- Joe Hill
Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, and also known as Joseph Hillström was a radical songwriter, labor activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies. He was executed for murder after a controversial trial. After his death, he became the subject of a folksong. - Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day was an American journalist turned social activist and devout member of the Catholic Church. She became known for her social justice campaigns in defense of the poor, forsaken, hungry and homeless. Alongside Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, espousing nonviolence, and hospitality for the impoverished and downtrodden. - John Reed
John "Jack" Silas Reed (October 22, 1887 - October 19, 1920) was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist, famous for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, "Ten Days that Shook the World". He was the husband of the writer and feminist Louise Bryant. Reed and Bryant were the subjects of the film "Reds" (1981), directed by Warren Beatty. - Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (originally, often associated with the Beat Generation), essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Since the 1970s, he has frequently been described as the 'laureate of Deep Ecology'. From the 1950s on, he has published travel-journals and essays from time to time. His work in his various roles reflects his immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. - Bill Haywood
William Dudley Haywood (February 4, 1869-May 18, 1928), better known as Big Bill Haywood, was a prominent figure in the American labor movement. Haywood was a leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, he was involved in several important labor battles, … - Lucy Parsons
Lucy Parsons (1853-March 7, 1942) was a radical American labor organizer, anarchist (and later, Communist) and is remembered as a powerful orator. She was born in Texas (likely as a slave) to parents of Native American, Black American and Mexican ancestry. She often went by the name of Lucy Gonzales. In 1871 she married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier, … - James Connolly
James Connolly (June 5, 1868 - May 12, 1916) was an Irish socialist leader. He was born in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh, Scotland, to Irish immigrant parents. He left school for working life at the age of 11, but despite this he would become one of the leading Marxist theorists of his day. Though proud of his Irish background he also took a role in Scottish politics. In addition, he studied the neutral international language, Esperanto. - Mother Jones
Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, was a prominent American labor and community organizer, and Wobbly. - Daniel de Leon
Daniel De Leon was a Curaçao-born American socialist and Syndicalism-influenced trade unionist of Jewish origin. He was educated in Germany and the Netherlands and arrived in the United States in 1874. De Leon settled in New York City, studying at Columbia University. He became a committed socialist during the 1886 Mayoral campaign of Henry George and in 1890 joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), becoming the editor of its newspaper, "The People". - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) was born in Concord, New Hampshire on 7 August, 1890. The family moved to New York in 1900 and Flynn was educated at the local public schools. Introduced by her parents to socialism, she was only 16 when she gave her first speech, What Socialism Will Do for Women, at the Harlem Socialist Club. As a result of her political activities, Flynn was expelled from high school. - Ammon Hennacy
Ammon Hennacy was an American pacifist, Christian anarchist, vegetarian, social activist, member of the Catholic Worker Movement and a Wobbly, and was known for establishing the "Joe Hill House of Hospitality" in Salt Lake City, Utah and for never paying taxes. - Utah Phillips
Bruce "Utah" Phillips (b. May 15 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio) is a labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller, poet and self-described "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest". He describes the struggles of labor unions and the power of direct action. He often promotes the Industrial Workers of the World in his music, actions, and words. Utah Phillips' given name is Bruce Phillips. A fan of T. Texas Tyler, Phillips adopted the stage name U. Utah Phillips. - Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. - Antonio Negri
Antonio "Toni" Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist political philosopher. Negri is perhaps best-known for his co-authorship of "Empire" and his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded "Potere Operaio" (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of the "Autonomia Operaia". - Woody Guthrie
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (July 14, 1912-October 3, 1967) was a prolific American folk musician. He described himself in one of his songs as "The Great Historical Bum", a first hand observer and survivor of the economic and environmental hardships of the dust bowl, which shook the great plains states during the great depression. Guthrie's body of music consists of hundreds of songs, ballads and improvised works. - William O. Douglas
William Orville Douglas was a United States Supreme Court Associate Justice. With a term lasting thirty-six years and seven months, he remains the longest-serving justice in the history of the Court. - Paul Mattick
Paul Mattick (1904-1981): Born in Pomerania in 1904 and raised in Berlin by class conscious parents, Mattick was already at the age of 14 a member of the Spartacists' "Freie Sozialistische Jugend". In 1918, he started to learn as a toolmaker at Siemens AG, where he was also elected as the apprentices' delegate on the workers' council of the company during the German Revolution. - Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855-October 20, 1926) was an American labor and political leader, one of the founders of the International Labor Union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States. - Marie Equi
Marie Diana Equi (born 7 April 1872 in New Bedford, Massachusetts; died 13 July 1952 in Portland, Oregon) was a medical doctor and anarchist. Her father was Italian and her mother of Irish parentage. In 1893, she moved to The Dalles, Oregon with her friend Bess Holcomb, who had been offered work as a teacher. The two lived together quietly in what has been called a "Boston marriage". On 21 July 1893, Equi was the subject of an article in "The Dalles Times-Mountaineer", … - Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth (December 221905 - June 61982) was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku. He is regarded as a chief figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Rexroth had two daughters, Mary (who later changed her name to Mariana) and Katharine, by his third wife, Marthe Larsen. - Judi Bari
