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

Lillian Smith
b. 12-12-1897; Jasper, FL
d. 9-28-1966

Social critic and activist Lillian Smith is best remembered for her best-selling 1944 novel Strange Fruit. Smith, Southern born and raised, openly supported unpopular stances on the issues of race and gender equality, calling for the removal of Jim Crow laws. Lillian Smith was also a teacher, the director of the family owned girl's summer camp, and publisher with long time companion Paula Snelling of the literary magazine South Today.

Lillian Smith quotes ~
• “Rich folks always talk hard times.”
• “Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.”

Patricia Lee “Patti” Smith
b. 12-30-1946; Chicago, IL
raised in New Jersey

Patti Smith is a songwriter, singer, and artist in the punk rock genre. She has been a supporter of the Green Party, and involved with protesting the Iraq War.

• Patti Smith at Amazon.com

Samantha Smith
b. 6-29-1972; Houlton, Maine
d. 8-25-1985, airplane crash

In 1982 Samantha Smith wrote to Soviet President Yuri Andropov -

Dear Mr. Andropov,
My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.
Sincerely,
Samantha Smith

In his answer, Andropov explained that that was not the case, and he invited Samantha to visit the Soviet Union.

Jan Christiaan Smuts
b. 5-24-1870; Cape Colony
d. 9-11-1950; South Africa

Smuts, better known as a politican and military leader pioneered the concept of holism, defined as “the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution” in his 1926 book, Holism and Evolution.

Anna Sokolow
b. 2-9-1910; Hartford, CT
d. 3-29-2000; NYC

Dancer, teacher and choreographer Ann Sokolow was associated with “radical dance” and the socially conscious collective the New Dance Group and the larger Workers Dance League, developing a work called Anti-War Trilogy in 1933.

Joel Elias Spingarn
b. 5-17-1875; New York City, NY
d. 7-26-1939

Educator, literary critic, and civil rights activist Joel Elias Spingarn was one of the first Jewish leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving as chairman of its board from 1913 to 1919, its treasurer from 1919-30, its second president from 1930 until his death in 1939.

Spingarn is the namesake of the Spingarn Medal, established in 1914, and awarded annually by the NAACP for outstanding achievement by an African American. His will stipulated a bequest to fund the Spingarn Medal in perpetuity.

Arthur Spingarn, brother of Joel, was also active in NAACP.