Scholar

Father of Ecology

b. September 14, 1769
d. May 6, 1859

“The most dangerous worldview is ... of those who have not viewed the world.”

Alexander von Humboldt was a renowned Prussian naturalist, explorer, and geographer, and the preeminent scientist of his time. Regarded as the father of ecology, he laid the foundations for modern biogeography and meteorology and shaped the concept of climate zones, weather forecasting and the theory of man-made climate change.

Von Humboldt was born into a wealthy Prussian family. In 1791, as a compromise between his mother’s desire for him to become a civil servant and his own interest in science and geology, he enrolled at the Mining Academy at Freiburg. As a mining inspector, he investigated the effect of light exposure on wildlife, collected thousands of botanical specimens and invented a breathing mask.

The death of his mother and his inheritance in 1796 enabled von Humboldt to fulfill his dream of traveling the world. Along with Aimé Bon­pland, a botanist, he explored Latin America for five years. He landed in modern-day Venezuela, where he traversed rainforests, crossed the Orinoco River and ascended the Andes mountains. He suffered intense cold, braved earthquakes and conducted life-threatening experiments with electrical eels. He returned with notebooks full of geological and meteorological observations and more than 60,000 plant specimens.

At Venezuela’s Lake Valencia, von Humboldt first developed the idea of human-induced climate change. He was the first to describe the fundamental impact of the forest on ecosystems and climate. On Mount Chimborazo, von Humboldt had an epiphany: he reasoned that the world was a single, interconnected organism. His view that ecosystems were intrinsically linked contrasted with previous scientific classifications of the earth and transformed the way scientists viewed nature.

Von Humboldt’s published works on nature made a far-reaching, interdisciplinary impact on major 20th and 21st century thinkers. His concepts inspired the young Charles Darwin to travel and informed his ideas on natural selection. Von Humboldt’s views prompted the revolutionary Simón Bolívar to assert that they had awakened the South American people to take pride in their continent. Von Humboldt influenced great writers such as Goethe, Whitman and Poe, and provided the scientific undergirding upon which modern environmentalists—from George Perkins Marsh to John Muir—built their ideas.

Von Humboldt’s personal life contrasted with his public celebrity. He held intense feelings for a series of male friends but struggled with loneliness. Contemporaries noted von Humboldt’s lack of love for women, and a newspaper article insinuated that he was a homosexual.

Von Humboldt died in Berlin, Germany, the city where he was born. He was 89.

LGBT Historian

b. July 18, 1940

“My writing has been my activism.”

Commonly known as the mother of LGBT history, Lillian Faderman is an internationally recognized pioneering lesbian scholar and historian. Her award-winning books have been translated into numerous languages.

Faderman was born in New York during World War II and raised by her mother and aunt, Latvian Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. The remainder of her family died in Europe during the Holocaust.
 
After moving with her mother and aunt to Los Angeles in her teens, Faderman began acting and modeling and discovered the underground gay bar scene. She bravely came out as a lesbian in 1956 during the Lavender Scare, a challenging period for gay Americans that was closely tied to McCarthyism.

Faderman went on to study at UC Berkeley, where she paid for her education working as a stripper. She then attended UCLA. She became an English professor at California State University Fresno, where she sought to address long-ignored populations. Toward that end, she co-edited her first published work, an anthology of multi-ethnic literature for the college classroom. Released in 1969, it was one of the first anthologies of its kind.

Although Faderman longed to write about sexual minorities, homophobia in the 1960s made such work difficult. In the 1970s, however, as feminism entered serious academic discourse, Faderman became one of the first academics to publish books about female same-sex relationships.
 
A pioneering authority on LGBT history and literature, Faderman has written 11 books. Among other recognition, she has received six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards and several prestigious lifetime achievement awards for her scholarship, including the James Brudner Award from Yale University. The New York Times honored her books “Surpassing the Love of Men” (1981),“Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” (1991) and “The Gay Revolution” (2015) on its list of Notable Books of the Year. The Guardian named “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” about lesbian life in the 20th century, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History and “The Gay Revolution” one of the Six Top Books of LGBT Life. “Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death,” her book about the slain gay San Francisco politician, was named Most Valuable Biography of 2018 by The Nation. In addition to her scholarly work, Faderman has published creative nonfiction, including her own memoir and a reconstructed memoir of her mother’s life.

Faderman retired in 2007 and serves as historian in residence for the Lambda Archives of San Diego. She has a son, Avrom, and lives with her partner of more than 45 years, Phyllis Irwin.

Distinguished Historian

b. July 28, 1954

“Marriage equality was neither inevitable nor, until recently, even conceivable.”

George Chauncey is a celebrated American historian and author whose groundbreaking scholarship helped establish the field of U.S. LGBT history and the basis of his work as an expert witness in numerous court cases.  He serves as the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University and the director of the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities.

The son of a Presbyterian minister who was active in the civil rights movement, Chauncey was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, and raised in the South. He attended Yale College, graduating with his doctorate in 1989. He attained a full professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught history 15 years.

