Unsung Heroes DIRECTORY
Dr. Isabella Aiona Abbott – Expert in marine algae who broke barriers during her career as a scientist, author, and university professor.
Amos Bronson Alcott – American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer who pioneered new ways of interacting with young students that avoided traditional punishment.
Mary Anning – faced prejudice as a woman in the scientific community but persevered to revolutionize paleontology with her discoveries.
Virginia Apgar – American obstetrical anesthesiologist, best known as the inventor of the Apgar score, a way to quickly assess the health of a newborn child immediately after birth.
Katherine Buckner Avery – Nurse who broke social boundaries to improve rural health care in Louisiana.
Emile Berliner – Inventor who developed innovations for recording and reproducing audio with the gramophone and disc records.
Mary Bickerdyke – Civil War nurse who revolutionized wartime medical care and built almost 300 field hospitals with the help of U.S. Sanitary Commission agents.
Emily Newell Blair – American writer, suffragist and feminist in Carthage, Missouri, who co-founded the League of Women Voters and eventually became the national vice chairman of the Democratic Party.
Dr. Norman Borlaug – Plant scientist who increased global food production by developing ultra-resilient grains.
James Braidwood – a Scottish firefighter and pioneer in the field of modern firefighting, known for establishing the first municipal fire service and implementing innovative techniques to combat fires in the 19th century.
Dorothy Buell – An American educator and nature preservationist who became the founder and first president of the Save the Dunes Council, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving the Dunelands along Lake Michigan.
Dr. Eugene Wilson Caldwell – Electrical engineer, physician and inventor credited with major developments in the science of diagnostic radiology.
Elizabeth Catlett – An African- and Mexican-American artist known for depicting the Black experience in 20th century America and for her social justice activism in Mexico.
Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain – American college professor best known for his heroic participation in the Battle of Gettysburg.
Dr. Eugenie Clark – Ichthyologist whose research changed the way we view sharks today.
Jerrie Cobb – American female aviator and member of the Mercury 13 group of women selected to undergo physiological screening tests at the same time as the original Mercury Seven astronauts, as part of a private, non-NASA program.
Claudette Colvin – Civil Rights and anti-segregation activist who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery in 1955.
Martin Couney – an immigrant who saved thousands of premature babies by caring for them in incubators displayed in sideshow exhibits. His success over time influenced hospitals to incorporate incubators.
Will Counts – American photojournalist most renowned for drawing the nation's attention to the desegregation crisis that was happening in 1957 at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Emma Darling Cushman – American nurse who saved the lives of thousands of Armenian children during the Armenian genocide.
Jonathan Daniels – Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist who was assassinated in 1965.
Annie Bell Robinson Devine – Civil rights activist who made instrumental contributions to what would eventually become the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Dion Diamond – an activist who championed equal rights for African Americans through nonviolent tactics.
Dr. Charles Drew – a surgeon and medical researcher who pioneered methods for the long-term storage of blood plasma. Often referred to as the 'father of the blood bank,' Dr. Drew is best known for organizing America's first large-scale blood bank and his collaboration with the American Red Cross.
Dr. Gunnar Dybwad – Important supporter of the self-advocacy movement for education rights of the mentally handicapped.
Dr. Sylvia Earle – American marine biologist, explorer, oceanographer, lecturer and author. Sylvia was named the first female chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Recognized as Time Magazine's first Hero for the Planet in 1998.
Jane Elliott – an American educator and social activist who created and promoted the “Blue eyes-Brown eyes” experiment in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. to teach her students about discrimination and racism that became a transformative teaching tool.
Mitsuye Endo – Woman who challenged Japanese-American internment during WWII until it was ultimately ended by the United States Supreme Court in 1945.
Olaudah Equiano – Freed slave active in the abolitionist movement in England and influential in the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807.
Lt. James Reese Europe – a champion for fellow Black musicians as a composer, conductor, and organizer who created the Clef Club, the first labor union and contracting agency for black entertainers.
Barbara Fassbinder – After contracting HIV on the job, she became a national spokesperson for universal healthcare precautions.
Caroline Ferriday – a woman who uncovered horrors at a WWII concentration camp and liberated the women within from traumatizing and deadly medical experiments.
Autherine Lucy Foster – African-American activist whose expulsion from the University of Alabama led her to fight for equal eligibility for college admissions in Alabama and beyond.
Terry Fox – a Canadian athlete and humanitarian who embarked on his iconic 1980 Marathon of Hope to run across Canada on a prosthetic leg, raising millions for cancer research and leaving an enduring legacy of resilience and hope worldwide.
