Kathleen Neal Cleaver
In the '60s, Kathleen Neal Cleaver was a prominent member of the Black Panther Party, in which she created the position of communications secretary. In 1998, she said, "I think it is important to place the women who fought oppression as Black Panthers within the longer tradition of freedom fighters like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, who took on an entirely oppressive world and insisted that their race, their gender, and their humanity be respected all at the same time. Not singled out, each one separate, but all at the same time. You cannot segregate out one aspect of our reality and expect to get a clear picture of what this struggle is about." She began teaching at Emory University School of Law in 1992.
Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke is a leading indigenous voice on the fight against climate change. Her long career includes founding organizations like the Indigenous Women's Network and the White Earth Land Recovery Project, and cofounding Honor the Earth with the Indigo Girls. She also participated in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, in which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe fought against the construction of an oil pipeline that threatened the area's drinking water and interfered with sacred land. LaDuke has remained vocal on the need to listen to indigenous perspectives—especially those of indigenous women—when it comes to fighting climate change. "Indigenous women understand that our struggle for autonomy is related to the total need for structural change in this society," she wrote in 1994. "We realize that indigenous people in industrial society have always been and will always be in a relationship of war, because industrial society has declared war on indigenous peoples, on land based peoples."
Naomi Klein
Writer Naomi Klein has spent the past few decades analyzing and criticizing the often-devastating effects of globalization, capitalism, and climate change. For her work, Klein has been the recipient of multiple awards and accolades, including the Izzy Award, named after journalist I. F. Stone, and awarded for outstanding achievement in independent media and journalism, as well as the Sydney Peace Prize. She currently serves as the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.
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