American civil rights activists

Alicia Escalante is a Chicana activist who was active during the Chicano Movement. She was the founder and chair of the East Los Angeles Chicana Welfare Rights Organization from 1967 to 1978.

Rueben Martinez (born April 26, 1940 in Miami, Arizona) is an American activist and businessman. He is active in Democratic party politics and runs a barbershop and a Latino-focused bookstore in Santa Ana, California.

Robert Chrisman (May 28, 1937 – March 10, 2013) was a poet, scholar, and founding editor and publisher of The Black Scholar (TBS). Chrisman and the internationally acclaimed TBS "occupied the vanguard of the struggle for recognition of Black Studies as a serious academic endeavor."

Silvia Baraldini (December 12, 1947) is an Italian political activist. From the age of 12, she lived in the United States and became a student radical. She joined the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the May 19th Communist Organization, groups which aimed to support Black Power and Puerto Rican independence movements. In 1977, Baraldini acted as spokesperson for the protestors outside the court during the trial of Assata Shakur and two years later, she helped to break Shakur out of jail, driving a getaway car. In 1982, she was arrested and imprisoned on a 43 year sentence under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for conspiring to commit armed robberies. Baraldini was held in a purpose-built High Security Unit (HSU) in the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky which also housed two other women, Susan Rosenberg and Alejandrina Torres. Conditions in the unit were criticized by Amnesty International and it was closed by judicial order.
Whilst incarcerated, she had cancer twice. After being transferred to Italy in 1999 to serve the remainder of her sentence, she was released into house arrest in 2001 and pardoned five years later by Minister of Justice Clemente Mastella. Her life has been the subject of the documentaries Ore d'aria – La vita di Silvia Baraldini (Hours outside: The life of Silvia Baraldini) in 2002 and Freeing Silvia Baraldini.

Mario Guerra Obledo (April 9, 1932 – August 18, 2010) was an American civil rights leader. He was called the "Godfather of the Latino Movement" in the United States, credited with establishing numerous civic institutions and bringing Latino interests into the center of the U.S. political arena. He also served as California's Secretary of Health and Welfare from 1975 to 1982.