The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement

Virginia Randolph was born in Richmond, Virginia, sometime around 1874. Her parents were formerly enslaved people; they were probably illiterate and didn’t keep exact track of their children’s birth years. Virginia’s father died when she was a young girl, leaving her mother to raise four daughters alone. Although she grew up in poverty, Virginia’s mother impressed upon her the values of cleanliness, hard work, and the importance of pursuing an education. Virginia would embody these values as she went on to change the face of American education.

Virginia began teaching at the age of 16 and soon took over the one-room schoolhouse called Mountain Road School in Henrico County. She began using her own time and money to improve the place, taking her mother’s advice to focus on one thing at a time. Despite her dedication, she struggled to win over the parents in her community, who wanted their children’s education to look like what white children were learning in school. However, as Virginia taught her students to cook, build furniture, and make baskets, she was trying to address the needs she saw in rural Black communities in order to lift families out of poverty and help them become self-sufficient. Slowly, her persistence and dedication began to win the trust of families in her community. She was appointed the first Jeanes Supervising Teacher, which allowed her to expand her influence as she trained teachers and oversaw rural schools across the region. Her career spanned 60 years and affected the lives of “tens of thousands of children and teachers all over the South” (66).

Katharine Lee Bates was born in Cape Cod in 1859 as the youngest of four children. As the baby of the family, she was able to pursue her love of reading and writing while the rest of her siblings worked to keep the family out of extreme poverty. From an early age, Katharine was frustrated by traditional gender roles and longed to pursue an education, a rarity for women in that era. She graduated from the prestigious Wellesley College and became a writer and literature professor at the same institution. At Wellesley, Katharine also met Katharine Coman, who became her “lifelong companion.” Many of the letters between the women suggest that they shared a romantic relationship, and they lived together for 20 years until the latter Katharine died of breast cancer in 1915.

In 1893, the two of them traveled West to teach workshops in Colorado. Inspired by the incredible landscape, Katharine wrote a first draft of the song that would become known as “America the Beautiful.” In 1895, she finally finished the poem and published it for the sum of just $5. The poem quickly became a sensation; it was set to music and sung around the United States and the world. Despite her success, Katharine avoided the spotlight and never asked for royalties from “America the Beautiful.” After her partner passed away, she lived a quiet life, teaching at Wellesley and trying to keep up with the many letters she received. She passed away in 1929 after contracting pneumonia, yet “America the Beautiful” lives on as an exemplification of American ideals and hope for the future.

Inez Milholland was born in 1886. She was part of a new generation of women who rejected the “cult of domesticity” and imagined a life of more freedom and opportunity. However, Inez was also conventionally beautiful, which helped her become the face of the national suffrage movement. She became one of the era’s best-known figures, on par with celebrities of the day, and she was a fixture at suffrage events across the country, where newspapers often included details of her outfits as a central part of the stories. Inez used her striking beauty to her advantage; in her most famous appearance, she led a suffrage march on “a towering, handsome white horse” down Pennsylvania Avenue while wearing a billowing cloak and a shining star headpiece (100).

When Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party organized a speaking tour ahead of the 1916 presidential election, Inez was the obvious choice to headline. However, she was ill with tonsillitis, and her health declined steadily despite her attempts to press on with the tour. Inez fought through her sickness for weeks but was eventually hospitalized and diagnosed with aplastic anemia. She passed away when she was just 30 years old and promptly became “a martyr” for the suffrage movement. Her dedication and commitment to suffrage up until her death made her a symbol of women’s strength, bravery, and perseverance.

Rebecca Brown Mitchell was a wife and mother in Illinois in the 1850s when her husband passed away. Because of Illinois’s coverture laws, all of Rebecca’s possessions were owned by her husband, and the state repossessed everything. In 1882, when most of her children were grown, Rebecca decided to move West and start a new life. She lived in a shack without money or resources but worked hard to improve herself and her community. She started a school, earned a teaching certificate, and eventually began to work on changing state politics and became an “in-demand speaker” for the temperance and suffrage movements. Rebecca belonged to the generation of women before Inez Milholland and Maria de Lopez, which was still encumbered with “oppressive gender roles.” Her “fire for empowering women” was born of her own experiences with oppression and injustice and paved the way for the national suffrage movement that was to come (116).

Anna Thomas Jeanes was a Quaker woman born in 19th-century Philadelphia. She was the youngest of 10 children, six of whom lived to adulthood, and the daughter of a wealthy merchant. All of the Jeanes children were committed to education and various social causes. Although they were wealthy, they were modest and humble. Anna was supported financially by her family throughout her life. None of her siblings had children, so Anna became the family’s sole heir and inherited a multi-million-dollar fortitude in 1894 when she was 72 years old. Anna lived humbly in a home for elderly Quakers and began investing in various social causes. She met William James Edwards, a formerly enslaved man who dreamed of building a school for African American children in rural Alabama. Anna was impressed by William and his plans, and she gave him the money to make his dream a reality. When she passed away in 1907, she left her fortune, more than $33 million dollars in today’s money, in a fund to support rural Black schools throughout the South. She lived “a seemingly quiet life” (159), but her generosity went on to change the face of education for Black children.

