Truth
Teller #16 Shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman
elected to the U. S. House of Representatives. In Congress, where she
served 7 terms, she was an advocate for children, minorities and women.
She became the first African American and first woman to seek the
presidential nomination of one of the two major U.S. Parties when she
ran against George McGovern in 1972. During that campaign she refused
to be intimidated by several assassination attempts, but lost
to McGovern at the convention. After retiring from Congress she helped
found the National Political Congress of Black Women and taught at Mount
Holyoke College.
Truth
Teller #15, Bayard Rustin. A close advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.,Rustin was instrumental in organizing The 1963 March on Washington.
Active during the civil rights era and after, he was forced to lower his
profile after being outed as a gay man. However, once outed, Rustin was
completely open about his sexuality. Although forced to take a less visible role due to his sexual orientation, he continued to work for the
rights of minorities, workers and gays.
Truth
Teller # 14, Primo Levi ~ 174517 was the number tattooed on Primo
Levi’s forearm as part of the Nazi effort to break him, and millions of
others down to subhuman. Through luck, chemistry and sheer will he
survived Auschwitz, and returned to his home in Turin, Italy. A chemist
by training and a writer by necessity, he wrote of life in the camps
with remarkable restraint, letting the horrors of the mass murder
carried out by the Nazis speak for themselves, and trusting the reader
to hear.
Truth
Teller #13 Frederick Douglass. Douglass escaped slavery to become one
of its greatest foes. An eloquent speaker and writer, he used his gifts
to argue against the evil of the “peculiar institution“ and became the
leading advocate for the abolition of slavery in America.
