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Previous Speakers  Hugh Gregory Gallagher Disability Rights Activist Scholar Writer Hugh Gregory Gallagher was born October 18, 1932, in Palo Alto, California, The son of Hubert and Luthera Wakefield Gallagher. Gallagher's father was a professor of public administration and a government consultant, and as a result Gallagher grew up in several different places, including Chicago, New York, Washington, Colorado, Greece, and Great Britain. In 1952 Gallagher was stricken with polio at the age of 19, while attending Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He spent six weeks in an iron lung and nearly died. For more than a year he underwent treatment for the disease as He struggled to recover from it, but it left him paralyzed from the chest down. Gallagher would dedicate his life to gaining equal rights for people with disabilities. In 1995, Gallagher won the $50,000 Henry B. Betts Award for his lifetime of work for the disabled. He was instrumental in seeing that the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, dedicated in 1997, depicted the former president as he really lived--in a wheelchair. He was a co-founder of AUTONOMY, INC., and was on the board of Compassion in Dying, both organizations interested in end-of-life issues. His final book, Nothing to Fear: FDR in Photographs, was published in 2001. Gallagher died July 13, 2004. Presentations
"FDR's Splendid Deception" 1985 "Black Bird Fly Away: Disabled in an Able-bodied World" 1998
 Angela DavisInternationally Renown AuthorActivist Scholar Angela Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, in the days of Jim Crow. Her father, a graduate of St. Augustine's College, a traditional black college in Raleigh, North Carolina, was briefly a high school history teacher. Leaving teaching due to the low salary, he owned and operated a service station in the black section of Birmingham. Her mother, also college educated, was an elementary school teacher with a history of political activism. Using their modest income, the family purchased a large home in a mixed neighborhood where Angela spent most of her youth. Throughout her life she has worked on a career of activism, and has written several books. A principal focus of her current activism is the state of prisons within the United States. She considers herself an abolitionist, not a "prison reformer," and refers to the United States prison system as the "prison-industrial complex."Her solutions include abolishing prisons and addressing the class,race, and gender factors that have led to large numbers of blacks and Latinos being incarcerated. She has lectured at San Francisco State University, Stanford University and other schools. She is currently a UC Presidential Chair and professor with the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and director of the Women's studies department. She states that in her teaching, which is mostly at the graduate level, she concentrates more on posing questions which encourage development of critical thinking than on imparting knowledge. Presentations"Peace and International Affairs" 1990
 Noam ChomskyLinguist Philosopher Political Activist Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar William Chomsky, who was from a town in Ukraine later wiped out by the Nazis. His mother, Elsie Chomsky née Simonofsky, came from what is now called Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in America and normally spoke "ordinary New York English". Later in life Chomsky would join the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. He has been teaching at MIT continuously for the last 50 years. It was during this time that Chomsky became more publicly engaged in politics: he became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" in The New York Review of Books in 1967. Since that time, Chomsky has become well known for his political views, speaking on politics all over the world, and writing numerous books. His far-reaching criticism of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power has made him a controversial figure. He has a devoted following among the left, but he has also come under increasing criticism from liberals as well as from the right, particularly because of his response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Presentations"The Aftermath of the Cold War and the Gulf War" 1992
 Morris DeesExecutive Director & Chief Trial Lawyer Southern Poverty Center After graduation from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1960, he returned to Montgomery, Alabama and opened a law office. He ran a book publishing business, Fuller & Dees Marketing Group, which grew to become a successful company in its own right. After what Dees described in his autobiography as "a night of soul searching at a snowed-in Cincinnati airport" in 1967, he sold the company in 1969 to Times Mirror, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times. He used the revenue generated by the sale to found the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971. Dees' new legal firm began taking part in civil rights cases that frequently put him in the spotlight. He filed suit to stop construction of a white university in an Alabama city that already had a predominantly black state college. In 1969, he filed suit to integrate the all-white Montgomery YMCA. Dees' most famous cases have involved landmark damage awards that have driven several prominent neo-Nazi groups into bankruptcy, effectively causing them to disband and re-organize under different names and different leaders. In 1981, Dees successfully sued the Ku Klux Klan and won a seven million dollar settlement. This was topped a decade later, when in 1991 he won a judgement of $12 million against White Aryan Resistance. He was also instrumental in the rewarding of a $6.5 million judgement against Aryan Nations in 2001, which splintered that group as well. Presentations"A Season for Justice" 1993
 Clarence PageSyndicated Columnist Chicago Tribune Page is a journalist, syndicated columnist and member of the editorial board for the Chicago Tribune. He is an occasional panelist on The McLaughlin Group, a regular contributor of essays to News Hour with Jim Lehrer, host of several documentaries on the Public Broadcasting System, and an occasional commentator on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Sunday. Page was born in Dayton, Ohio. A 1965 graduate of Middletown High School in Ohio, he began his journalism career as a freelance writer and photographer for the Middletown Journal and Cincinnati Enquirer at the age of 17. Page received his Bachelor of Science degree in journalism from Ohio University in 1969, where he was the commencement speaker in 1993. He has received honorary doctorates from Columbia College in Chicago, Lake Forest College, and Nazareth College in Rochester. He has been married since 1987 to the former Lisa Johnson of Chicago. They have one child and reside in Washington D.C.
Presentation
"Race Relations: Do We Really Have any?" 1994
 Ward ChurchillNative Rights Activist Public Speaker Writer Churchill was born and grew up in a blue-collar family in Elmwood, Illinois. His parents, Maralyn and Jack Churchill, divorced while Ward was still a toddler. In March 1950, his mother married Henry Carlton Debo, an employee of Caterpillar in downstate Peoria, as a result of which Churchill has two half-brothers, Tom and Danny, and a half-sister, Terry. When he enrolled in Elmwood High School, Churchill went by the name Ward Debo, taking his stepfather's surname, but when he graduated in 1965, he was listed in his yearbook, the Ulmus, as Ward L. Churchill.
Presentation
"Indigenous Governance in America: Fact, Fantasy and Prospects for the Future" 1995
 Jill Cornell TarterReal Life Hero of the Movie "Contact" Tarter, born 1944, is an American astronomer and the current director of the Center for SETI Research. She holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. Tarter received her undergraduate education at Cornell University and her PH.D from the University of California. Tarter has worked on a number of major scientific projects, most relating to the search for extraterrestrial life. As a graduate student, she worked on the radio-search project SERENDIP. She was project scientist for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) in 1992 and 1993 and subsequently director of Project Phoenix (HRMS reconfigured) under the auspices of SETI. She was co-creator of the HabCat in 2002, a principal component of Project Phoenix. Tarter has published dozens of technical papers and lectures extensively both on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the need for proper science education. Her work in the astrobiology field and her success as a female scientist have garnered achievement awards from Women in Aerospace and NASA, amongst others. Dr. Tarter also currently serves as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Tarter was the inspiration for Jodi Foster's character in the movie Contact. She conversed with the actress for months before and during filming. Presentation
"Searching the Galaxy for Life" 1999
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