White Antiracist Activists

This article was originally published on Teaching While White.

Compiled by Elizabeth Denevi and Lori Cohen, Eastern Educational Resource Collaborative

What we mean by “White antiracist activist”

Antiracism for White people is a process of recognizing the impact of race as a system of oppression and engaging in practices, behaviors, and ways of being that disrupt racial discrimination. Racism advantages White people and disadvantages People of Color via inequitable systems of institutional power, authority, and violence. The term “People of Color” includes Native, Black/African American, Latinx, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and Multiracial people. More accurately, this group is also referred to as “people of the global majority.” The goal of this activism is to challenge the racist status quo to bring about social change, healing, and liberation for non-White identified communities. The following people and organizations are White antiracist/anti-oppression activists who questioned, resisted, and interrupted racist systems.

People of Color have always worked to end racism. By naming these White activists and organizations, we hope to show that for as long as there has been racial oppression, particularly in the United States, there have been White people who have stood in solidarity with People of Color By highlighting these White activists, we hope to expand the understanding of how White people can work toward racial justice in proactive and productive ways. Much of what our students learn in schools about race reflects People of Color as oppressed and White people as “bad racists,” but the realities of anti-oppression/antiracism work are far more nuanced and complex.

To disrupt the narratives we learned in schools, and to support White students in recognizing their empowerment in antiracist work, we are sharing a collection of noted White antiracist/anti-oppression activists whose work can serve as a guidepost. We also recognize that these activists are products of their particular time and reflect the limitations of their time period. We also offer these examples as a way for White educators to think about their personal stake and role in challenging racism in their classrooms. This list is by no means exhaustive, but for those looking to build your curriculum, we hope you will find this list a helpful starting point. This is an attempt to highlight the work of White activists who stood up to racism when it was challenging, unpopular, and even illegal.

As a means of studying and learning from these activists, we offer these critical questions for consideration:

1. In considering the activists’ lives, what were the significant moments that led to their activism? What motivated them to work for change?

2. What skills do/did they need to challenge racial injustice?

3. What blind spots might these activists have?

4. How can White people work effectively in solidarity with People of Color? How do they keep from replicating the very system they are trying to challenge?

5. What is the value of a multiracial, antiracist coalition?

6. What actions might you take to work for racial justice?

The African Free School (founded November 2, 1787) was founded by members of the New York Manumission Society to provide education to children of slaves and free people of color. Many of its students became leaders in the African American community in New York. Established in 1794, the first school was a one-room schoolhouse that held about 40 students. Originally the Manumission Society hired White teachers, but it eventually employed Black teachers as well. By 1835, when the schools ended their run as privately supported institutions, the African Free School had seven buildings in different neighborhoods, and it had educated thousands of girls and boys. At that time the African Free Schools and their facilities were integrated into the public school system. This was several years after New York freed the last adult slaves under its gradual abolition law.

Anne McCarty Braden (1924–2006) was a journalist and community organizer from Louisville, Kentucky, who defied racist real estate practices and the House Un-American Activities Committee and organized White Southerners to support the civil rights movement. She is best known for helping a Black couple buy a house in an all-White neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky in 1954. She and her husband were put on trial for sedition, banned from jobs, threatened, and reviled by their fellow White Southerners for what they did. She wrote a book about her sedition trial, The Wall Between, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She worked closely with Rosa Parks (in photo below) and Ella Baker, and she is mentioned in Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

John Brown (1800–1859) was also an ardent abolitionist who worked with the Underground Railroad and worked to inspire a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. As a 12-year-old boy traveling through Michigan, Brown witnessed an enslaved African-American boy being beaten, which haunted him for years to come and informed his own abolitionism. In 1855, Brown moved to Kansas, and with the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, there was conflict over whether the territory would be a free or slave state. Brown, who believed in using violent means to end slavery, became involved in the conflict; in 1856, he and several of his men killed five pro-slavery settlers in a retaliatory attack at Pottawatomie Creek. With the intent of inspiring a slave insurrection, he eventually led an unsuccessful raid on the Harpers Ferry federal armory on October 16, 1859, holding dozens of men hostage. Brown’s forces held out for two days; they were eventually defeated by military forces led by Robert E. Lee. Many of Brown’s men were killed, including two of his sons, and he was captured. Brown went to trial and was executed on December 2, 1859.

