All knowledge is contained...

[kiya]

If anyone is up for helping me brainstorm, I am seeking:

Suggestions for names/images of people who are simultaneously leaders of a movement/action involving the long arc curving towards justice and synecdoche for that movement/action in popular discourse.

So:

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Malcolm X
Bree Newsome

as for examples.

Susan B. Anthony is probably the first wave icon most recognisable. Hrm. I know there were notable black feminists of her time but I cannot bring names to mind; must fix.

Gandhi. (My examples are rather US-centric and while that isn't a problem for the project per se I don't want to be explicitly US-centric.) Nelson Mandela.

I need enough visually 'I recognise this person as an Icon' people to make the ones who aren't visually recognisable clearly 'okay, even though I don't know who that is, they must be, also, an Icon'. (I don't expect most people would recognise Bree Newsome on the street, f'ex, but I suspect the silhouette of her up a flagpole would be appropriately Iconic.)

Miss Major, I think. Harvey Milk?

Crazy Horse. Some of the young people behind the DAPL protests.

Things.


Also seeking:

Iconic artists/musicians/etc. whose work provided rallying points for similar matters. Johnny Cash. Pete Seeger. Phil Ochs. Possibly Freddie Mercury, given Queen's particular cultural role and his death. Um. Things.

Comments

[jenett]

Helen Keller. (as noted elsewhere)

[eeeeka]

Bob Dylan?
Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass?

[redbird]

Definitely Sojourner Truth (this icon is left over from the 2008 campaign).

I suspect the faces of the nineteenth and early twentieth century people are less likely to be familiar than those of more recent activists. When I think of what Gandhi looked like, I think of the various statues of him that I've seen, and that doesn't bring a face to mind.

Eugene Debs comes to my mind as a good example, but depending on your purposes, it might be a disadvantage that Debs spent time in prison for opposing U.S. involvement in World War I.

Muhammad Ali?

[laurion]

Cesar Chavez
Frederick Douglass
Harriet Tubman?
Sitting Bull
The Dalai Lama?

[whispercricket]

Brainstorm without cross checking what has already been listed as requested. :)
(Also, I haven't cross checked as much of the "This person was a revolutionary for women but really racist" or vice versa types of things - not sure if that matter or not)

Statue of Liberty

Susan B Anthony
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Rosa Parks
Louis Farrakhan
Abraham Lincoln
Medgar Evers
WEB Du Bois
Frederick Douglass
John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy
Obama
Thurgood Marshall
Jackie Robinson
Nelson Mandela
Betty Friedan
Gloria Steinem
Rigoberta Menchu
Maya Angelou
Coretta Scott King
Emma Goldman
Malala Yousafzai

Emiliano Zapata
Eugene V Debs

Soujourner Truth
Harriet Tubman

Ghandi

Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens "we'll never be free until we end slavery"

Looking to our south:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_the_Plaza_de_Mayo
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Official_Story

[whispercricket]

Artsy side:
Sesame Street
Free To Be You and Me (Marlo Thomas)
Tracy Chapman
Lady Gaga
Bob Marley
Harry Belafonte
Bob Dylan
John Lennon
Cat Stevens
U2 / Bono - also http://www.biography.com/news/politically-active-musicians