Locations:Mississippi National River & Recreation Area
Robert Thomas Hickman was born an enslaved man near Boone, Missouri in 1831. With permission of his enslaver, Hickman learned to read and write. This allowed him to preach to fellow enslaved people on several plantations, and ultimately leading group of Black men and women to freedom in 1863 via the Mississippi River.
Locations:Mississippi National River & Recreation Area
Ruth Tanbara was a pioneering Japanese American community leader in St. Paul, MN. During World War II, the incarceration of Japanese Americans forced her and her husband Earl to leave their home in Berkeley, CA. They were the first Japanese Americans to resettle to St. Paul, and worked to promote the acceptance of other Japanese Americans from incarceration camps. After the war, the Tanbaras stayed in St. Paul and remained active in the community.
Locations:Mississippi National River & Recreation Area
Eva McDonald Valesh was an investigative journalist and labor activist. She exposed unsafe conditions for women workers in the Twin Cities during the late nineteenth century and became a prominent labor writer and speaker.