Edgar Chandler (1904-1988). A Navy Chaplain, congregational minister, and director of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago during the 1960s, Chandler worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. Chandler later hired Jesse Jackson at the Church Federation of Greater Chicago and they became friends. Chandler “really helped to bring me into the civil rights movement,” Jackson was quoted as saying, “He helped to hire me when I had no money, and helped sustain my family.”

Christopher Chandler (1938-2019). A longtime journalist who focused on social justice issues, Chandler helped start the Chicago Journalism Review, the Chicago Free Press, and the Daily Planet, and worked on exposés of the 1969 police raid that resulted in the killings of Black Panthers leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Later, he was Press Secretary for Chicago Mayor, Harold Washington, and later for U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush. From 1997 to 2001, Mr. Chandler worked in media relations for the Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C., group that assists whistleblowers.

Prudence Crandall (1803-1890) was an American schoolteacher and activist. She is believed to have run the first known school for Black girls in the United States. When Crandall admitted Sarah Harris, a 20-year-old African American female student in 1832 to her school, she had what is considered to be the first integrated classroom in the United States. Parents of the White children began to withdraw them. She decided that if White girls would not attend, she would educate Black girls. She was arrested and spent a night in jail. Soon the violence of the townspeople forced her to close the school and leave.

Virginia Foster Durr (1903–1999) was a housewife and political activist from Birmingham, Alabama, who fought against the poll tax and Southern White male domination. Durr was a close friend of Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt, and was sister-in-law (through her sister’s marriage) of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who sat on many crucial civil rights cases. In 1933, Durr moved with her husband to Washington, D.C., which was where her activism began. She met important people through her husband’s New Deal contacts, some of whom changed her conservative views on civil matters. Durr joined the Woman’s National Democratic Club, and in 1938, she was one of the founding members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an interracial group working to reduce segregation and improve living conditions in the South. The group was formed in part as a response to Franklin Roosevelt’s proclamation that the South was the leading economic problem in the nation. By 1941, Durr became the vice president of the SCHW’s civil rights subcommittee. Working together with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she lobbied for legislation to abolish the poll tax. She worked jointly with liberal political leaders in order to gain the necessary support needed for legislation, which ultimately resulted in the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Jane Eliot (1933-). In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, Elliott devised the controversial and startling, “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise.” This, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority. Elliott’s classroom exercise was filmed the third time she held it with her White third-graders in 1970, becoming the documentary The Eye of the Storm. This in turn inspired a retrospective that reunited the 1970 class members with their teacher fifteen years later in “A Class Divided,” an episode of the PBS series Frontline. After leaving her school, Elliott became a full-time diversity educator. She still holds the exercise and gives lectures about its effects all over the U.S.

Bob Fletcher (1911-2013) was a farmer, fireman, and community historian best known for safeguarding the farms of expelled Japanese Americans in Florin, California, during World War II. With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the eviction of West Coast Japanese Americans looming, the Tsukamoto family of Florin approached Fletcher with a proposal: would he manage the flame tokay grape farms of two of their friends, paying taxes and mortgages while there were excluded? Fletcher agreed, quitting his job, and eventually took over the farms of the Okamoto, Nitta, and Tsukamoto families, a total of ninety acres. In doing so, he bucked popular opinion that largely supported the exclusion of Japanese Americans and opposed their return. He was, in fact, fired on while in the Tsukamotos’ barn. When the families returned from their incarceration in the fall of 1945, their farms and homes were intact, and their half of the profits was waiting for them. Fletcher continued to help the families after the war, sometimes buying supplies and equipment for them when local businesses would not sell to them. In the later part of the 20th Century, with changing attitudes toward the wartime incarceration, Fletcher received acclaim for his wartime actions. He died at the age of 101, his actions celebrated in obituaries in the New York Times and other newspapers.

