The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History

by Sharon McMahon

You can see where Rebecca’s fire for empowering women comes from: her own experiences being legally stripped of all her possessions, being told that if she wanted her own clothing she would have to pay the government for it. Being denied access to the education she desired as a result of nothing more than her gender. Rebecca was part of the temperance movement, which was inextricably linked to suffrage in the United States.

When the election ended and the ballots were tabulated, the women sat for a moment in stunned silence. They had done it. It had worked. They had convinced nearly 66 percent of the men of Idaho to extend them the vote.

the men of Idaho said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” “Why not do the unheard-of thing?” Rebecca asked.[25] And what a question that is. Why not do the unheard-of thing? Why not do what no one else is doing? Why not leave behind the old ways that are no longer serving? Why not be the first?

I think she’d love to know that some of the institutions she nurtured, the schools and the churches and the libraries, the places that continue to help their communities learn about justice and truth and right—these are the most fitting monuments to the woman who finally picked the lock of the iron cage of the law.

In 2022, Idaho erected a statue to commemorate women’s suffrage. Cast in bronze, the Spirit of Idaho Women depicts a lithe figure with an outstretched hand. Behind her stand twelve sets of shoes, those of the generations of women who came before, each decade of suffragists treading the path to enfranchisement. In her hand, she extends a shoe to the women of the future, inviting them to continue in the work that was begun by those with the courage to let people watch them fail.

up for comments and interviews. The women did not try to conceal their identities, didn’t come armed, didn’t break any glass or invade any private offices. They weren’t there to kidnap members of Congress; no faux gallows waited outside the building. They came peacefully, stayed in the section designated for visitors, and left peacefully, confident that they had made their point.

“Women should assert their power. If women don’t respect themselves, no one else will.”[11]

Suffrage workers sprang into action planning a memorial befitting such a hero, and one month later, on Christmas Day, she was memorialized in Statuary Hall inside the U.S. Capitol. She was the first women ever honored there, and she was the first person so honored who wasn’t a member of Congress.

Over time, Wilson began to realize that we couldn’t ask women to serve their country and not give them a say in how it was run.

“This war could not have been fought, either by the nations engaged or by America, if it had not been for the services of women…. Are we alone to ask and take the utmost that women can give—service and sacrifice of every kind—and still say that we do not see what title that gives them to stand by our sides in the guidance of the affairs of their nation and ours? We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and of right?”[19]

For the suffragists like Inez Milholland, who gave her very life, for the members of the military who were willing to give theirs, for women of every belief and stripe: justice and freedom—suffrage—was not granted, it was seized. Suffrage was not a gift bestowed, delivered in a basket on a doorstep. Suffrage was the hard-won harvest of seventy years of toil.

As part of the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the natural sciences, the Jeaneses were highly instrumental in building the fossil collection of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.

No, Anna did not spend the money on herself. Instead, she realized that her time was short, and the world was in need of much good.

And more than two hundred years later, Miss Anna T. Jeanes asked herself what she could do to bring more justice, more mercy, more truth, more peace, and more freedom to the world. Instead of spending $5 million on fancy furnishings and luxury cruises, she decided to give it all away.

The Jeanes Six, as I call the six siblings who lived to adulthood—Jacob, Joshua, Samuel, Joseph, Mary, and Anna—stayed out of the spotlight intentionally. Occasionally, you see one of their names printed in a small blurb in a Philadelphia newspaper as having been to this annual meeting or contributing to that cause. For example, a notice in The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1883 shows Mary and Samuel Jeanes as having contributed to a children’s sanitarium.[13] Another article shows that both Samuel and Joseph sent money to a fund to help flood victims out west.[14] The Jeanes Six cared about the human condition, not about naming rights.

Edwards recounted to Anna how he had a vision to build a beautiful school at Snow Hill, one that could house three or four hundred students who could learn industrial education as he had. When he returned home, he found a check from Anna for $5,000. (To put this in context, this is $186,000 in modern money.) Every year for the next few years, Anna sent more, in amounts ranging from $300 to $2,000.[6]

Unlike many northern philanthropists who gave money to causes that benefited the Black community, Anna Jeanes did not have the motivation of preparing a workforce or keeping people in a position of subservience.

Anna believed that people could decide for themselves what their community needed, and that people of all races should have equal seats at the table.

They knew their work was important. But they had no way of knowing the true, lasting impact they had on generations of students, on the American South at large, and, consequently, on America as a whole. In one of his reports fourteen years into the existence of the Jeanes teacher program, William Dillard, the president of the Jeanes Fund, wrote, “There have been no nobler pioneers and missionaries than these humble teachers. They have literally gone about doing good.”[17]

Progress is usually born out of struggle. But struggle doesn’t always mean progress, does it? What do we need to add to struggle to create progress? The answer is hope. Hope, which attorney and author Bryan Stevenson told me is not a feeling but an orientation of the spirit. Hope is a choice that we make each morning, and we do not have the luxury of hopelessness if we want to see progress.

