50 Fun Facts About Social Justice

Which European country did not let women vote in national elections until a referendum in 1971?

Switzerland gave women the federal vote in February 1971, after its male voters approved the change. One canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, kept women out of local votes until a court forced its hand in 1990.

What everyday commodity did Mahatma Gandhi lead a 240-mile march to make in 1930, defying British tax law?

Salt was a British monopoly in colonial India, so gathering it from the shore was a crime. Gandhi's walk to the coast at Dandi took 24 days and set off a wave of civil disobedience.

Which country in June 2018 became the last in the world to lift a legal ban on women driving?

Saudi Arabia ended the ban on 24 June 2018, following a royal order from King Salman. Several of the women who had campaigned for the change were in detention on the day it took effect.

Off the coast of Cape Town, where did Nelson Mandela spend 18 of his 27 years as a prisoner?

Robben Island takes its name from the Dutch word for seals, and it had earlier been used as a leper colony. Two later South African presidents were also held there.

Which Montgomery seamstress was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger?

Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse: a 15-year-old student had been arrested on a city bus earlier that year. Her case was the one that set off a boycott lasting 381 days.

From the steps of which Washington landmark did Martin Luther King Jr. address over 250,000 marchers in August 1963?

The Lincoln Memorial crowd heard King leave his prepared text: the best-known passage of the speech was improvised, after singer Mahalia Jackson urged him on from her seat behind him.

Which country, then a British colony, became the first in the world to give all women the vote in 1893?

New Zealand passed the law after years of petitions organized by Kate Sheppard, and women voted that November. They could not stand for parliament themselves until 1919.

Which Mafia-owned bar in Greenwich Village was raided by police in June 1969, sparking days of riots?

The Stonewall Inn raid broke the usual pattern: nobody had tipped off the owners, and the crowd fought back. The first Gay Pride marches in the United States marked its anniversary a year later.

Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, founded a Kenyan movement that paid rural women to do what?

Plant trees, and they did: her Green Belt Movement has put more than 51 million in the ground since 1977. Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Which famous author and lecturer, a Socialist Party member from 1909, helped found the ACLU in 1920?

Helen Keller is remembered for learning to communicate without sight or hearing, but as an adult she campaigned for labor rights, women's suffrage and world peace.

Which lawyer won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and later became the first Black Supreme Court justice?

Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court. Lyndon Johnson appointed him to its bench in 1967.

Which six-year-old needed federal marshals to enter William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans in November 1960?

Ruby Bridges was taught alone for more than a year, because only one teacher, Barbara Henry from Boston, agreed to have her in class. Norman Rockwell painted her walk to school in 1964.

Which state's ban on interracial marriage did Richard and Mildred Loving overturn at the Supreme Court in 1967?

Virginia police had raided the couple's home before dawn in 1958, and a judge suspended their jail term only if they left the state for 25 years. The ruling in their favor was unanimous.

From which Alabama city did about 600 voting rights marchers set out on Bloody Sunday in March 1965?

Selma's marchers were attacked by state troopers with batons and tear gas as they left for the state capital, 54 miles away. The outcry helped pass the Voting Rights Act that year.

At which store chain's lunch counter in Greensboro did four Black students begin a sit-in in February 1960?

Woolworth's ended segregation in its Southern stores after protests that ran from February to July. The Greensboro branch is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

In which state capital did soldiers of the 101st Airborne escort nine Black students into Central High School in 1957?

Little Rock's nine students had first been kept out by the Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus. President Eisenhower sent in the army and took the state's National Guard out of the governor's control.

Which Underground Railroad guide, born into slavery in Maryland, led a Civil War raid that freed over 700 people?

Harriet Tubman had already made some 13 trips back to the South, guiding about 70 people to freedom. She was known as Moses, and she said she never lost a passenger.

Which abolitionist escaped slavery in Baltimore disguised as a sailor and later published the North Star newspaper?

Frederick Douglass traveled north carrying papers borrowed from a free Black seaman. His first autobiography, published seven years later, became a bestseller.

Which US holiday marks the day in 1865 when a Union general in Galveston ordered slavery ended in Texas?

Juneteenth blends the words June and nineteenth, the date of the general's order. Congress made it a federal holiday in 2021.

Which civil rights organization, formed in 1909, publishes The Crisis, a magazine first edited by W. E. B. Du Bois?

The NAACP is the oldest and largest civil rights group in the United States. Du Bois edited its magazine for the first 24 years.

Which New York town hosted the first women's rights convention, planned by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and local Quakers?

Seneca Falls drew about 300 people in 1848. One hundred of them, 68 women and 32 men, signed the meeting's Declaration of Sentiments.

Which suffragist was arrested in Rochester for voting in the 1872 presidential election and fined $100?

Susan B. Anthony told the judge she would never pay. He declined to jail her for it, a move that stopped her from taking the case to the Supreme Court.

Which Manchester-born campaigner founded the militant Women's Social and Political Union in 1903?

Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters were sent to prison again and again for the union's protests. Jailed suffragettes staged hunger strikes, and the authorities force-fed many of them.

Which English horse race did suffragette Emily Davison disrupt in 1913 by walking in front of King George V's horse?

The Epsom Derby collision killed her: Davison died four days later of a fractured skull. She had hidden overnight in the Palace of Westminster three times, once on the night of the 1911 census.

Which state became the 36th and final one needed to ratify the amendment giving American women the vote in 1920?