Therese Frare – Photojournalist credited with capturing the image that “changed the face of AIDS” that ran on a 1990 cover of LIFE magazine.
Frederick III, Elector of Saxony – One of the first notably ardent supporters of Martin Luther, whom he hid in the aftermath of the Diet of Worms, giving Luther time to translate the Bible into German, which would eventually lead to the breakup of Catholic hegemony in Europe.
Varian Fry – Varian Fry was an American journalist and activist who rescued thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
Sarah Bradlee Fulton – One of the first female spies for George Washington during the Revolutionary War, she played a critical role in the fight for freedom.
Cpl. Guy Gabaldon – a member of the US Marine Corps during WWII. Rather than killing enemy soldiers, he spoke to them in Japanese, thus saving the lives of both American and Japanese soldiers.
Dr. Kadambini Ganguly – The first Indian-educated woman to become a doctor, Kadambini Ganguly was also a social activist and one of India’s first female college graduates.
Mother Matylda Getter – Polish Catholic nun and member of the Żegota resistance organization, which saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII.
Betty Goudsmit-Oudkerk – a Dutch teenager who worked tirelessly to provide medical care and support to Jewish children in hiding during the Holocaust.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham – 19th-century teacher and civil rights figure, Graham insisted on her right to ride on an available New York City streetcar at a time when all such companies were private and most operated segregated cars.
Dr. Christine Grant – Trailblazer for equity in women's sports at the collegiate level and beyond and was integral in legislation ranging from civil rights to Title IX.
Col. Gail Halvorsen – An accomplished United States military pilot known as the Berlin Candy Bomber during WWII because he organized operations that dropped candy from miniature parachutes to German children during the Berlin Airlift from 1948 to 1949.
Kim Hak-Sun – a courageous South Korean survivor and advocate who broke the silence surrounding the issue of "comfort women," speaking out about the sexual enslavement of Korean women by the Japanese military during World War II.
Lorraine Hansberry – author of "A Raisin in the Sun," the first play on Broadway to be written by a Black woman.
Alice Seeley Harris – An English missionary and an early documentary photographer whose work helped to expose the human rights abuses in the Congo.
Cordelia Harvey – a compassionate First Lady of Wisconsin during the American Civil War, who dedicated herself to improving healthcare for wounded soldiers and establishing hospitals and relief organizations.
Bela Ya’ari Hazan – Courier for the Jewish resistance in Poland during World War II.
Douglas Hegdahl – A United States Navy sailor who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. After his early release from North Vietnam, upon returning to the United States, he was able to provide the names and personal information of other POWs as well as reveal the conditions in the prison camp.
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga – Woman who discovered the government report that re-opened three Supreme Court cases and led to Congress approving reparations for Japanese-Americans relocated to internment camps during WWII.
Judy Heumann – Activist and leader in the disability rights movement.
Hiawatha – Pre-colonial Mohawk chief of the Onandaga, attributed with uniting the five northern Iroquois tribes into the Iroquois confederacy.
Andrew Jackson Higgins – American shipbuilder created the WWII “Higgins boat” that gave Allied forces a wartime advantage.
Maurice Hilleman – saved millions of lives with his development of more than 40 vaccines.
Lewis Hine – Accomplished American photographer and child labor activist.
Ann Hopkins – a successful, working woman whose lawsuit against her former employer reached the US Supreme Court. The Court's decision led to a win for all those who experience sex discrimination in the workplace.
Oscar Howe – a modernist painter and arts educator who challenged art institutions’ preconceptions about Native American artwork.
Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe – advocated for equal education for blind and disabled students in the early 19th century.
Lt. Colonel Tran Ngoc Hue – Former lieutenant colonel with the 1st Infantry Division Army of the Republic of Vietnam who received the Silver Star, the American military’s highest award for heroism on the battlefield for aiding American soldiers in the Vietnam War.
Reverend Dr. T.J. Jemison – a man of compassion and faith, took steps to fight for justice and ended up helping Martin Luther King, Jr. along the way.
Jigonhsasee – An influential figure in the establishment of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Gareth Jones – Welsh journalist who, despite Western criticism, exposed the Holodomor, Stalin’s state-induced famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.
Andrée de Jongh – Instrumental in establishing the Comet Line to assist Allied forces and airmen escape from Nazi-occupied Belgium.
Dr. Ernest Everett Just – African-American pioneer in biology, academic and science writer. Credited with the recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms.
Florence Kelley – Influential child labor rights activist in the late 1800s who was the first Executive Secretary of the National Consumers League.