In 1994 he published “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.” The groundbreaking work won five major awards, including the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award in social history and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history. It remains the most widely taught book about LGBT history.

In 2000 Chauncey secured major grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to support a conference at the University of Chicago billed as “the largest-ever” on lesbian, gay and queer history. The following year, Equality Illinois presented him with its Freedom Award.

In 2004 Chauncey published “Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality.” He joined the faculty of Yale in 2006, where he chaired the history department and the committee for LGBT studies. In 2012 Yale presented him with its prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. He joined the Columbia University faculty in 2017.

Chauncey has served as a historical consultant on major public projects, including exhibitions at the New York Public Library and the Chicago History Museum. He has provided expert witness testimony on the history of antigay discrimination in more than 30 court cases. Five reached the U.S. Supreme Court, including  Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which overturned the nation’s remaining sodomy laws; United States v. Windsor (2013), which struck down the core of the Defense of Marriage Act and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Chauncey earned fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center. He was elected a member of the Society of American Historians in 2005 and has served on its executive board.

In 2014 Chauncey married Ronald Gregg, a professor of film and media studies at Columbia. They live in New York.

Philosopher & Author

b. May 8, 1954

“Having an identity doesn’t, by itself, authorize you to speak on behalf of everyone of that identity.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ph.D., is a distinguished philosopher, author and professor who specializes in the philosophy of mind and language and the intellectual history of Africa and African-Americans.

Born in London, England, Appiah grew up in Ghana. His father, a native Ghanaian, was a well-known lawyer and politician. His mother, the daughter of a British statesmen, was an author and scholar. Their widely publicized marriage was one of the first interracial “society weddings” in Britain. It is thought to have inspired the 1967 film, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

Appiah received much of his education in England. He completed his bachelor’s degree in philosophy 1975 from Cambridge University. After teaching at the University of Ghana, he returned to Cambridge for his doctorate, graduating in 1982. He speaks five languages.

Appiah writes about ethics for The New York Times. He has published three novels, short fiction and numerous academic books. He is acclaimed for his groundbreaking scholarship, particularly on the philosophy and politics of personal identity. His work has been translated into more than 15 languages.

His early book “In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture” (1992), received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a  Herskovits Award  for “the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English.” His book “Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race” (1996), coauthored by Amy Gutman, presents his critique of the concept of biological race and how individuals frequently overemphasize it as part of their identity. In the “The Ethics of Identity” (2004), he explains how ideas around “group identities,” such as race and gender, can add to or detract from notions of individual freedom.

Appiah has lectured worldwide and taught at leading universities, including Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard. As an openly gay scholar, he served for 13 years on the editorial board of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, published by Duke University Press.

In 2002 Appiah joined the faculty of Princeton University, where he held appointments in the Philosophy Department and the University Center for Human Values, before becoming a professor emeritus. In 2014 he went on to New York University, where he teaches law and philosophy.

Father of the Harlem Renaissance

b. Sept. 13, 1885
d. June 9, 1954

“Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid.”

Alain Locke was the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, a writer, an educator and a philosopher of race and culture. He is considered the father of the Harlem Renaissance.

Locke graduated second in his class from Philadelphia’s Central High School and earned an undergraduate degree with honors from Harvard University. He received a Rhodes Scholarship—the prestigious international award for study at the University of Oxford in England.

At Oxford Locke faced rampant racial discrimination. He was denied admission to several colleges at the university before Hertford College admitted him. Thereafter, he studied at the University of Berlin.

Locke worked as an assistant professor at Howard University, then an all-black college, before leaving to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. He completed his doctoral dissertation on the theory of social bias and returned to Howard in 1918 as chair of the Philosophy Department. He held the position until he retired in 1953. Locke introduced the first classes taught on race relations.

Locke wrote for journals and guest edited a special issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem Renaissance—an African-American literary and artistic movement that flourished in New York City during the ’20s and ’30s. He published “The New Negro” in 1925, an anthology of work by black writers, including his own. It remains one of the most influential projects of his career, helping to define the cultural period.

Locke wrote, reviewed or edited scores of important books and publications by or about African-Americans. He influenced and promoted blacks in the arts and urged them to look to Africa for inspiration and identity. He used “cultural pluralism” to define his philosophy, calling for a “new spirit” among African-Americans that would defy social and racial impediments. His work helped launched the careers of legendary black writers, including Zora Neale Hurston.

Although he never publically disclosed his sexual orientation, Locke once referred to being gay as his point of “vulnerable/invulnerability;” it brought him both risk and strength.

Locke’s ashes are buried in the historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The memorial inscription calls him a “Herald of the Harlem Renaissance” and an “Exponent of Cultural Pluralism.” It also features a lambda, a symbol of gay rights.

Howard University named Locke Hall in the College of Arts and Sciences in his honor and public schools across the country bear his name. In 2002 Locke was included in the 100 Greatest African Americans and The Black 100.