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely-read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which he founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by Constitutional amendment in 1865. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and promoted immediate and uncompensated, as opposed to gradual and compensated, emancipation of slaves in the United States. Garrison also emerged as a leading advocate of women’s rights, which prompted a split in the abolitionist community. In the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the women’s suffrage movement.

Andrew Goodman (1943-1964) and Michael Henry “Mickey” Schwerner (1939-1964) were American civil rights activists, murdered at a young age by members of the Ku Klux Klan. They took part in the Freedom Summer campaign to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi, where they met fellow social activists, James Chaney. They all worked together in Meridian, Mississippi, where Schwerner was designated head of the field office. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was strongly opposed to integration and civil rights and paid spies to identify citizens suspected of activism, especially people from the North and West who entered the state. On their return to Meridian, the three men were stopped and arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price (a Klan member) for allegedly driving 35 miles over the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit. They were arrested, released, and eventually turned them over to Klansmen who shot and killed them. The Commission was eventually implicated in the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879), known as the Grimké sisters, were speakers, writers, and educators who were the first nationally known White American female advocates for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. They grew up in a slave-owning family in South Carolina but moved to the North in the 1820s, settling for some time in Philadelphia and becoming part of its substantial Quaker community. They became deeply involved with the abolitionist movement, traveling on its lecture circuit and recounting their firsthand experiences with slavery on their family’s plantation. Among the first White American women to act publicly in social reform movements, they were ridiculed for their abolitionist activity and perspective. They also became early activists in the women’s rights movement. 

Rachelle Horowitz was an organizer and strategist during the height of the modern civil rights movement, and is a major figure in labor union politics. As a student member of the socialist party during the late 1950s, Horowitz was encouraged to become involved in the civil rights movement by party leaders who recognized the leadership potential that she and other young members possessed. She worked with organizer Bayard Rustin on the March on Washington in 1963, assisting with planning for demonstrations and labor organization efforts and securing transportation to get leaders, organizations, and March participants to and from Washington, D.C. Horowitz also assisted Rustin with running the March’s organizing headquarters in New York. In the following year, Horowitz spent three months in Jackson, Mississippi for the formation of the Freedom Democrats, and she assisted with organizing Freedom Summer. She also continued to work with Rustin, serving as his assistant from 1964 to 1973, and working with him and others to form the Social Democrats. She continued her efforts with labor unions throughout the 1970s and served as the political director of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1995.

Eric Kulberg was a photographer at the March on Washington in 1963. Only 18 at the time, Kulberg convinced his supervisors that he needed to be at the March to document the experience. After some initial resistance, his bosses relented and supported Kulberg’s decision. One of the only photographers to capture the experience in color film, Kulberg generated some of the most iconic images of the experience. He also was changed by what he witnessed.  Standing a mere few feet from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he spoke, Kulberg had two revelations: he wanted to eradicate prejudice, and he wanted to center the experience of African Americans through radio, film, and television—which is how Kulberg has spent the majority of his career.

Margaret Leonard was a Freedom Rider and Civil Rights Activist. When she was a student at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, she began going to Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) meetings and participated in both local sit-ins and the Freedom Rides of 1961. At the CORE meetings, she learned about the practices of nonviolent resistance that became the mainstay of the Freedom Riders movement. She was the first unmistakably Southern White student to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Ride and inspired other White people to follow her lead. Leonard is retired now from a reporting career at the St. Petersburg Times, Miami Herald, and Tallahassee Democrat and still occasionally unites with other Freedom Riders.

