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

Paul Robeson
Mary Robinson
Anita Roddick
Nikolai Roerich

Romain Rolland
Oscar Romaro
Eleanor Roosevelt

Paul Bustill Robeson American Actor and Singer, Giclee Print

Paul Robeson
b. 4-9-1898; Princeton, NJ
d. 11-25-1949; NYC

Paul Bustill Robeson was an actor and operatic bass-baritone singer.

He was awarded the 1945 Spingarn Medal for his outstanding achievment as a musical artist, writer, athlete, orator, lawyer and wide-ranging social justice activism.

• Show Boat poster
• Paul Robeson at Amazon.com

Mary Robinson
b. 5-21-1944; County Mayo, Ireland

Mary Robinson served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002. Her current project is Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalization Initiative, for fostering equitable trade and decent work, promoting the right to health and more humane migration policies, works to strengthen women's leadership and encourage corporate responsibility. She was also the first woman president of Ireland (1990-1997).

Anita Roddick
b. 10-23-1942; England
d. 9-10-2007

Businesswoman Dame Anita Roddick, a human rights activist and environmental campaigner, was the founder of The Body Shop, a cosmetics company producing and retailing beauty products. She strove to prove the Quaker model of business for the common good.

The Body Shop products were of natural rather than synthesized ingredients and customers were encouraged to bring containers back for refilling. In addition she opposed testing on animals and worked with third-world situations to improve lives. (The canals were being choked by water plants - one solution - use herbicides to clear the plants with the risk of poisoning the people and animals - OR - invest in the women clearing the plants that were then used to make packing paper, and pay them a first world wage.)

In her stores she displayed posters supporting Greenpeace anti-whaling campaign posters (1977) and ollected signatures on a petition to save the Brazilian rain forest (1989).

Anita Roddick quotes ~
• “If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.”
• “Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.”
• “I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.”
• “If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.”

Nikolai Roerich
b. 10-9-1874; St. Petersburg, Russia
d. 12-13-1947

Nikolai Roerich was a writer, philosopher, traveler, scientist and painter who initiated an international pact for the protection of historic sites and artistic and academic institutions in defense of culture. He was nominated numerous times for a Nobel Peace Prize.

• Shambhala: In Search of the New Era
• Nicholas and Helena Roerich, Revised Edition: The Spiritual Journey of Two Great Artists and Peacemakers

Romain Rolland
b. 1-29-1866, France
d. 11-30-1944

Romain Rolland, dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic, was awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize for Literature “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.”

Rolland, the first to bring the work of Mahatma Gandhi to the public attention also was a professor of both history and music. FYI - the author Hermann Hesse dedicated his novel Siddhartha to Rolland.

Romain Rolland quotes ~
• “One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.”
• “The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by various essences, until it becomes a great conflagration.”
• “Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepared the way for the faith of tomorrow.”
• “I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.”
• “A hero is a man who does what he can.”
• “It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.”
• “The people have been gradually conquered by the bourgeois class, penetrated by their thoughts and now want only to resemble them. If you long for a people's art, begin by creating a people!”
• “All these young millionaires were anarchists, of course: when a man possesses everything it is the supreme luxury for him to deny society: for in that way he can evade his responsibilities.”

• Jean-Chritophe by Romain Roland

Oscar Romero
b. 8-15-1917; El Salvador
d. 3-24-1980

Bishop Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass one day after a sermon where he had called on Salvadoran soldiers, as Christians, to obey God's higher order and to stop carrying out the government's repression and violations of basic human rights.

Oscar Romero quotes ~
• “We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways.”
• “A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth - beware! - is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel's call.”
• “Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ...In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression.”
• “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grains of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies. We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us. I am bound, as a pastor, by divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me.”

Eleanor Roosevelt
b. 10-11-1884; New York City
d. 11-7-1962

Poster Text: Born in 1884, Eleanor Roosevelt was to become the most active First Lady in the nation's history. Even as a teenager, she felt a deep concern for the less forunate. “I am always questioning, questioning,” she wrote in her diary. “I can feel it in me ... that I can do much more than I am doing.” Life was soon to give her the chance to do “much more.” In 1905, Eleanor married Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When he was stricken with polio in 1921, she began to help him with his work. And after he became President in 1933, she became hes “eyes and ears,” traveling everywhere he could not go.

The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, a time when millions were out of work. When Mrs. Roosevelt was not visiting coal mines or city slums, she was working hard to get help for poor farmers or speaking boldly against racial prejudice. In the early 1940s, during World War Two, she worked tirelessly for world peace. And for the six years after her husband's death in 1945, whe served as a delegate to the United Nations. President Truman once called her “The First lady of the World.” She herself summed up her views this way: “You have to do the best you can in this world, and when you have done that, that is all you can do.” She remained active in public life until her death in 1962.

• more Great American Women posters
• more Eleanor Roosevelt posters

Theodore Roosevelt
b. 10-27-1858; NYC
d. 1-6-1919

Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the U.S. was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for “brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War”.

• presidents posters

Elihu Root
b. 2-15-1845; Clinton, NY
d. 2-7-1937

Elihu Root was awarded the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize for “for initiating various arbitration agreements”.

French Scientist Jean Rostand Doing Biological Study of Toads and Frogs, Photographic Print

Jean Rostand
b. 10-30-1894; France
d. 9-4-1977

Jean Rostand was an experimental biologist who was a philosopher about the responsibilities of humanity and our place in nature, a science writer, and activist against nuclear proliferation and the death penalty.

His father was playwright Edmond Rostand most noted for his play Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jean Rostand quotes ~
• “A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.”
• “It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.”
• “I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell.”
• “Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conquerer. Kill everyone, and you are a god.”