The Most Famous

SOCIAL ACTIVISTS from United States

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This page contains a list of the greatest American Social Activists. The pantheon dataset contains 840 Social Activists, 122 of which were born in United States. This makes United States the birth place of the most number of Social Activists.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary American Social Activists of all time. This list of famous American Social Activists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of American Social Activists.

Photo of Malcolm X

1. Malcolm X (1925 - 1965)

With an HPI of 83.10, Malcolm X is the most famous American Social Activist.  His biography has been translated into 96 different languages on wikipedia.

Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African American revolutionary, Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement until his assassination in 1965. A spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI) until 1964, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the African American community. A controversial figure accused of preaching violence, Malcolm X is also a widely celebrated figure within African American and Muslim communities for his pursuit of racial justice. Malcolm spent his adolescence living in a series of foster homes or with relatives after his father's death and his mother's hospitalization. He committed various crimes, being sentenced to 8 to 10 years in prison in 1946 for larceny and burglary. In prison, he joined the Nation of Islam, adopting the name Malcolm X to symbolize his unknown African ancestral surname while discarding "the white slavemaster name of 'Little'", and after his parole in 1952, he quickly became one of the organization's most influential leaders. He was the public face of the organization for 12 years, advocating Black empowerment and separation of Black and White Americans, and criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. and the mainstream civil rights movement for its emphasis on non-violence and racial integration. Malcolm X also expressed pride in some of the Nation's social welfare achievements, such as its free drug rehabilitation program. From the 1950s onward, Malcolm X was subjected to surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the 1960s, Malcolm X began to grow disillusioned with the Nation of Islam, as well as with its leader, Elijah Muhammad. He subsequently embraced Sunni Islam and the civil rights movement after completing the Hajj to Mecca and became known as "el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz", which roughly translates to "The Pilgrim Malcolm the Patriarch". After a brief period of travel across Africa, he publicly renounced the Nation of Islam and founded the Islamic Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI) and the Pan-African Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Throughout 1964, his conflict with the Nation of Islam intensified, and he was repeatedly sent death threats. On February 21, 1965, he was assassinated in New York City. Three Nation members were charged with the murder and given indeterminate life sentences. In 2021, two of the convictions were vacated. Speculation about the assassination and whether it was conceived or aided by leading or additional members of the Nation, or with law enforcement agencies, has persisted for decades. He was posthumously honored with Malcolm X Day, on which he is commemorated in various cities across the United States. Hundreds of streets and schools in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, while the Audubon Ballroom, the site of his assassination, was partly redeveloped in 2005 to accommodate the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. A posthumous autobiography, on which he collaborated with Alex Haley, was published in 1965.

Photo of Eleanor Roosevelt

2. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962)

With an HPI of 82.40, Eleanor Roosevelt is the 2nd most famous American Social Activist.  Her biography has been translated into 93 different languages.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt ( EL-in-or ROH-zə-velt; October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms as president, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States. Through her travels, public engagement, and advocacy, she largely redefined the role of first lady. Roosevelt then served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and took a leading role in designing the text and gaining international support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948, she was given a standing ovation by the assembly upon their adoption of the declaration. President Harry S. Truman later called her the "First Lady of the World" in tribute to her human rights achievements. Roosevelt was a member of the prominent and wealthy American Roosevelt and Livingston families and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. She had an unhappy childhood, having suffered the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers at a young age. At 15, she attended Allenswood Boarding Academy in London and was deeply influenced by its founder and director Marie Souvestre. Returning to the U.S., she married her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1905. Between 1906 and 1916 she gave birth to six children, one of whom died in infancy. The Roosevelts' marriage became complicated after Eleanor discovered her husband's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, in 1918. Due to mediation by her mother-in-law, Sara, who was a strong financial supporter of the family, the liaison was ended officially. After that, both partners started to keep independent agendas, and Eleanor joined the Women's Trade Union League and became active in the New York state Democratic Party. Roosevelt helped persuade her husband to stay in politics after he was stricken with a paralytic illness in 1921, which cost him the normal use of his legs, and she began giving speeches and appearing at campaign events in his place. Following Franklin's election as governor of New York in 1928, and throughout the remainder of Franklin's public career in government, Roosevelt regularly made public appearances on his behalf; and as first lady, while her husband served as president, she significantly reshaped and redefined the role. Roosevelt was, in her time, one of the world's most widely admired and powerful women. Nevertheless, in her early years in the White House she was a controversial first lady for her outspokenness, particularly with respect to her promotion of civil rights for African Americans. She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences, write a daily newspaper column, write a monthly magazine column, host a weekly radio show, and speak at a national party convention. On a few occasions, she publicly disagreed with her husband's policies. She launched an experimental community at Arthurdale, West Virginia, for the families of unemployed miners, later widely regarded as a failure. She advocated for expanded roles for women in the workplace, the civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans, and the rights of World War II refugees. Following her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt remained active in politics for the remaining 17 years of her life. She pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations and became its first delegate to the committee on Human Rights. She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, she chaired the John F. Kennedy administration's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. By the time of her death, Roosevelt was regarded as "one of the most esteemed women in the world"; The New York Times called her "the object of almost universal respect" in her obituary. In 1999, Roosevelt was ranked ninth in the top ten of Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, and was found to rank as the most admired woman in thirteen different years between 1948 and 1961 in Gallup's annual most admired woman poll. Periodic surveys conducted by the Siena College Research Institute have consistently seen historians assess Roosevelt as the greatest American first lady.

