The ArtEffect Project
Pre-Approved Unsung Heroes
Irena Sendler (WWII nurse/hero who devised plan and saved 2500 children)
Gene Shoemaker (space pioneer)
Robert R. Williams (scientist)
Jane Elliott (elementary teacher/activist)
Dorothy Buell (nature activist)
Kendall Reinhardt (friend who stood up for his beliefs)
Ralph Lazo (volunteer prisoner who protested racism)
Therese Frare (photojournalist)
L. Alex Wilson (journalist during Civil Rights)
Jacob Valentine II (nature activist)
U.S. Colonel Halvorsen (U.S. military pilot)
Sheyann Webb (8 year old Civil Rights activist)
Meva Mikusz (saved and protected child in WWII)
Alice Seeley Harris (English missionary who used her camera to expose atrocities in the Congo)
Lt. Colonel Tran Ngoc Hue (aided the U.S. during the Vietnam War)
Virginia Apgar (developed the A.P.G.A.R. score, which determines a baby’s health one and five
minutes after birth)
Hepy Lamar (model who helped invent radio technology to combat Nazis in WWII)
Roslif Naf (nurse with the Swiss Red Cross who rescued several Jewish children from Nazi
controlled France during WWII)
Elizabeth Horton Sheff (Civil rights activist who led a lawsuit to rectify educational inequities
between urban/suburban schools)
Sylvia Mendez (Civil rights activist whose landmark 1946 desegregation case paved the way for
Brown vs. Board of Education)
Helen Taussig (founder of pediatric cardiology for involvement with “blue baby” syndrome)
Anna Smith Strong (American patriot and only female member of George Washington's Culper
Spy Ring)
Minoru Yasui (Japanese orchardist who started the first Supreme Court case testing the
constitutionality of Japanese internment)
Pavel Winer (young boy who confronted adversity through secret newspapers during WWII)
Sofia Kovalevskaya (first major Russian female mathematician and one of the first women to
work as editor for a scientific journal)
Lewis Hine (photographer who was a child labor activist)
Justus von Liebig (19th century pioneer in Chemistry)
Hiram Bingham IV (diplomat in France that wrote visas for Jewish refugees in WWII)
Bernice Sandler (Godmother of Title IX)
Eugen Caldwell (noted X-ray expert and inventor of many devices)
Will Counts (photographer who used his 36mm camera to shoot civil rights events)
John Lomax (innovatively captured sound… )
Robert Williams (developed ways to synthesize vitamins)
Cher Ami (pigeon that saved over 200 soldier lives during WW I by transporting a message tied
to her leg through enemy territory)
Segeant Stubby (most decorated animal in American military history..)
Emma Darling Cushman (American nurse who saved the lives of thousands of Armenian
children during the Armenian genocide)
Eugene Lazowski (doctor who saved the lives of over 8,000 Polish Jews during WWII by
injecting them with a phony vaccine)
Walter Sommers (World War II veteran who helped de-segregate lunch counters at the height
of the Civil Rights Movement)
Jan Opletal (brave activist who catalyzed widespread student activism and served as a model
for Nazi defiance in 1930s)
Katherine Buckner Avery (a nurse who broke social boundaries to improve rural health care in
Louisiana)
Frances Kelsey (pharmacologist/physician who, as a reviewer for the FDA, refused to authorize
a birth defect inducing drug)
Mitsuye Endo (woman who challenged Japanese-American internment all the way up to the
United States Supreme Court and won)
William Lewis Moore (postal worker and Congress of Racial Equality member who staged lone
protests against racial segregation)
Andrew Jackson Higgins (created the WWII “Higgins boat” that gave Allies a wartime
advantage)
Huddie Leadbelly (American folk and blues musician)
Emmeline Pankhurst (British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement
who helped women win the right to vote(
Jonathan Daniels (Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist)
Amos Bronson Alcott (American teacher, writer, philosopher, and education)
Robert Nesbit (pulpit committee of the Ebenezer Baptist Church)
Dorothea Lange (Depression-era American documentary photographer and photojournalist)
Joshua Chamberlain (American college professor best known for his heroic participation in the
Battle of Gettysburg)
Kadambini Gangly (First women graduate from India; first Indian woman to become a doctor;
first Indian woman to seek higher education outside the country; and ardent social activist,
advocating for women’s rights)
Hiawatha (Pre-colonial Mohawk chief of the Onandaga, attributed with uniting the 5 northern
Iroquois tribes into the Iroquois confederacy)
John Snow (Public heath advocate from the 19th century who played a major role in containing
the 1854 Cholera outbreak in London)
Yōsuke Yamahata (Took extensive photographs of the aftermath of the Nagasaki bombing at
the end of WWII, altering public opinion about the use of the atomic bomb)
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (Considered father of algebra and grandfather of
computer science; oversaw the translation of Greek and Indian mathematical and astronomical
works, preserving them through the European dark ages)
Frederick III, Elector of Saxony (One of the first notably ardent supporters of Martin Luther,
who he hid in the aftermath of the Diet of Worms, giving Luther time to translate the Bible into
German, which would eventually lead to the breakup of Catholic hegemony in Europe)
Olaudah Equiano (Freed slave who became active in the abolitionist movement in England;
influential in the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807)
Jigonhsasee (An influential figure in the establishment of the Iroquois confederacy)