Dr. Frances Kelsey – Pharmacologist and physician who, as a reviewer for the FDA, refused to authorize a birth defect-inducing drug.
ENS Jane Kendeigh – First U.S. Navy flight nurse to appear on an active battlefield in the Pacific.
Dr. Pearl Kendrick – Developed the first effective Whooping Cough vaccine and advocated for safe vaccine standards in Latin America and the Soviet Union.
Noor Inayat Khan – was a wartime British secret agent of Indian descent, the first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France by the S.O.E.
Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi – Considered the father of algebra and grandfather of computer science and oversaw the translation of Greek and Indian mathematical and astronomical works, preserving them through the European dark ages.
Horace King – Born a slave in 1807 in South Carolina, King is considered the most respected bridge builder of the 19th century Deep South.
Dr. Sofia Kovalevskaya – The first major Russian female mathematician and one of the first women to work as an editor for a scientific journal.
Agnes Láckovič – As a teen, she became a spy for the Allies during WWII, ultimately saving hundreds of lives from Nazi persecution.
Hedy Lamarr – An Austrian-born American film actress and inventor who helped invent radio technology to combat Nazis in WWII.
Dorothea Lange – Depression-era American documentary photographer and photojournalist.
Ralph Lazo – Only known non-spouse, a non-Japanese American teen who voluntarily relocated to a World War II Japanese internment camp, Manzanar, to protest the war practice.
Dr. Eugene Lazowski – Doctor who saved over 8,000 Polish Jews during WWII by injecting them with a vaccine that mimicked typhus so that the Nazis quarantined them, rather than deporting them to concentration camps.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt – American astronomer who discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars. Though she received little recognition in her lifetime, it was her discovery that first allowed astronomers to measure the distance between the Earth and faraway galaxies.
Corky Lee – A Chinese-American activist and photojournalist whose photographs of racially-motivated violence led to protests across the country.
Dr. Justus von Liebig – German chemist who made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry, and was considered the founder of organic chemistry.
John Lomax – American teacher, pioneering musicologist, and folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music.
Curt Lowens – Polish-born Holocaust survivor who helped save over 100 Jewish children as a member of the Dutch resistance.
Katherine Lum – Initiated Lum v. Rice, which challenged Chinese exclusion from public schools and sparked similar court cases nationwide.
Clara Luper – Civil rights activist and teacher in Oklahoma City and pioneer of integration in the 1950s.
Julius Madritsch – During World War II, while imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, he utilized his tailoring skills to create clothing for fellow prisoners. After the war, Madritsch established a successful textile business, and his experiences and resilience serve as a testament to human strength and survival in the face of unimaginable adversity.
Miriam Makeba – South African singer, songwriter, actress, United Nations goodwill ambassador, and civil rights activist.
William Matthews – A free African American man who challenged racism and helped liberate slaves through the Underground Railroad.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes – As Portugal's consul in France, Mendes defied orders and issued thousands of visas for those fleeing Nazi persecution during WWII.
Sylvia Mendez – Civil rights activist whose landmark 1946 desegregation case paved the way for Brown vs. Board of Education.
Meva Mikusz – Teenage Polish girl who rescued and raised the two-year-old girl from the Czortkow Ghetto in 1942 during WWII.
Inez Milholland – Important figure in the women’s suffrage movement, who led a march of 8,000 suffragettes in 1913 and continued fighting for the right to vote until her untimely death in 1916.
Lilla Day Monroe – 19th-century journalist and suffragette who fought for voting rights in Kansas.
William Lewis Moore – Postal worker and Congress of Racial Equality member who staged lone protests against racial segregation.
Irene Morgan – a civil rights activist who played a pivotal role in the fight against segregation in the United States, famously challenging racial segregation on interstate buses in the landmark Supreme Court case, Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia.
Pauli Murray – An American civil rights activist who made a large impact on the women's rights movement as a lawyer, Episcopal priest and author.
Rosli Naf – Swiss Red Cross nurse, notable for taking great risks to save the lives of 90 Jewish children from Nazi-controlled France during WWII.
Eileen Nearne – A spy who helped transmit messages and built an intelligence network to fight back against Nazi Germany.
Robert Nesbitt – Head of the pulpit committee of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was reverend minister from 1960 until his assassination.
Cpl. Chester Nez – Navajo Code Talker in World War II who helped develop an encrypted communication system for the US military.
Jan Opletal – Activist who catalyzed widespread student activism and served as a model for Nazi defiance in the 1930s.
Jackie Ormes – the first Black female cartoonist who made comics about real-life issues Black people faced.