Viola Liuzzo (1925–1965) was a Unitarian Universalist Civil Rights activist from Michigan. In March 1965, Liuzzo, then a housewife and mother of five with a history of local activism, heeded the call of Martin Luther King, Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was shot dead by members of the Ku Klux Klan at age 39.

Richard Loving (1933-1975) was married to Mildred Loving, and they were plaintiffs in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (1967). The Lovings were an interracial married couple who were criminally charged under a Virginia statute banning such marriages. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), they filed suit to overturn the law. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, striking down the Virginia statute and all state anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional violations of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Hazel Massey (born Hazel Bryan 1941-) first appeared in an iconic photograph in 1957, as she leered at The Little Rock Nine, nine black students who were integrated at Central High School. Bryan is captured leering at Elizabeth Eckford, who is also featured in this photograph. Bryan, only 17 years old at the time and a high school dropout, was haunted by the image for which she became notorious. Several years after the photograph was taken, Bryan—tormented by the image and what she had done—tracked Eckford down, and apologized. The two women forged a friendship for a number of years, and in 1999, journalist David Margolick decided to write Elizabeth and Hazel, two years after the 40th anniversary of the events in Little Rock.

William Lewis Moore (1927–1963) was a postal worker and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) member who staged lone protests against racial segregation. Moore undertook three civil rights protests in which he marched to a capital to hand-deliver letters he had written denouncing racial segregation. Moore was in the midst of a one-man civil rights march to Jackson, Mississippi, to implore Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett to support integration efforts. He wore signs that stated: “End Segregation in America, Eat at Joe’s — Both Black and White” and “Equal Rights For All (Mississippi or Bust).” On April 23, 1963, Moore was found dead on U.S. Highway 11 near Attalla, Alabama—only four days shy of his 36th birthday. A letter he had written, meant for Governor Ross, was opened when Moore was found, and its contents stated that “the White man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights.” He asked Governor Barnett to: “Be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.”

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a White teenager in the South during Segregation who put herself on the front lines of the Civil Rights struggle. She Stood for Freedom is a biography about her experiences, published simultaneously in picture book and middle-grade editions, detailing the many events she participated in. She attended demonstrations and sit-ins and was one of the Freedom Riders in 1961 who was arrested and put on death row for months at the notorious Parchman Penitentiary. She was the first White person to join in the 1963 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins in Jackson, Mississippi, and that same year participated in the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. and the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, which contributed to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act that year. Her willingness to stand up for justice has been an inspiration, “Anyone can make a difference. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember, you don’t have to change the world . . . just change your world.”

Peter George Norman (1942–2006) was an Australian track athlete who won the silver medal in the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Norman is best known as the third athlete pictured in a famous photograph of the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute, which occurred during the medal ceremony for the 200-meter event. He wore a badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights in support of fellow athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith. Norman was not selected for the 1972 Summer Olympics, and retired from the sport soon after.

Mary White Ovington (1865–1951) was an American suffragist, journalist, and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Ovington became involved in the campaign for civil rights in 1890 after hearing Frederick Douglass speak in a New York City church. She also supported the work to improve living conditions in tenements and investigated housing and employment discrimination.

Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was an American transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and popular quotations would later be mentioned in speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. In Boston, he led the movement to combat the stricter Fugitive Slave Act, a controversial part of the Compromise of 1850. This act required law enforcement and citizens of all states — free states as well as slave states — to assist in recovering fugitive slaves. Parker called the law “a hateful statute of kidnappers” and helped organize open resistance to it. He and his followers formed the Boston Vigilance Committee, which refused to assist with the recovery of fugitive slaves and helped hide them. For example, they smuggled away Ellen and William Craft when Georgian slave catchers came to Boston to arrest them. Due to such efforts, from 1850 to the onset of the American Civil War in 1861, only twice were slaves captured in Boston and transported back to the South.