Tennessee's vote turned on Harry Burn, the youngest member of its legislature. He switched sides with a letter from his mother in his coat pocket, urging him to back the amendment.

Which 1972 US law against sex discrimination in federally funded schools is best known for its effect on college sports?

Title IX never mentions sports: its text bars sex discrimination in any education program that takes federal money. It was later renamed in honor of Representative Patsy Mink.

For which broadcaster did 11-year-old Malala Yousafzai write an anonymous blog about life under the Taliban in Swat?

The BBC ran her diary on its Urdu service under the pseudonym Gul Makai. In 2012 a Taliban gunman shot her on a bus, and at 17 she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Which activist began the Me Too movement in 2006, more than a decade before the phrase became a viral hashtag?

Tarana Burke started it as a youth program to tackle sexual violence in her community. Actor Alyssa Milano's 2017 tweet turned the two words into a worldwide hashtag.

In which Nordic country did about 90 percent of women refuse to work, cook or mind children for a day in 1975?

Iceland's organizers called it a day off, because women could be fired for striking but not for taking leave. Five years later the country chose the world's first democratically elected woman president.

Which African country elected the world's first national parliament with a female majority in 2008?

Rwanda sets aside 24 of the 80 seats in its Chamber of Deputies for women. In 2008 women also won enough of the openly contested seats to pass the halfway mark.

Which Castro Street camera store owner became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California?

Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He had served for less than a year when a former supervisor shot him and Mayor George Moscone dead.

What did artist Gilbert Baker and fellow activists create for San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day parade in June 1978?

The rainbow flag had eight colors at its debut. The six-stripe version that became standard from 1979 dropped two of them.

Which country became the first in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, with four weddings on 1 April 2001?

The Netherlands held its first four weddings on the day the law took effect. Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, had become a registrar specially to officiate.

Which gay civil rights strategist was the principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom?

Bayard Rustin usually advised other leaders from behind the scenes because of hostility to his sexuality. Barack Obama awarded him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

Which sister of a US president grew a summer camp at her Maryland farm into the Special Olympics?

Eunice Kennedy Shriver opened the camp in 1962, and the first games followed in Chicago in 1968 with about 1,000 athletes. Her sister Rosemary was born with intellectual disabilities.

In March 1990, dozens of disabled activists left their wheelchairs and crutches to crawl up the steps of which building?

The US Capitol climb was staged to press Congress into passing the Americans with Disabilities Act. One of the climbers, Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, was eight years old.

Which labor leader co-founded a farm workers' union with Dolores Huerta in 1962 and led a five-year grape strike?

Cesar Chavez's union joined a walkout that Filipino farmworkers had begun a week earlier. The two groups later merged to form the United Farm Workers.

Which witness to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire became the first woman to serve in a US presidential cabinet?

Frances Perkins ran the Department of Labor from 1933 to 1945, longer than anyone else has, and helped to design Social Security.

Which photographer's images of working children for the National Child Labor Committee helped change US law?

Lewis Hine quit teaching in 1908 to take the job. He was a sociologist who had earlier led his classes to Ellis Island to photograph arriving immigrants.

Which shipyard electrician led Poland's Solidarity trade union and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983?

Lech Wałęsa sent his wife to collect the prize, fearing the authorities would not let him back into the country. Seven years later he was elected its president.

Which legal scholar coined the term intersectionality in a 1989 essay about discrimination against Black women?

Kimberlé Crenshaw later founded a center devoted to the idea at Columbia Law School. The concept was older than her word for it.

Which philosopher's 1971 book A Theory of Justice imagines choosing society's rules behind a veil of ignorance?

John Rawls offered the book as an alternative to utilitarianism. He taught philosophy at Harvard from 1962 until he reached the mandatory retirement age in 1991.

What name is given to the practice, traced to 1930s federal maps, of denying loans in mostly Black neighborhoods?

Redlining was named in the 1960s by sociologist John McKnight, who was describing Chicago banks that classed whole districts as hazardous. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed to combat it.

Which former First Lady chaired the UN commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948?

Eleanor Roosevelt was a US delegate to the United Nations from 1945 to 1952. President Truman called her the First Lady of the World in tribute to her human rights work.

Which Anglican archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner chaired South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Desmond Tutu was chosen for the job by Nelson Mandela after the 1994 election. He had been the first Black African to serve as Archbishop of Cape Town.

Which jurist, born into a Dalit family treated as untouchable, chaired the committee that drafted India's constitution?

B. R. Ambedkar was also independent India's first law minister. In 1956 he converted to Buddhism, and large numbers of Dalits followed him.

Which island in San Francisco Bay did Native American activists occupy for 19 months from November 1969?

Alcatraz was then classed as abandoned surplus federal land. The occupiers, who called themselves Indians of All Tribes, cited an 1868 treaty under which such land should go back to Native peoples.

Which Chicago settlement did Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr open in 1889 to serve newly arrived immigrants?

Hull House became the model for a movement that grew to about 500 settlements across the country by 1920. Addams went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

At which 1968 Olympics did US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise black-gloved fists on the medal podium?

Mexico City's protest got both men suspended from the US team and banned from the Olympic Village. Peter Norman, the Australian silver medalist beside them, wore a human rights badge too.

Which human rights group, founded in London in 1961, has a logo of a candle wrapped in barbed wire?

Amnesty International began with a newspaper appeal by lawyer Peter Benenson, who said a report of two Portuguese students jailed over a toast to liberty had spurred him. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.