Theresa Killeen Bonpane grew up the youngest child in an Irish working class family in Troy, New York. Theresa fended for herself from an early age. An indifferent student, her life consisted of the social side of school, and a rigorous Catholic faith.
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Blase Bonpane grew up in Los Angeles. His father, an Italian immigrant, became a lawyer, and eventually a Judge. Against his family's wishes, Blase left home to join the Maryknoll Religious Order. He was drawn to Maryknoll because of their history of international service.
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Susan Adelman is a feminist, activist and a philanthropist who was inspired by her times, and her mother, Lucy Adelman. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, Susan was in SDS, worked for the Liberation News Service and went to Cuba with the Venceramos Brigade.
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In Joan Andersson's formative years she was heavily influenced by an exemplary set of parents whose progressive child rearing practices helped her mature without the strictures or role limitations that affected most young women of her generation.
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Bill Zimmerman earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and taught briefly there and at Brooklyn College. In the early 1960's, a trip to Greenwood, Mississippi, in support of civil rights activists brought him face to face with systematic racism and set him on an activist life.
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Marge Tabankin was born in Newark and attended the same High School as that famous and controversial chronicler of Jewish life, Philip Roth. When she was 15, she heard Tom Hayden speak about his community organizing in Newark and the presentation was like a honing device that set the course of her professional life.
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Ed Asner was born in Kansas City to uneducated immigrant parents from Russia and Lithuania. His family benefited from Jewish social service organizations that helped the young family gain a footing in the United States.
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Billie Heller was born in Redondo Beach to parents who were steeped in the American tradition of joining fraternal service organizations as a part of their duty to the community.
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Ed Pearl spent the early part of his childhood in Boyle Heights where he lived among an amalgam of Jewish and Mexican families, a new generation of immigrants from Mexico fast supplanting the Russian and Eastern European enclave.
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Reverend Dr. George Regas studied at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and Cambridge University; he received his doctorate from the Claremont School of Theology. His first parish, on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement, was in Pulaski, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
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Jack Shakely was born in Oklahoma and came of age working in a family run newspaper owned by his Uncle. After majoring in Journalism at the University of Oklahoma, Jack, who was greatly influenced by the Presidency of Jack Kennedy, joined the Peace Corp, learning Spanish and serving in Costa Rica.
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Rodolfo F. Acuña, Ph.d, is a historian, professor emeritus, and one of the leading scholars of Chicano Studies, which he teaches at Cal State Northridge. He is the author Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, now in its seventh printing.
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Tom Hayden - One of founding members of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden was a teacher, writer, journalist, and Legislator. Recently, he was named by The Nation Magazine as one of the most influential progressives of the 20th Century.
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Peter Douglas is the first environmental activist we have profiled at the Activist Video Archive. Peter wrote the law protecting the California Coast, and was longtime Executive Director of the California Coastal Commission.
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Fr. Greg Boyle is a Jesuit priest and the founder and Executive Director of Homeboy Industries. As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of gang activity in Los Angeles, Greg Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people can learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration.
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Jackie Goldberg was born in Los Angeles and went to her first demonstration in 1961, influenced and guided by the woman who led Women's Strike for Peace.
Sharon Stricker has pursued two parallel courses her entire adult life: the arts and political activism.
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Mike Farrell is an actor, writer, director and producer, President of the board of Death Penalty Focus, Co-chair Emeritus of the California Committee of Human Rights Watch, spokesperson for Concern America, and author of "Just Call Me Mike; a Journey to Actor and Activist" and "Of Mule and Man."
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Irv was born in the Bronx in the Worker’s Cooperative Colony, known as the"Coops," a community of 5000 people, mostly from Europe, who identified themselves as Leftists. He was a member of the Young Pioneers and even as a child, worked to support members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
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Lila Garrett is a writer, producer and radio host. She came to Los Angeles after studying acting and appearing in plays in New York and Chicago. From a socialist family, advocating for those less fortunate and those who take the "minority" position was second nature to her almost from birth.
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Peg Yorkin was born in New York and came to Los Angeles after studying acting. Eventually, she married and raised children, producing plays and raising money for charities. In 1988, Peg, Eleanor Smeal, Katherine Spillar, Toni Carabillo, and Judith Meuli founded The Feminist Majority Foundation.
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