1. Heather Booth was born on December 15,1945 and is an American civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist who has been involved in activism for progressive causes.
28 Facts About Heather Booth
1. 2.
Heather Booth said that she grew up in a warm, loving, and supportive family, and that her parents taught her the importance of recognizing injustice and acting to correct it.
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From her Jewish upbringing, Heather Booth learned to take on responsibility for building a society that reflected these goals.
4.
In high school, Heather Booth joined a sorority and the cheerleading team but left both of them when she came to believe that their members were discriminating against students who did not lead their privileged lives.
5.
Heather Booth chose that school in part because it had no sororities and deemphasized sports.
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One of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, Paul Heather Booth was national secretary of the organization when they met.
7.
Heather Booth helped organize the 1965 March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam, subsequently became president of the Citizen Action Program in Chicago, and was later a director of the Midwest Academy.
8.
Heather Booth died January 17,2018, from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
9.
Heather Booth defended an African-American fellow student who was being attacked for allegedly stealing another student's lunch money.
10.
Heather Booth became student liaison to the Chicago Council of Community Organizations, which was then protesting school segregation in the city.
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In 1964, Heather Booth joined the Freedom Summer project in which volunteers from Northern and Western colleges and universities worked to register black voters and set up freedom schools and libraries in Mississippi.
12.
In 1965, Heather Booth was arrested while demonstrating at banks that were providing financial support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.
13.
Heather Booth left SNCC in 1967 when its leaders no longer welcomed Whites as members.
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Heather Booth then devoted more of her time to issues related to feminism and the anti-war movement.
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Heather Booth helped to organize a course on women's studies, began to coach women who were uneasy about speaking up in class, and conducted a study on the disparity of treatment between male and female students in the classroom.
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In 1965, a fellow student asked whether Heather Booth could help his sister who was so greatly distraught about an unwanted pregnancy as to consider killing herself.
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Heather Booth formed it by involving like-minded students in a clandestine organization for evaluating doctors, counseling women who contacted them, performing referrals, and conducting follow-up discussions by phone.
18.
In 1969, recognizing the need to counter a strong tendency among feminists to see all organizational structures as oppressive, Heather Booth joined with five other women to found the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.
19.
Heather Booth sued and in 1972 won her case before the National Labor Relations Board.
20.
In 1978, Heather Booth proposed and helped to found an alliance of citizen-activist and labor organizations called the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, often referred to as CLEC.
21.
In 1981, Heather Booth was arrested while supporting miners during the Pittston Coal strike.
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Heather Booth was an adviser to Harold Washington's 1983 and 1987 mayor campaigns in Chicago and subsequently served as field director for Carol Moseley-Braun's successful campaign for the Senate in 1992.
23.
Late in 1999, Heather Booth helped found a federation of progressive community organizing groups called USAction.
24.
In 2018, Heather Booth was arrested at a Capitol Hill protest in support of the DACA program and in 2003, she was lead consultant to the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform and subsequently to the Voter Participation Center.
25.
Heather Booth was the senior advisor to the One Nation Working Together rally held in October 2010 and consultant to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare a year later.
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Heather Booth worked to achieve financial reform and establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
27.
In 2019, Heather Booth was arrested during a "Fire Drill Fridays" climate change rally on Capitol Hill.
28.
Heather Booth was appointed Progressive Outreach Director for the 2024 Biden presidential election campaign.