claims on her bodily and brain vigor, and moral claims on her heart and thoughts, that she cannot ... meet them all and find any large margin beyond for other cares and work. She serves the community in the very best and highest way it is possible to do, by giving birth to healthy children, whose physical strength has not been defrauded, and to whose moral and mental nature she can give the whole of her thoughts.”
• “I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!”
• “Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.”

William Cobbett
b. 3-9-1763; Farnham, Surrey, England
d. 6-18-1835

Pamphleteer, journalist and farmer William Cobbett is best remembered today for his 1830 Rural Rides, an extensive social commentary on agrarian life in the early nineteenth century, first published in serialized form.

Cobbett was ‘prickly’ to any authority, calling out for justice for the wrongs he saw:

• he had to flee England to escape retribution for calling attention to the corruption of Army officers,
• he wrote from a pro-British position under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine while in the young U.S. from 1792-1800 (and was successfully sued by Benjamin Rush),
• then back to England where he was found treasonously libel causing him to flee to the U.S. again from 1817-1819.

Eventually Cobbett was elected to to the House of Commons where he attacked corruption in government, the 1834 Poor Law, and voiced the cause of the persecuted and unjustly sentenced Tolpuddle Martyrs.

A reported 8,000 people attended his funeral.

• William Cobbett by G. K. Chesterton

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody
b. 2-26-1846; LeClaire, Iowa
d. 1-10-1917; Colorado

The showman William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, noted for his conservation efforts, also spoke out in favor of women voting.

Levi Coffin
b. 10-28-1798; Guilford Co., North Carolina
d. 9-16-1877; Avondale, Ohio

Quaker Levi Coffin and his family left North Carolina for Indiana after slave owners forced a closing of their school for teaching slaves to read the Bible. He later became known as the “President of the Underground Railroad.”

Levi Coffin and Lucretia Mott were cousins.

Levi Coffin quote ~
• “The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color, and I should try to follow out the teachings of that good book.”

William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
b. 6-1-1924; New York City, New York
d. 4-12-2006; Vermont

William Sloane Coffin served as Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York City and President of SANE/Freeze (now Peace Action), the nation's largest peace and justice group after he was a CIA case officer from 1950-53. He was also a supporter of gay rights.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr. quotes ~
• “People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both.”
• “In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent.” - In the Yale Alumni magazine in 1967
• “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”
• “Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.”
• “I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap and then you grow wings.”
• “Of God's love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.”
• “It is often said that the Church is a crutch. Of course it's a crutch. What makes you think you don't limp?”

John Amos Comenius
b. 3-28-1592; Moravia (Czech Republic)
d. 11-4-1670

John Amos Comenius, Bishop of the Unity of the Brethren (the Hussites, followers of Jan Hus) and one of the first advocates of universal education, is called the “Father of Modern Education”. Comenius is considered to have authored the first textbook, a picture book, for children.

One of UNESCO’s most prestigious awards, The Comenius Medal honouring outstanding achievements in the fields of education research and innovation, is named after him.

• theology posters
• John Comenius: The Labyrinth of the World and The Paradise of the Heart (Classics of Western Spirituality)

Henry Steele Commager
b. 10-25-1902; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
d. 3-3-1998

Henry Steele Commager was a noted educator, historian and author. He was a defender of civil liberties, opposed McCarthyism, and the Vietnam War.

• The Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as told by Participants, ed. Henry Steele Commager

Barry Commoner
b. 5-28-1917; Brooklyn, New York

Barry Commoner, a biology professor and 1980 presidental candidate, wrote four laws of ecology, in The Closing Circle (1971) -

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.

3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is “likely to be detrimental to that system.”

4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Everything comes from something. There's no such thing as spontaneous existence.

Mairead Corrigan
b. 1-27-1944; Belfast, Northern Ireland

Mairead Corrigan received the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with co-recipient Betty Williams for their work as cofounders of Community of Peace People, an organization dedicated to promoting a peaceful resolution to The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Mairead Corrigan quotes ~
• “If we want to reap the harvest of peace and justice in the future, we will have to sow seeds of nonviolence, here and now, in the present.”
• “...I believe, with Gandhi, that we need to take an imaginative leap forward toward fresh and generous idealism for the sake of all humanity -- that we neeed to renew this ancient wisdom of nonviolence, to strive for a disarmed world, and to create a culture of nonviolence.”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau
b. 6-11-1910; Saint-André-de-Cubzac, France
d. 6-25-1997; Paris

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was an ecologist and researcher who shared his knowledge and discoveries of the oceans through television documentaries, books, and an environmental protection foundation.