Notable Peace & Justice Activists Posters “Ca...-”
with curriculum enrichment resources for social studies classrooms, teachers, home schoolers, offices.

Helen Caldicott
Rachel Carson
Jimmy Carter

Lillian Carter
Majora Carter
Bartolome de las Casas

Helen Caldicott
b. 1938; Australia

Helen Caldicott is a “physician, author, and anti-nuclear advocate who has founded several associations dedicated to opposing the use of depleted uranium munitions, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation, war and military action in general”.

She was also active with Physicians for Social Responsibility. Currently she hosts a weekly radio program, If You Love This Planet.

• If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth (book)

Rachel Carson
b. 5-27-1907; Pennsylvania
d. 4-14-1964

More than any other person, Rachel Carson helped make “ecology” a household word. She spent nearly fifteen years of her life working in obscurity for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But the publication of her books “The Sea Around Us” and “Silent Spring,” brought her immediate fame. ...Her first two books, “Under the Sea-Wind” and “The Sea Around Us,” describe the oceans and the life they contain. But it was “Silent Spring,” published in 1962, that made her famous. The book warned of the dangers of pesticides, which Ms. Carson discovered were killing fish and birds as well as insects. Some scientists said she exaggerated this danger. But most agreed that “Silent Spring” was both accurate and timely. The book lead directly to new laws regulating the use of pesticides, and it aroused millions to a new concern about humanity's growing impact on the natural environment around us. Text based on Great American Women poster series

Rachel Carson quote ~
• “The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.”

• more Rachel Carson posters

Majora Carter
b. 10-27-1966; New York

Environmental justice advocate Majora Carter founded the non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation Sustainable South Bronx, SSBx.

Jimmy Carter
b. 10-1-1924; Plains, GA

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Lillian Carter, née Bessie Lillian Gordy
b. 8-15-1898; Richland, GA
d. 10-30-1983; Ameriicua, GA (cancer)

Lillian Carter, best remembered as Miss Lillian, the mother of former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, was also a life long social activist and humanitarian expressed primarily through her nursing work in her home state of Georgia.

She volunteered as a nurse at age 19 for the U.S. Army in 1917 (the program was cancelled before she serve), and as a Peace Corps volunteer in India at age 68.

• Away From Home: Letters to My Family by Lillian Carter

Bartolome de las Casas
b. 8-24-1484; Spain
d. 7-17-1566; Madrid

Bartolome de las Casas, Dominican missionary priest and the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, came to the defense of the indigenous peoples after witnessing the slavery, torture and genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists.

Bartolome de las Casas quote ~
• “The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed. . . . Their insatiable greed and overweening ambition know no bounds; the land is fertile and rich, the inhabitants simple, forbearing and submissive. The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset) not as brute animals - indeed, I would to God they had done and had shown them the consideration they afford their animals - so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road. They have had as little concern for their souls as for their bodies, all the millions that perished having gone to their deaths with no knowledge of God and without the benefit of the Sacraments. One fact in all this is widely known and beyond dispute, for even the tyrannical murderers themselves acknowledge the truth of it: the indigenous peoples never did the Europeans any harm whatever; on the contrary, they believed them to have descended from the heavens, at least until they or their fellow citizens had tasted, at the hands of these oppressors, a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations.”

• book- In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolome de las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa

Saint Catherine of Siena
b. 3-25-1347; Siena, Italy
d. 4-29-1380; Rome

Saint Catherine of Siena was a lay member of the Dominican Order, a scholastic philosopher, and theologian.

She dedicated to her life at age four to ‘praying, meditating and living in total solitude’ into her late teens when she experienced a ‘Mystical Marriage’ with Jesus and began to help the sick and poor.

In 1370 Catherine received visions that commanded her to leave her solitary life and go into public works. She began pleading for peace among the Italian factions and to end the Western Schism on the Church.

Catherine of Siena, with Teresa of Avila and Thérèse de Lisieux, are the only three women who are Doctors of the Church.

Saint Catherine of Siena quotes ~
• “Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.”
• “To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his right and left hand. He uses both.”

• book- Catherine of Siena : The Dialogue (Classics of Western Spirituality)

Carrie Chapman Catt
b. 1-9-1859; Ripon, Wisconsin
d. 3-9-1947; New Rochelle, NY

Carrie Clinton Lane graduated from Iowa State University and was a teacher and then superintendent of Mason City, IA schools in 1885.

Carrie, who was married to George Catt after her first husband, Leo Chapman, died, was Susan B. Anthony’s hand-picked successor to lead the woman suffrage movement nationally. For two decades her tactical skills, perserverance, and diplomacy laid the path passing and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Catt also founded the League of Women Voters and later became a prominent figure in the internationalist and pacifist movements that arose in the wake of World War I.

Carrie Chapman Catt quotes ~
• “No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.”
• “There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.”
• “In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.”