None of us can do it all. But all of us can do something. And it might as well be the next needed thing.

Armstrong came to the United States to attend college, and left college to enlist in the Union Army, where he commanded all-Black regiments of troops. He saw that, despite being excellent soldiers who fought valiantly and trained rigorously, few of them could read. Lack of literacy was not because of a lack of ability, it was because generations of enslavers greatly feared what could happen if Black people became educated.

At the Chicago luncheon, JR addressed the assembled business leaders: “Whether it is because I belong to a people who have known centuries of persecution or whether it is because I naturally am inclined to sympathize with the oppressed, I have always felt keenly for the colored race.”[11]

JR was modest, saying he didn’t believe he needed to be thanked for his donation, but that he liked donating to YMCAs because they had the ability to bring races together. He said, “There is no problem which faces the American people that has more importance than this problem of how to have these two races live congenially and try to uplift each other.”[12]

On another visit to Tuskegee, Booker drove JR through the countryside, where they passed a shack, at significant risk of collapse, a single window hanging on for dear life. Booker pointed out the shack and told JR that it was a school, and it was representative of what the state of Alabama provided to Black children. White northern philanthropists had made inroads with Black education, he explained, describing the work of women like Anna Jeanes. But it was difficult to do good work when students had to hold an umbrella over the teacher when it rained. JR was aghast. Many of the places in the South where school was taught were worse than stables that housed farm animals. The following month, JR sent a letter to Booker marked “personal.” In the letter, he posed a question: “If I gave you $25,000, how would you spend it?” (For context: this is nearly $800,000 in modern money.) Booker replied that the money would be a godsend, and that it would accomplish more than anyone could even realize.[17]

Booker believed in JR’s philosophy that people appreciate gifts more when they are required to contribute. Much of JR’s philanthropy throughout his lifetime was made in the form of matching grants. “I will give you $50,000 for the YMCA, but you also have to put in $50,000,” JR might offer. Making the recipient contribute funds demonstrated that there was public support for the initiative, and it meant that the recipient was likely to take care of the resources it received.

Over the next nearly two decades, Julius Rosenwald, in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute and thousands of Black communities, built nearly five thousand schools in the United States. Five thousand schools. And not just schools: Houses for teachers. Buses for students. Gymnasiums. Cafeterias. Libraries.

One of JR’s employees wrote: “I have never seen greater human sacrifices made for the cause of education. Children without shoes on their feet gave from fifty cents to one dollar and old men and old women, whose costumes represented several years of wear, gave from one to five dollars.” The employee went on: “It should be borne in mind that funds with which this project was completed came from people who represented a poor working class, men who worked at furnaces, women who washed and ironed for white people, and children who chopped cotton in the heat of the day for money to go in their snuff boxes.”[20]

The widow who pushed five dollars into the collection basket deserves just as much respect as the millionaire.

One examination of the historic impact of the Rosenwald schools found that nearly 90 percent of Black students in Alabama were educated in Rosenwald schools from the time they were built, beginning in 1917, until schools were legally integrated—for some, not until the 1960s. Across the entire American South, more than six hundred thousand African American children attended a Rosenwald school.[21] But the true reach was far greater than just the hundreds of thousands of children who had the opportunity to receive an education. It’s easy to make the argument that the five thousand schools impacted millions, maybe even tens of millions. Not only did a child receiving an education affect their immediate family, it affected that child’s children, and their grandchildren, and their communities at large.

Were the schools separate? They were. Did JR and Booker T. Washington, who died partway through the project, try to create integrated facilities? No. They were working within the confines of an existing societal structure, believing that educating students had to be realistic. Were they equal? No. Did they still change the course of history in an imperfect way? Yes.

The Washington Post interviewed several people in Maryland who attended a Rosenwald school. LaVerne Gray said of her time there, “You were expected to grow up and be a credit to your race.” Her cousin Corinthia Boone said, “Oh yes, you were expected to be somebody. Our teachers wanted us to be contributors to society.”

Without their ability to become educated, integration and equality under the law would not have occurred. Education was simply too powerful a weapon, and without the lift from JR, there is little chance that states would have allowed African Americans to wield it.

A man once asked JR, “Why are you doing so much to help the Negro?” “I am interested in America,” he said. “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind.”[23]

When Virginia Randolph, the first Jeanes teacher, saw her life’s work go up in flames in 1929, it was the Julius Rosenwald Fund that gave some of the money to construct the new and bigger school out of brick.

