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

Peter Gabriel
Matilda Joslyn Gage
Zona Gale

Mahatma Gandhi
William Lloyd Garrison
Marcus Garvey

Peter Gabriel
b. 2-13-1950; Chobham, Surrey, England

Singer, musician and songwriter Peter Gabriel, who rose to fame as the lead vocalist and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis, co-founded WITNESS, a non-profit group that equips, trains and supports locally-based organizations worldwide to use video and the internet in human rights documentation and advocacy.

Matilda Joslyn Gage
b. 3-24-1826; Cicero, New York
d. 3-18-1898; Chicago, IL (in the home of her daughter and son-in-law, L. Frank Baum)

Matilda Joslyn Gage, a key figure in the 19th century as a radical freethinker, suffragist, abolitionist and Native American activist, spent her childhood in a house that was a station of the Underground Railroad.

At different times in her life she faced arrest and prison - under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 which criminalized assistance to escaped slaves and once successfully argued down a group of policemen who were charging illegal assembly against the National Woman Suffage Association convention in 1876.

The advanced thought of Gage caused her to be shunned by other leaders in the suffrage movement and resulted in her not being as well known today.

• Woman, Church and State by Matilda Joslyn Gage
• Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influences on Early American Feminists

Zona Gale
b. 8-26-1874; Portage, Wisconsin
d. 12-27-1938

Zona Gale adapted her most popular novel, Miss Lulu Bett, into a Pulitzer Drama prize winner (1921). She was also active in creating the Wisconsin Equal Rights Law, which prohibits discrimination against women.

Zona Gale quotes ~
• “I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.”
• “The world consists almost exclusively of people who are one sort and who behave like another sort.”
• “Loving, like prayer, is a power as well as a process. It's curative. It is creative.”

Mohandas Gandhi
b. 10-2-1869; Porbandar, India
d. 1-30-1948; New Dehli, India

Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) is known for the non-violent means of revolution by which India was able to gain its independence.

His emphasis on truth and the purity of means was from a deep sense of humanity: the respect for life should not be violated in the fight for their rights and privileges.

Great as he was as a leader, he was far greater as one who put no limit to humanity. For him life was an indivisible whole and to know is to act.

His entire life was devoted to the translating of his thought into “experiments with truth.”
(bookmark text)

William Lloyd Garrison
b. 12-13-1805; Newburyport, MA
d. 5-24-1879; NYC

Abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer William Lloyd Garrison is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and as one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Garrison was also a prominent voice for the women's suffrage movement associated with Lydia Maria Child.

William Lloyd Garrison quotes ~
• “I will say, finally, that I despair of the republic while slavery exists therein.” Address to the Colonization Society (4 July 1829)
• “Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind.” The motto of The Liberator, 1831
• “I cherish as strong a love for the land of my nativity as any man living. I am proud of her civil, political and religious institutions — of her high advancement in science, literature and the arts — of her general prosperity and grandeur. But I have some solemn accusations to bring against her. ... I accuse her of legalizing, on an enormous scale, licentiousness, fraud, cruelty and murder.” ~ Address to the World Anti-slavery Convention, London (12 July 1833)
• “Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.” ~ Declaration of Sentiments, Boston Peace Conference (28 September 1838)
• “Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.” ~ The Story of His Life Told by His Children (1885)

Marcus Garvey Photographic Print

Marcus Garvey
b. 8-17-1887; Jamaica
d. 6-10-1940; London, England

Marcus Garvey, a controversial African American leader of the early 20th century, was a great orator and enlisted many thousands of African Americans in his ‘Back to Africa’ movement.

Marcus Garvey quotes ~
• “Present day statesmen are making the biggest blunder of the age if they believe that there can be any peace without equity and justice to all mankind. Any attempt at disarmament when half the world oppresses the other half is but a farce, because the oppressed will make their oppressors get armed sooner or later.”

Letter to Will Geer from Woody Guthrie MP3 download

Will Geer
b. 3-9-1902; Frankfort, Indiana
d. 4-22-1978; Los Angeles, California

Botanist, actor and social activist Will Geer was blacklisted in the early 1950s for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Geer is best remembered for his playing the role of Grandpa Walton in the The Waltons and the seasoned trapper in the movie Jeremiah Johnson.

He also founded the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum where he combined his acting and botanical careers by making sure that every plant mentioned in Shakespeare was grown there.

Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, Historic Print

Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
b. 7-3-1860; Hartford, CT
d. 8-17-1935 (breast cancer & suicide)

Sociologist and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform who is best remembered today for her semi-autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. Her aunts included Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotes ~
• “It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman.”
• “It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.”
• “To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”
• “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.”
• “The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”
• “Love grows by service.”
• “And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.”
• “To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.”
• “Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! . . . Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.”

The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni (no commerically avaiable poster)

“Nikki” Giovanni
née Yolande Cornelia
b. 6-7-1943; Knoxville, TN

Poet and civil rights activist Nikki Giovanni has taught English at Virginia Tech since 1987. In 2004 Giovanni was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Nikki Giovanni quote ~
• “...if it takes a near-death experience for you to appreciate your life, you're wasting somebody's time.”