What do human rights activists do

Famous person who fought for human rights
Famous human rights activists today
List of human rights activists

•

Twenty-seven million people live in slavery—more than twice the number during the peak of the slave trade. And more than a billion adults are unable to read. Given the magnitude of human rights violations—and those listed in the Violations of Human Rights section of this website are only a glimpse of the full picture—it is not surprising that 90 percent of people are unable to name more than three of their thirty rights.

Who, then, with so many unaware of their most basic rights, will make sure that human rights are promoted, protected and become a reality?

To answer that question, we can draw inspiration from those who made a difference and helped create the human rights we have today. These humanitarians stood up for human rights because they recognized that peace and progress can never be achieved without them. Each, in a significant way, changed the world.

Martin Luther King, Jr., when championing the rights of people of color in the United States in the 1960s, declared, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The great advocate of peaceful resistance to op

•

On December 1,1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of going to the back of the bus, which was designated for African Americans, she sat in the front. When the bus started to fill up with white passengers, the bus driver asked Parks to move. She refused. Her resistance set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4th, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. As a child, she went to an industrial school for girls and later enrolled at Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes (present-day Alabama State University). Unfortunately, Parks was forced to withdraw after her grandmother became ill. Growing up in the segregated South, Parks was frequently confronted with racial discrimination and violence. She became active in the Civil Rights Movement at a young age.

Parks married a local barber by the name of Raymond Parks when she was 19. He was actively fighting to end racial injustice. Together the couple worked with many social justice organizations. Eventually, Rosa was elected secre

•

Rosa Parks

American civil rights activist (1913–2005)

For other uses, see Rosa Parks (disambiguation).

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement, best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".

Parks became an NAACP activist in 1943, participating in several high-profile civil rights campaigns. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of four seats in the "colored" section in favor of a white female passenger who had complained to the driver, once the "white" section was filled.^[2] Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation,^[3] but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, an