Joachim Prinz (1902-1998) devoted much of his life in the United States to the Civil Rights Movement. He saw the plight of African Americans in the context of his own experience under Hitler. From his early days in Newark, he spoke from his pulpit about the disgrace of discrimination. He joined the picket lines across America protesting racial prejudice from unequal employment to segregated schools, housing and all other areas of life. While serving as President of the American Jewish Congress, he represented the Jewish community as an organizer of the August 1963 March on Washington. He came to the podium immediately following a stirring spiritual sung by the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and just before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. Prinz’s address is remembered for its contention that, based on his experience as a rabbi in Nazi Germany after the rise of Hitler, in the face of discrimination, “the most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”

Fred Rogers (1928–2003) was an American television personality, musician, puppeteer, writer, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. While Fred Rogers benefited from a system of advantages for White people, he sought to create a show that could repair some inequities. For example, Francois Clemmons — an African-American actor — was an integral part of the show and he depicted a loving, positive role model. Further, the audience for the show was mixed race, indicating that the show appealed to all children. Finally, the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor sought to include significant historical context about race to deepen the movie’s message about inclusion and belonging.

Sally Rowley (1931-2020). While working as a secretary in New York in the early 1960s, Rowley joined the freedom riders, a group of activists who traveled to the south to challenge segregationist policies. She was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961 and served time in the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Christine Saxman, teacher and racial equity consultant, and Shelly Tochluk, professor of education and counselor, have worked together to identify White nationalist groups and their recruiting tactics. They have done intensive research to document how these groups target young people, in particular White boys, and to provide resistance strategies and resources for parents, schools, and young people. See Inoculating Our Students Against White Nationalism as an example of their work.

Robert Shetterly (1946- ) is an artist whose series of portraits, Americans Who Tell the Truth, (example left of Tarana Burke) has given Shetterly an opportunity to speak with children and adults all over this country about the necessity of dissent in a democracy, the obligations of citizenship, sustainability, U.S. history, and how democracy cannot function if politicians don’t tell the truth, if the media don’t report it, and if the people don’t demand it. Shetterly has engaged in a wide variety of political and humanitarian work with many of the people whose portraits he has painted. In the spring of 2007, he traveled to Rwanda with Lily Yeh and Terry Tempest Williams to work in a village of survivors of the 1994 genocide there. Much of his current work focuses on honoring and working with the activists trying to bring an end to the terrible practice of Mountaintop Removal by coal companies in Appalachia, on climate change, and on the continuation of systemic racism in the U.S. particularly in relation to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Gloria Steinem (1934- ) is an American journalist, feminist activist, organizer, and writer. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. With Dorothy Pittman-Hughes, Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine and the Women’s Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education. The partnership between Steinem and Pitman Hughes began in the early 1970s as the pair took to the podium to discuss the importance of intersectional feminism. She is the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a first national day devoted to girls that has now become an institution here and in other countries. She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally. She works with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on documenting the grassroots origins of the U.S. women’s movement, and on a Center for Organizers in tribute to Wilma Mankiller, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.

”The symbolism of a Black and White woman standing together, demonstrating the Black power salute is as important now as it was in the 70s,” said Pitman-Hughes. “A hundred years of the suffrage movement has not eliminated racism, classism and sexism. Black women and White women can make this change together, but not until we acknowledge and resolve the racism problem that stands between us.”

Laura Towne (1825-1901) was an American abolitionist and educator. She is best known for forming the first freedmen’s schools (those for newly freed slaves), notably the Penn School. She was raised in Philadelphia hearing sermons about the abolition of slavery. Influenced by these teachings, Towne answered the call for volunteers when the Union captured Port Royal and other Sea Islands area of South Carolina. With the help of her Quaker friend Ellen Murray, they founded the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, the first school for newly freed slaves in the United States.

