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

Emma Goldman
Maud Gonne
Amy Goodman
Paul Goodman
Michail Gorbachev

Nadine Gordimer
Al Gore, Jr.
Maxim Gorky
Marie-Olympe de Gouges

Emma Goldman
b. 6-27-1869; Kovno, Russian Empire (Lithuania)
d. 5-19-1940; Toronto, Canada

“The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.”

Emma Goldman was a prolific writer and speaker, constantly drawing attention to her ideas for women’s equality with sexual freedom and birth control, freedom of thought and expression, and worker’s rights for an eight hour day, and union organizing.

• more Emma Goldman posters

Maud Gonne
b. 12-21-1866; Tongham, England
d. 4-27-1953; Ireland

Maude Gonne was an Irish actress, feminist, and patriot. Poet William Butler Yeats was infatuated with her, she was also the mother of Sean MacBride, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974.

• Maude Gonne: Ireland's Joan of Arc

Amy Goodman
b. 4-13-1957; Bay Shore, New York

Progressive broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author, Amy Goodman, is the principal host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the internet. She was awarded a Right Livelihood Award in 2008.

Amy Goodman quotes ~
• “War coverage should be more than a parade of retired generals and retired government flacks posing as reporters.”
• “The media — stenographers to power.”
• “I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheared off, we saw kids blown apart, for one week, war would be eradicated. Instead, what we see in the U.S. media is the video war game. ”

Paul Goodman
b. 9-9-1911; New York City, NY
d. 8-2-1972; New Hampshire

Sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, and intellectual Paul Goodman is best remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (1960) which analyzes the causes and effects of “the disgrace of the Organised System, of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc., and the disaffection of the growing generation”, and in turn an inspiration to '60s student movement.

Goodman was also a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and '50s.

Paul Goodman quote ~
• ...“But perhaps there has not been a failure to communicate. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable.”
• “Wrong training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.”

Mikhail Gorbachev
b. 3-2-1931; Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, Russian SFSR, USSR

Poster Text: The decision to give the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize to Soviet President Michail Gorbachev was one of the most controversial in the history of the award. the members of the Nobel committee felt that Mr. Gorbachev was at least partly responsible for the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe in 1989. And they wanted to reward Mr. Gorbachev for his efforts to make his own nation more free and open. But in the months ofter the award was given many people criticized the choice. They pointed to Mr. Gorgachev's use of force against people struggling for independence in the Soviet republics of Lativia and Lituania. And they questioned whether the Soviet leader truly believed in democracy and freedom. As with Henry Kissinger, most people have strong feeling about Michail Gorbachev winning this great honor. But there is no doubt that in the 1980s, Mr. Gorbachev did more to change the world than any other leader.

Very little is known about Mikhail Gorbachev's past. But experts do know that he was born in southern Russian in 1931, and that his first job was driving a tractor. In 1950, he took the first important step in his career when he entered Moscow State University. Only the best students or those who know top officials get into this school. Mr. Gorbachev trained as a lawyer, but he decided to become an official of the Communist Party. In 1980, he became a full member of the Politburo – the top decision-making group in the Soviet government. At the age of 49, he was placed in charge of the country's agriculture. When Konstantin Chernenko died in 1985, Mr. Gorbachev took over as leader of the Soviet Union. His first task was to try to improve the nation's economy. But he was not very successful. In the early 1990s, Mr. Gorbachev was fighting to hold his nation together, and to make it as strong and wealthy as the nations of the West.

• Mikhail Gorbachev at Amazon.com

Nadine Gordimer
b. 11-20-1923; Johannesburg, South Africa

Nadine Gordimer a writer and political activist who dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa, was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognized as a woman “who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity”.

Gordimer has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Al Gore, Senator from Tennessee
b. 3-31-1948; Washington, DC

Nobel Peace Prize 2007-
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change & Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

• climate posters

Maxim Gorky
b. 3-28-1868; Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire
d. 6-14-1936; near Moscow

Author Maxim Gorky was a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. Gorky was known to write incessantly and viewing “literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world”.

He was influenced by the Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

• Autobiography of Maxim Gorky

Olympe de Gouges
b. 12-31-1748; Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France
d. 11-3-1793; Place de la Revolution, Paris

Marie-Olympe de Gouges was a writer, feminist, & revolutionary who was guillotined during the French Reign of Terror.

Today she is best remembered for demanding that French women be given the same rights as French men,“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen”.

Germaine Greer
b. 1-29-1939; Melbourne, Australia

Writer, academic, journalist and scholar Germaine Greer is widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century with the publication of her controversial book, The Female Eunuch. She regards her goal as ‘women's liberation’ as distinct from ‘equality with men’.

Sarah Moore Grimke, with Autograph, Giclee Print

The Grimké Sisters

Sarah Moore Grimké
b. 11-26-1792; South Carolina
d. 12-23-1873

Angelina Grimké Weld
b. 2-20-1805; South Carolina
d. 10-26-1879

The Grimké sisters are remembered for their strong educational, abolitionist, religious activism. They were the daughters of a distinguished member of Charleston society who as a judge, planter, lawyer, politician, slaveholder, and Revolutionary War veteran, forbid his daughters any activities outside of the prescribed elite social mores.

The Grimke sisters became Quakers and lived in Philadelphia.

FYI ~ Playwright Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958) was the great niece of the Grimke Sisters, the granddaughter of their brother Henry who had raised a family with slave Nancy Weston, a woman of African and European descent.

The Brothers Grimm
Jacob
b. 1-4-1785 - d. 9-20-1863;
Wilhelm
b. 2-24-1786 - d. 12-16-1859
Hanau, Germany

The Grimm Brothers were philologists, combinating the study of literary criticism, history, and linguistics from written historical sources. Though beginning their university studies with law (following their father) the brothers are best known for transcribing and preserving the tales of the peasant classes.

The brothers are also considered as precursors of the German democratic movement. In 1837, they and five of their fellow professors, known as the Göttinger Sieben (The Göttingen Seven), were dismissed from their positions for accusing King Ernest Augustus of Hanover as violating the constitution. (FYI - Ernest Augustus was the uncle of Victoria, who became queen of England in 1837).

• Grimms' Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories

Woody Guthrie, Photographic Print

Woody Guthrie
b. 7-14-1912; Okemah, Oklahoma
d. 10-3-1967

Woody Guthrie, a singer-songwriter and folk musician, is well known for his social conscious aroused by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl conditions of his life. Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land”, and an autobiography “Bound for Glory”.

FYI - The sign on his guitar reads “This Machine Kills Fascists”.