Evangeline Marrs Simpson Whipple

At the turn of the twentieth century, Evangeline Whipple used her wealth to improve the lives of women, people of color, and the poor. She supported social justice for Native Americans in Minnesota, for African Americans in Florida, and for villagers and World War I refugees in Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

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Bertha Berglin Moller

Bertha Berglin Moller (Delin), jailed twice in Washington, DC, for leading a hunger strike, was one of Minnesota’s most passionate and fiery woman suffragists.

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Alice Tripp

A self-proclaimed “jumper-inner,” Alice Tripp made her mark as a grassroots activist and self-taught farmer. She was a key leader of a movement opposing the CU Powerline, which began construction on western Minnesota farmland in the early 1970s.

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Nellie Stone Johnson

Nellie Stone Johnson was an African American union and civil rights leader whose career spanned the class-conscious politics of the 1930s and the liberal reforms of the Minnesota DFL Party.

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Ruth Nomura Tanbara

In August of 1942, Ruth Tanbara and her husband, Earl, were the first Japanese Americans to resettle in St. Paul as a result of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. They assisted the St. Paul Resettlement Committee during World War II and remained in the city after the war’s end, becoming life-long community leaders in St. Paul.

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Toki Wakayama

The Wakayama case was a wartime test case that challenged the detention of Japanese Americans forcibly removed from the West Coast.

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Teiko Ishida

Teiko Ishida (1916-98) was the first woman to be appointed to the national board of the Japanese American Citizens League in 1939 and was the first woman appointed to the position of national secretary of the JACL from 1943 to 1945.

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