Asakichi rose at 2:00 a.m. each morning to earn extra money to pay off the debt of his father. It took thirty years.

“You fools!” his father screamed at the planes. “FOOLS!”[14] The singular pain of the country of his ancestry attacking the country of his heart twisted his face. In a world where many Americans already hated the Japanese, it was like watching a slow-motion nightmare play out before his eyes.

It didn’t matter how prosperous someone became, it didn’t matter how hard they worked or how deeply they believed in the promise of America, if they had the wrong face, they were an “other.”

“Internment” is what happens to citizens of the enemy you are fighting. But the majority of people who were sent to the camps were citizens of the United States by birth. They, by definition, could not be interned. They were imprisoned. Incarcerated without due process. While you may still hear people call them internment camps, every person I have interviewed prefers incarceration or concentration camp, because the term more accurately describes what was happening.

Norm’s family was lucky in one respect: a white attorney named J. B. Peckham was incensed by California’s long-standing policy of not allowing people of Asian descent to own land, so he created a workaround. He would purchase property in his own name, allowing the Asian family to pay him for the mortgage, and when a family’s oldest child, a U.S. citizen by birth, turned twenty-one, he would legally transfer the property to them. On paper, Peckham appeared to be one of the wealthiest men in Santa Clara County, California. In reality, he owned the properties in name only. He gave the dream of home ownership to hundreds of families for whom it would have been otherwise out of reach.[6]

The train journey to Southern California took more than sixteen hours, and it was full of the quiet suffering of people who knew in their hearts their only crime was having been born of the wrong womb.

Eighty percent of eligible Japanese Americans volunteered for military service. They bought more war bonds than any other group.[3]

When he left, his parents put their hands on his shoulders. “You do not dishonor this family,” they said, “and you do not dishonor this country. If you must die, die with honor.”[5]

He built enough connections in San Jose to get appointed to the city council when a spot became available, and eventually Norm won election to the mayor’s office. His win became international news, and represented a giant step for mankind: voters had elected an Asian American mayor of a major city.[3]

When Norm ran for Congress and won, Alan Simpson wasn’t far behind. The friendship formed inside the barbed wire of Heart Mountain, Wyoming, picked up where it left off. When Alan and Norm met again, they immediately started laughing, greeting each other with the hugs and kisses that come from the hearts of only the truest of friends. They couldn’t have been more opposite: Alan was cowboy stock: large, pale, and steely. Norm was the son of an immigrant, with a thick shock of black hair. He barely came to Alan’s shoulder. When you watch interviews of them together, they either spend all their time laughing or trying to make each other cry.

before Alan even gets to the punch line. But Alan can’t help but extoll Norm’s virtues. “It’s been a wonderful, rich ride of true friendship, which is a beautiful thing”[7] and “I really respect and admire him. And love him. He is a wonderful, wonderful individual.”[8] These are words you don’t expect from a juvenile delinquent cowboy from Wyoming. “There are a lot of issues where I’ve had an opposite view,” Norm said. “I’m a liberal Democrat. He’s a conservative. He’s a good Republican. So it’s not that we had agreement on everything…. We had fights in committees or subcommittees, and then we’d slap each other on the back and say, ‘Come on, let’s go have dinner. Let’s go have a drink.’ I don’t know how to describe it. We just see each other and begin to laugh.”[9]

Norm Mineta and Daniel Inouye were proud to be among the first Asian Americans in Congress. Together with other Japanese American congressional leaders, they proposed legislation that would make amends for the atrocities the government leveled at Japanese Americans during World War II.

Norm went to bat for HR 442, named after the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. It came up for debate in 1987, on the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution. He said, “Though this bill is a deeply personal one for a small number, this legislation touches all of us, because it touches the very core of our nation. Does our Constitution indeed protect all of us, regardless of race or culture? We lost our homes, we lost our businesses, we lost our farms, but worst of all, we lost our most basic human rights. Our own government had branded us with the unwarranted stigma of disloyalty which clings to us still to this day.”[12]

“I tried to depoliticize my cabinet. I didn’t want people in there serving the Republican Party, I wanted people in there serving their country. There is no better servant for America than Norm Mineta,” Bush recalled.[14]

“I’m here to tell you that his physical courage was matched by his moral courage. I don’t know of anybody else I can say that of. He was, in my thirty-six years in the Senate, more trusted by his colleagues than any man or woman I ever served with. No one ever doubted that Danny Inouye had such integrity at his core that he would meet any obligation thrust upon him with absolute steadiness and objectivity.