#InContext: W.E.B. Du Bois

#InContext: W.E.B. Du Bois

By: MOLLY WICKER Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, but his life and legacy extended far beyond the confines of the Deep South. As a child, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, better known as W.E.B. Du...
#InContext: Mary Wollstonecraft

#InContext: Mary Wollstonecraft

By: TAKIM WILLIAMS Mary Wollstonecraft provocatively compared the women of 18th Century England to slaves in her groundbreaking feminist classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They were not literally slaves, but in a time when women were denied equal access to...
#InContext: Rosa Parks

#InContext: Rosa Parks

By: SARAH CRAMER Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. At a young age, Parks’ parents separated. She and her mother moved in with her mother’s parents, who were former slaves. From a young age, she witnessed her family serve as leading...
#InContext: Dalai Lama

#InContext: Dalai Lama

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the spiritual leader of Tibet and has spent his lifetime advocating for the freedom of Tibet. His Holiness was born on July 6, 1935, to a farming family in the village of Taktser in northeastern Tibet. At birth, he...
#InContext: Jessie E. Sampter

#InContext: Jessie E. Sampter

Jessie Ethel Sampter was born on March 22, 1883, in New York City to Rudolph and Virginia (Kohlberg) Sampter, prosperous second-generation German Jews. She and her sister Elvie were raised in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in Harlem, which housed three generations of an...