Judi Bari (November 7, 1949 - March 2, 1997) was an American environmentalist and labor leader, a feminist, and the principal organizer of Earth First! campaigns against logging in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California as well as efforts through Industrial Workers of the World Local 1 to bring timber workers and environmentalists together in common cause. - David Rovics
David Rovics (born April 10, 1967) is an indie singer/songwriter and outspoken grassroots political protestor from the United States. His music is most accurately described as protest-folk and concerns topical subjects such as the 2003 Iraq war, anti-globalisation and social justice issues. Rovics is an outspoken critic of not only George W. Bush, but also figures like John Kerry and the Democratic Party as a whole. He is vocal on these subjects on stage, … - Emcee Lynx
Emcee Lynx is an anarchist hip hop artist from the San Francisco Bay Area in California who has achieved significant popularity and name-recognition in the West Coast hip hop and underground hip hop scenes and among anarchists and other radicals around the world. - Ricardo Flores Magón
Ricardo Flores Magón a noted Mexican anarchist and social reform activist, was born on Mexican Independence Day, in San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, Mexico. He died at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, USA. Flores Magón explored the writings and ideas of many anarchists; he examined the works of early anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon but was also influenced by his anarchist contemporaries: Élisée Reclus, Charles Malato, Errico Malatesta, … - Ralph Chaplin
Ralph Hosea Chaplin (1887-1961) became a labor activist, when at the age of seven, he saw a worker shot dead during the Pullman strike in Chicago, Illinois. He had moved with his family from Ames County, Kansas to Chicago in 1893. During a time in Mexico he was influenced by hearing of the execution squads established by Porfirio Diaz, and became a supporter of Emiliano Zapata. On his return, he began work in various union positions, most of which were very poorly paid. - Michael Wilson
Michael Wilson was an American multiple-Academy Award winning screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses during the era of McCarthyism. - David Dubinsky
David Dubinsky (David Dubnievski) (February 22, 1892 - September 17, 1982) was an American labor leader. He served as president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1932 and 1966, took part in the creation of the CIO and was one of the founders of the American Labor Party and the Liberal Party of New York. - Frederick Funston
Frederick N. Funston (11 September, 1865 - 19 February, 1917) also known as Fred Funston, was a General in the United States Army, best known for his role in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. - Carlos Cortez
Carlos Cortez (August 13, 1923 - January 19, 2005) was a poet, graphic artist, photographer, muralist and political activist, active for six decades in the Industrial Workers of the World. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1923, the son of a Mexican-Indian Wobbly union organizer father and a German socialist pacifist mother, … - Harry Bridges
Harry Bridges (July 28 1901 - March 30 1990) was an influential American labor leader in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a union of longshore and warehouse workers on the West Coast, Hawai'i and Alaska which he helped form and led for over forty years. As controversial as he was charismatic, he was prosecuted by FDR, Truman and Eisenhower alike, … - Peter Maurin
Peter Maurin was a Catholic activist who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement with Dorothy Day in 1933. Maurin was born into a poor farming family in southern France, where he was the oldest of 21 siblings. After spending time with the Christian Brothers, he briefly moved to western Canada to try his hand at homesteading, but was discouraged by the death of his partner. He then traveled throughout the American east for a few years, and eventually settled in New York, … - Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 - June 1, 1968) was a deafblind American author, activist and lecturer. - Carlo Tresca
Carlo Tresca (1879 - january 11, 1943 New York City) was an Italian-born American anarchist, newspaper editor, and labor agitator. - William Z. Foster
William Zebulon Foster (February 25, 1881 - September 1, 1961), born in Taunton, Massachusetts, was the long-time General Secretary of the Communist Party USA and trade union leader. He passed through the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as leading the drive to organize the packinghouse industry during World War I and leading the steel strike of 1919 before joining the Communist Party in 1921. - T-Bone Slim
Matti Valentine Huhta (c.1890? - May 11?, 1942) better known by his pen name T-Bone Slim, was a humourist, poet, songwriter, hobo, and a labour activist in the Industrial Workers of the World. Very little is known of his early life or his death. He was born in Ashtabula, Ohio to Finnish working-class immigrants sometime before the turn of the century, married at a young age, and left the area around 1910, … - Thomas Mooney
Thomas Joseph Mooney was an American labor leader in San Francisco, who famously spent 22½ years in prison for a crime he did not commit, the Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916. - Rosemary Byrne
Rosemary Byrne (born 3 March 1948, Irvine) is a former Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the South of Scotland region losing her seat in the 2007 election. She is a member of Solidarity (Scotland) after she and Tommy Sheridan left the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). Byrne lives in Irvine and was a teacher and a trade union activist for several years. In 2003 she was elected to the Scottish Parliament, … - Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff (born March 8, 1934) is an American composer of experimental classical music. - James Withycombe
James Withycombe (March 21, 1843-March 3, 1919) was a British-born American politician, a Republican, and the 15th Governor of Oregon. - Norman Ewing
Norman Kirkwood Ewing, Australian politician, was a member of three parliaments: the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, the Australian Senate, and the Tasmanian House of Assembly. He became a Judge of the Supreme Court of Tasmania, and was Administrator of Tasmania from November 1923 to June 1924. Norman Ewing was born in Wollongong, New South Wales on 26 December 1870. The son of Anglican clergyman Thomas Campbell Ewing and Elizabeth nee Thomson, …
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