From her early days as a vocational nurse, to the moment she became the first Black organizer at Local 250 in 1971, to her 1988 election as secretary-treasurer at the nation’s second-largest healthcare union — Shirley Ware knew how to organize.
Lucy Eldine González Parsons was a fiery speaker, writer, and labor organizer who led the first May Day parade in Chicago in 1886, and also unionized the city’s only female workers organization at the time, Working Women’s Union No. 1 (WWU).
Edgar Nixon founded the Sleeping Car Porters union and organized the Alabama Voters League before joining with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. to initiate the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 to protest segregation in the South.
Isaac Myers was a pioneering Black labor leader who rose from a caulker, sealing seams on vessels in the Maryland shipyard, to organizing the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society and eventually became the president of the (Colored) National Labor Union, the first organization of its type in U.S. history.
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” said Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil and voting rights icon whose early life necessitated her activism as a form of survival.
Cat Brooks’ activism against police violence has sparked the work of her Anti Police-Terror Project and the Justice Teams Network and has greatly advanced the conversation around police accountability.
Cori Bush is a lifelong activist and change agent. Most recently, in 2020, she became Missouri’s first Black congresswoman, advocating for progressive causes on an anti-violence platform.
Stacey Abrams, former Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, is a voting rights activist whose efforts focus on ending voter suppression.
Eloise Reese-Burns tirelessly fought for justice as one of the longest-tenured healthcare workers in California and a member of NUHW’s executive board.
