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

Pete Seeger
b. 5-3-1919; NYC

Folk singer Pete Seeger, who was blacklisted as a member of The Weavers folk group during the McCarthy Era, became a prominent voice of protest during the 1960s. He wrote or co-authored “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)” , and “Turn, Turn, Turn!”.

Pete Seeger quotes ~
• “Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.”
• “I feel that my whole life is a contribution.”
• “I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.”
• “One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.”

FYI ~
• WWI poet Alan Seeger was the uncle of Pete Seeger.
• Seeger attended the Highlander Folk School that was started by Myles Horton.

Irena Sendler
b. 2-15-1910; Warsaw, Poland
d. 5-12-2008

Social worker Irena Sendler and others in the Polish Underground resistance in German-occupied Warsaw during WWII, smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto by providing false documents and shelter.

Irena Sendler quote ~
• “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.”

Other individuals who helped individauls hide or escape the Nazi's include Nicholas Winton, Henryk Slawik, Miep Gies, Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenburg, Paul Grüninger, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka.

Anna Sewell
b. 3-30-1820; England
d. 4-25-1878

Anna Sewell, who had difficulty walking because of a childhood injury, became concerned about the treatment of animals when forced to use horse drawn carriages for transportation.

• “There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham.” — Black Beauty

Anna Howard Shaw
b. 2-14-1847; Newcastle-on-Tyne, England
b. 7-2-1919; Moylan, PA (pneumonia)

“Nothing bigger can come to a human being than to love a great cause more than life itself.”

Anna Howard Shaw was brought up near Big Rapids, Michigan when it was considered frontier, giving her first sermon in Ashton (1870). She attended Albion College and Boston University School of Theology, becoming the first female ordained as a Methodist minister. She also earned a Medical Doctor (MD) degree in 1886 though she never practiced medicine.

She was associated with the suffrage and temperance movements, being president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association for ten years, and close friends with Susan B. Anthony. She was also the first woman awarded a Distinguished Service Medal, voted for by the United States Congress for her humanitarian work during World War I.

• The Story of a Pioneer

Martin Sheen
née Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez
b. 8-3-1940; Dayton, OH

The actor Martin Sheen (stage name) developed a commitment to social justice after meeting Dorothy Day and being involved in the Catholic Worker Movement. In the movie Gandhi Sheen played a fictionalized journalist character inspired by real life journalist Webb Miller (vegetarian, friend of Gandhi, and carried a copy of Walden by Thoreau with him since boyhood - Miller's story - “I Found No Peace”).

Leon Shenandoah portrait by Frank Szasz

Leon Shenandoah
b. 5-18-1915
d. 7-22-1996

Leon Shenandoah, as Chief of the Chiefs of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, was the keeper of the central fire.

‘The fire that never dies’ is a symbol for a tradition that began centuries ago when a man they called the Peace Maker persuaded them to make a ‘Great Peace’ by forming a confederacy among themselves, based on a ‘Great Binding Law.’

He taught them that the way to overcome their conflicts was through a greater perspective. He said, “Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of the continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.”

• Leon Shenandoah Tribute at peace4turtleisland.org
• The Heart Forest
• Discover Turtle Island Earth Day Celebration in KC, 1992
• To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah
Chief Leon Shenandoah held the Onondaga title of Tadodaho for 25 years.

“My energy grows, my mind settles, and my heart smiles; for here, in the Heart of America, the people care for one another and their Earth.” Chief Leon Shenandoah, visiting KC in 1987

Nina Simone
née Eunice Kathleen Waymon
b. 2-21-1933; Tryon, NC
d. 4-21-2003; Mississippi

Singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist Nina Simone is most often associated with Jazz.

May Sinclair, née Mary Amelia St. Clair
b. 8-24-1862; England
d. 11-14-1946; Parkinson's Disease

Suffragist May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair, a popular writer of about two dozen novels, short stories, poetry and critiques. The literary term ‘stream of consciousness’ is attributed to her.

May Sinclair quotes ~
• “The War will leave none of us as it found us.”
• “At the moment you are no longer an observing, reflecting being; you have ceased to be aware of yourself; you exist only in that quiet, steady thrill that is so unlike any excitement that you have ever known.”

• The Divine Fire
• May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian

Upton Sinclair
b. 9-20-1878; Maryland
d. 11-25-1968

American author Upton Sinclair achieved much popularity in the first half of the 20th century for his investigations of social conditions, and notariety for his advocacy of socialist views and anarchist causes, such as his arrest for reading the First Amendment (free speech) at a labor rally in 1923. He gained particular fame for his novel, 'The Jungle', which dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and caused a public uproar that contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

Upton Sinclair quotes ~
• “What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of “art for art's sake” than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore — and then there will be time enough for art.” Cosmopolitan (October 1906)
• “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.” Mammonart - an Essay in Economic Interpretation Ch. 2 Who Owns the Artists? (1925)
• “I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit, when I see a line of a hundred policeman with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming on to private property to hear my feeble voice. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice.” Letter to the Los Angeles Chief of Police (1928-04-07)
• “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

• Sinclair in Writers Who Changed the World posters
• Literary Techniques Posters - Imagery