James Tyson partnered with Bree Newsome to remove the Confederate flag that was flying over the South Carolina Statehouse on June 27, 2015. The two 30-year-old Charlotte activists, who had met only a few days before, hustled toward the flagpole bearing the South’s most controversial flag. Tyson braced himself so Newsome, strapped into climbing gear, could use his leg to jump the four-foot fence. Tyson, who stood quietly at the base of the pole while she climbed, remained in the background. That was the plan, to show White support without dominating. After scaling the flagpole and taking down the flag, Newsome and Tyson were arrested. The state legislature voted to remove the flag permanently less than three weeks later.

Julius Waties Waring (1880–1968) was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina who played an important role in the early legal battles of the American Civil Rights Movement and who opened White primaries to Black voters. Waring spent the early part of his career in Charleston, South Carolina, but after political, editorial, and social leaders in South Carolina criticized and shunned Judge Waring and his wife for their progressive views, Waring left Charleston altogether, and moved to New York City and quickly transitioned even further from a racial moderate to a proponent of radical change. Speaking at a Harlem church, he proclaimed: “The cancer of segregation will never be cured by the sedative of gradualism.” During his career, he fought against racial segregation and worked towards equal opportunities for the Black community in political, economic, and educational spheres.

The Weathermen, also known as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), was a radical left militant organization active in the late 1960s and 1970s, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. The WUO organized in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) largely composed of the national office leadership of SDS and their supporters. Beginning in 1974, the organization’s express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow what it viewed as American imperialism. In 1969, the group authored a paper a position paper distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago, which called for a “White fighting force” to be allied with the “Black Liberation Movement” and other radical movements to achieve destruction of U.S. Imperialism in favor of a classless communist society. The FBI classified the WUO as a domestic terrorist group, with revolutionary positions characterized by Black power and opposition to the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, the Weathermen took part in a range of bombing campaigns within the U.S,. and they began to disintegrate after the United States reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973. The group was defunct by 1977.

The White Rose (German: Weiße Rose) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany led by a group of students including Hans and Sophie Scholl. The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime. Their activities started in Munich in 1942, and ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo in February 1943. They, as well as other members and supporters of the group who carried on distributing the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), and many of them were sentenced to death or imprisonment (both School and Probst were executed). The group wrote, printed and initially distributed their pamphlets in the greater Munich region. Later on, secret carriers brought copies to other cities, mostly in the southern parts of Germany. In total, the White Rose authored six leaflets, which were multiplied and spread, in a total of about 15,000 copies. They denounced the Nazi regime’s crimes and oppression, and called for resistance. In their second leaflet, they openly denounced the persecution and mass murder of the Jews. By the time of their arrest, the members of the White Rose were just about to establish contacts with other German resistance groups like the Kreisau Circle or the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group of the Red Orchestra. Today, the White Rose is well known both within Germany and worldwide.

Dave Zirin (1974- ) is an American political sportswriter. He is the sports editor for The Nation, a weekly progressive magazine dedicated to politics and culture; he also writes a blog named Edge of Sports: the weekly sports column by Dave Zirin and has authored nine books, including The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World. He has repeatedly called for sports boycotts of certain teams, states, or nations for political reasons, including a boycott against sports teams from Arizona as a statement against the Arizona immigration law. He has spoken out against boycotts of Israel, has criticized Hank Williams, Jr. for racist remarks about Barack Obama, and has defended baseball player Barry Bonds, noting that most criticisms against Bonds were rooted in racism.

James Zwerg (1939- ) is an American former minister who was involved with the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s. He participated in a one-semester student exchange program in 1961 at Fisk University, a predominantly Black school, and met John Lewis who was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As a Freedom Rider, he traveled by bus to Birmingham where Zwerg was first arrested for not moving to the back of the bus with his Black seating companion, Paul Brooks. Three days later, the riders regrouped and headed to Montgomery. At first the bus station there was quiet and eerie, but the scene turned into an ambush with the riders attacked from all directions. Zwerg was denied prompt medical attention because there were no White ambulances available, and he remained unconscious for two days. His post-riot photos were published in many newspapers and magazines across the country.