by Mark Stover | Aug 17, 2023
Jimmy Carter served as the thirty-ninth president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. His administration’s accomplishments include the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union. After leaving the White House, President Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that works to promote peace, democracy, and human rights. President Carter also teaches Sunday School and is a deacon at the Maranatha Baptist Church. He builds homes one week each year for Habitat for Humanity and is the author of fourteen books.
by Mark Stover | Aug 17, 2023
Harry Wu spent nineteen years in Chinese prison camps during the 1960s and 1970s. He was arrested and detained again for sixty-six days in 1995 at the Chinese border while on a fact-finding mission. He is executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation in Milpitas, California, and has held research positions at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. He has built a database of information on more than eleven hundred prisons and concentration camps of the Chinese gulag system, or “Laogai,” which literally means “reform through labor.” He is the author of two autobiographical books.
by Mark Stover | Aug 17, 2023
One of the main figures responsible for the fall of European communism, Lech Walesa began work as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdan´sk, Poland, in 1967. After losing his job in 1976 for organizing against Poland’s Communist government, he climbed over the shipyard wall to join striking workers, who elected him to lead negotiations. Walesa eventually won the legalization of the ten-million-member national union Solidarity, which he led. After a landslide victory, Walesa served for five years as Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister in more than forty years. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.
by Mark Stover | Aug 16, 2023
China’s most prominent dissident, Wei Jingsheng, has spent most of his adult life in prison. He was first sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment in 1979 for arguing in protests and in his essay “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy” that, in addition to Deng Xiaoping’s heralded reforms, China needed democracy. Enduring solitary confinement and unspeakable conditions, Wei was released in 1993 during China’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Within eighteen months, after returning immediately to vocal protest, he was sentenced to another fourteen years. He was released three years later on medical parole. He now lives in the United States, hoping one day to return to China. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.