Emmeline Pankhurst – British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement who helped women win the right to vote.
Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin – astronomer and astrophysicist who discovered that stars are made mainly of hydrogen and helium.
Carla Olman Peperzak – Speaker and Holocaust Survivor who was a member of the Dutch resistance during World War II.
Frances Perkins – Workers rights advocate and Secretary of Labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt, making important decisions on Social Security, strikes, and labor.
Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte – First Indigenous American woman to receive a medical degree, which she used to serve and advocate for the health and humane treatment of her communities.
Witold Pilecki – a Polish resistance fighter who voluntarily infiltrated Auschwitz concentration camp to gather intelligence and organize resistance during World War II.
Eliza Potter – South Carolina woman who rebelled against the Confederacy by caring for wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War.
Kendall Reinhardt – A student in 1957 at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, who befriended and stood up for members of the Little Rock Nine, the group of black students who attempted to attend classes to desegregate the school, but were at first barred from entering.
Bernice Sandler – American women's rights activist known for being instrumental in the creation of Title IX.
Abdol Hossein Sardari – Iranian diplomat credited with saving thousands of Jews in Europe. Referred to as the "Schindler of Iran".
Irena Sendler – A Polish social worker during WWII who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto between 1942 and 1943. Arranging for safe hiding places and families to adopt them.
Elizabeth Horton Sheff – Civil rights activist who led a lawsuit to rectify educational inequities between urban/suburban schools.
Adam Shoemaker – Minister and teacher of Abraham Lincoln credited with influencing the future president’s anti-slavery stance.
Dr. Gene Shoemaker – An esteemed scientist and astronomer who founded astrogeology, Gene Shoemaker is the only person to date whose ashes have been buried on the moon.
John Snow – Public health advocate from the 19th century who played a major role in containing the 1854 Cholera outbreak in London.
Walter Sommers – World War II veteran who helped desegregate lunch counters at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Lutie Stearns – an influential librarian and pioneer of bookmobile services in the United States, bringing books and literacy to rural communities and underserved populations during the early 20th century.
Recha Sternbuch – a prominent Jewish activist and leader during the Holocaust. She played a vital role in rescuing Jewish refugees and organizing relief efforts, particularly in Switzerland and Palestine.
Anna Smith Strong – Only female member of George Washington's Culper Spy Ring during the American Revolution.
Roy Stryker – during the Great Depression he was the head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Agency. He initiated a program that dispatched photographers to rural America, documenting people's way of life.
Dr. Helen Brooke Taussig – American doctor who is the founder of pediatric cardiology.
Marie Tharp – American geologist and oceanographic cartographer who discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, leading to the acceptance of theories of plate tectonics and continental drift.
Vivien Thomas – an American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s
Jacob Valentine II – A nature activist who worked to save the Sandhill Crane population and establish Mississippi Sandhill Crane Refuge.
Dr. Karl Ernst von Baer – Estonian scientist who contributed greatly to the establishment of the field of embryology, including Baer's laws of embryology, upon which Charles Darwin based much of his research on evolution.
Raoul Wallenberg – Swedish businessman, architect, and humanitarian activist who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II.
Sheyann Webb – Known as the “smallest freedom fighter,” when she was 8 years old during the civil rights movement she joined Martin Luther King Jr. in the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama known as Bloody Sunday.
Pavel Weiner – A young boy incarcerated at the Terezin concentration camp who confronted adversity through secret newspapers during WWII.
Carl Wilkens – American missionary who chose to stay during the Rwandan Genocide, saving hundreds of lives.
Elizabeth "Tex" Williams – American photographer and first female graduate of the Photographic Division School at Fort Monmouth, NJ as a member of Women’s Army Corp in 1944, who became an official army photographer during WWII.
Frances Elizabeth Williams – Frances Williams and the Women's Emergency Committee worked to change community attitudes toward school desegregation following the 1957 Little Rock school crisis.
Robert R. Williams – An influential American chemist who first synthesized thiamin (vitamin B) and advocated for fortified foods to be distributed in the United States and across the globe to prevent malnutrition.
Maurice Willows – American doctor and member of the Red Cross who played a critical role in bringing medical aid to victims of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921.
L. Alex Wilson – A journalist during the civil rights movement whose life was put at risk when he was beaten by police trying to cover the desegregation of Central High School by the Little Rock Nine in Arkansas in 1957.
Sir Nicholas Winton – British humanitarian who arranged the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of WWII, finding homes for the children and facilitating their safe passage to Britain.
Minoru Yasui – Japanese orchardist who started the first Supreme Court case testing the constitutionality of Japanese internment.