Photo of Helen Keller

3. Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

With an HPI of 77.53, Helen Keller is the 3rd most famous American Social Activist.  Her biography has been translated into 107 different languages.

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi. Keller campaigned for those with disabilities and for women's suffrage, labor rights, and world peace. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA). She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), publicized her education and life with Sullivan. It was adapted as a play by William Gibson, later adapted as a film under the same title, The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Since 1954 it has been operated as a house museum and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day".

Photo of Martin Luther King Jr.

4. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968)

With an HPI of 76.60, Martin Luther King Jr. is the 4th most famous American Social Activist.  His biography has been translated into 170 different languages.

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination. A black church leader, King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently. King was jailed several times. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was convicted of the assassination, though the King family believes he was a scapegoat; the assassination remains the subject of conspiracy theories. King's death was followed by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first observed in 1986. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

Photo of Jane Addams

5. Jane Addams (1860 - 1935)

With an HPI of 74.93, Jane Addams is the 5th most famous American Social Activist.  Her biography has been translated into 79 different languages.

Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was a leader in the history of social work and Women's suffrage. In 1889, Addams co-founded Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, in Chicago, Illinois, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. Philosophically a "radical pragmatist", she was arguably the first woman public philosopher in the United States. In the Progressive Era, when even presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and might be seen as social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers. An advocate for world peace, and recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States, in 1931 Addams became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Earlier, Addams was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University in 1910, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Addams helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers or extensions of the domestic-work assigned to women, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. In her essay "Utilization of Women in City Government", Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women's roles in the private sphere. When she died in 1935, Addams was the best-known female public figure in the United States.

Photo of Rosa Parks

6. Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005)

With an HPI of 74.15, Rosa Parks is the 6th most famous American Social Activist.  Her biography has been translated into 103 different languages.

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. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, 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, and she helped inspire the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Parks's act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation, and organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr. At the time, Parks was employed as a seamstress at a local department store and was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job and received death threats for years afterwards. Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988, she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US Representative. She was also active in the black power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US. After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that there was more work to be done in the struggle for justice. She received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday, February 4, while Ohio, Oregon, and Texas commemorate the anniversary of her arrest, December 1.

Photo of Emily Greene Balch

7. Emily Greene Balch (1867 - 1961)

With an HPI of 70.49, Emily Greene Balch is the 7th most famous American Social Activist.  Her biography has been translated into 72 different languages.

Emily Greene Balch (January 8, 1867 – January 9, 1961) was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency. She moved into the peace movement at the start of World War I in 1914, and began collaborating with Jane Addams of Chicago. She became a central leader of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) based in Switzerland, for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946.

Photo of Angela Davis

8. Angela Davis (b. 1944)

With an HPI of 68.30, Angela Davis is the 8th most famous American Social Activist.  Her biography has been translated into 60 different languages.

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt, where she became increasingly engaged in far-left politics. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies—including conspiracy to murder—she was held in jail for over a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972. During the 1980s, Davis was twice the Communist Party's candidate for vice president. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex. In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke away from the CPUSA to help establish the CCDS. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008. Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Due to accusations that she advocates political violence and due to her support of the Soviet Union, she has been a controversial figure. In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" edition. In 2020, she was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Photo of Jimmy Hoffa

9. Jimmy Hoffa (1913 - 1975)

With an HPI of 63.98, Jimmy Hoffa is the 9th most famous American Social Activist.  His biography has been translated into 36 different languages.

James Riddle Hoffa (born February 14, 1913 – disappeared July 30, 1975, declared dead July 30, 1982) was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) from 1957 until 1971. He is notorious for his alleged ties to organized crime and for his disappearance under mysterious circumstances in 1975. From an early age, Hoffa was a union activist: he became an important regional figure with the IBT by his mid-20s. By 1952, he was the national vice-president of the IBT and between 1957 and 1971 he was its general president. Hoffa secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates in 1964 with the National Master Freight Agreement. He played a major role in the growth and the development of the union, which eventually became the largest by membership in the United States, with over 2.3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader. Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, along with mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials. He was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years. In mid-1971, he resigned as president of the union as part of a commutation agreement with U.S. president Richard Nixon and was released later that year, but he was barred from union activities until 1980. Hoping to regain support and to return to IBT leadership, he unsuccessfully tried to overturn the order. Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975. He is generally thought to have been murdered by the Mafia, and was declared legally dead in 1982. Hoffa's legacy and the circumstances of his disappearance continue to stir debate.

Photo of Harriet Tubman

10. Harriet Tubman (1820 - 1913)

With an HPI of 63.62, Harriet Tubman is the 10th most famous American Social Activist.  Her biography has been translated into 83 different languages.

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. March 1822 – March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage. Born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by enslavers as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight, intending to hit another slave, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious. In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) travelled by night and in extreme secrecy, and later said she "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide escapees farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. For her guidance of the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people, she is widely credited as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her and was admitted to a home for elderly African Americans, which she had helped establish years earlier. Tubman is commonly viewed as an icon of courage and freedom.

People

Pantheon has 150 people classified as American social activists born between 1660 and 2005. Of these 150, 44 (29.33%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living American social activists include Angela Davis, Jody Williams, and Edward Snowden. The most famous deceased American social activists include Malcolm X, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Helen Keller. As of April 2024, 30 new American social activists have been added to Pantheon including Nat Turner, Grace Sherwood, and Pretty Boy Floyd.

Living American Social Activists

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Deceased American Social Activists

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Newly Added American Social Activists (2024)

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Overlapping Lives

Which Social Activists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 25 most globally memorable Social Activists since 1700.