Julius Rosenwald was born in Illinois in 1862. He moved to New York as a teenager and began to make a life for himself selling suits. When his brother-in-law received an opportunity to become a partner in the newly established Sears, Roebuck & Co., he invited Julius to invest with him. Due to personal differences, Julius’s brother-in-law left the company, and Richard Sears left due to health problems. This left Julius as the sole owner of “the world’s largest retailer” (171). He became extremely wealthy but felt that his money did no good “in vaults beneath the earth” (183). He and his family had everything they wanted and needed, so Julius began giving money away. He gave to many causes, including Jewish charities and YMCAs. In 1911, Julius met Booker T. Washington and became inspired by the Black industrial school that Booker headed in Alabama. Julius was nearing his 50th birthday and decided to do something special to celebrate this milestone. He approved a series of matching grants that eventually allowed Booker and other Black educators to build almost 5,000 schools across the South over a 20-year period. Like Anna Thomas Jeanes and other white philanthropists of their generation, Julius didn’t go as far as to argue for equality between races or the desegregation of schools, but his generosity had an incalculable impact that spread far beyond the children whom his money allowed to be educated.

Booker T. Washington was born enslaved sometime before the Civil War. His family was eventually emancipated, but they remained very poor. Booker dreamed of attending school but had to work to support his family. He finally enrolled himself in school at age nine, and at 16, he learned about the Hampton Industrial and Normal School. Lacking money for a train ticket, Booker walked most of the 400-mile journey to Hampton. He was granted admission after he proved his capacity to work hard by impeccably cleaning a classroom. Booker became the head of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute and the most influential Black educator of his generation. He didn’t advocate for “full equality and integration” but believed that “good citizenship, literacy, and job skills […] would help the economic status of Black people” (54). Because of this perspective, many accused Booker of participating in “respectability politics” and perpetuating white supremacy. However, the work he did transformed the lives of tens of thousands of African American children across the South, along with the lives of their families and communities, setting the stage for the fights for equality that would come later.

Daniel Inouye was born to Japanese immigrants to Hawaii in 1924. He was the eldest of four children, and his family lived in poverty. When Daniel was in seventh grade, he broke his arm, and the doctor who saw him set it crookedly, leaving the arm disabled. His parents took him to a second doctor, who told them that the arm could be fixed with surgery. When Daniel’s mother told the doctor that they would pay for the treatment in installments, he insisted on doing the operation for free. He asked that Daniel repay him by being a good student. The doctor’s generosity had a great impact on Daniel, and he decided to become a doctor himself. He took first aid courses and worked hard in school. On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, and Daniel rushed to help. He spent weeks working night shifts for the Red Cross and attending school during the day, sleeping only two hours per night. When he graduated high school, he was eager to join the Army, but his draft eligibility had been revoked due to his Japanese ancestry. Daniel, along with other Japanese American men, repeatedly petitioned the government for permission to serve. Eventually, their request was granted, and Daniel was shipped out to Italy. In Europe, Daniel was critically injured but returned home as a hero. He finished law school and started a political career, becoming a congressman and one of Hawaii’s first senators. He never stopped working “to make a world where every man is a free man, and the equal of his neighbor” (221).

Norman Mineta was a 10-year-old living in California when Pearl Harbor was bombed. His father, who had immigrated from Japan as a young man, worried about what might happen to them in the wake of the attack but assured Norman and his siblings that they were safe because they were American citizens. Nevertheless, Norman and his family were soon forced to “evacuate” to a concentration camp for Japanese Americans. They spent several weeks living in a makeshift camp at the Santa Anita racetrack before being transferred to a facility called Heart Mountain near Cody, Wyoming. The family remained at Heart Mountain until the end of the war, and Norman made friends with a boy from a local Boy Scout troop that sometimes visited the imprisoned children. As a young man, Norman fought in the Korean War and returned home to start a political career. He was elected to the San Jose City Council and later became one of the country’s first Asian American mayors. The notoriety he received allowed him to reconnect with his old friend from camp, Alan Simpson. Alan was also a politician, and soon, both men were elected as congressmen. Norman served 10 terms in Congress and held positions in the cabinets of both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He was known for his ability to work with those who shared different backgrounds and beliefs, like his friend Alan, and believed that “compromise” was an important “strength,” not a weakness.

In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. She was arrested, jailed, and charged with violating segregation laws, disturbing the peace, and assaulting an officer. Claudette had grown up frustrated and angered by the injustices that she and other Black people were subject to, and that day on the bus, she knew that it was her moment to act. Her case became part of a federal lawsuit that led to the desegregation of Montgomery’s public buses; however, Claudette was largely forgotten. By 16, she was a single mother with no help, and the notoriety that she received from the case made it hard for her to find work. Although Rosa Parks received the credit for instigating the Montgomery bus boycott and starting the civil rights movement, individuals like Claudette were an important part of the “momentum” that propelled Rosa and civil rights into the international spotlight.