Michael Curtotti, Ten Lives Declaring Human Rights
From Bartolomé de las Casas to Martin Luther King Jr.
They walked in the darkest parts of human history: in the blood of genocide, the chains of slavery, in the oppression of women, in the death camps of the Holocaust and in the hatred and exclusion of racism. Yet, where others could see only our worst, they saw another path. And what they discovered, they taught to the rest of us.
These ten, and others like them, "declared" human rights by their very lives. Often long before the ideas appeared in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were there. When human rights were being born, they were there.
Some of their names will be familiar, others will not. Bartolome de Las Casas, Thomas Clarkson, Lucretia Mott, Tahirih, Frederick Douglass, Alain Locke, Primo Levi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. and Albie Sachs. Yet, you won’t find the “official” story of human rights in this book. Indeed, most of the lives you find here, barely appear in that official story.
What are human rights? What does it mean to work for them? As we follow their stories we will see through their eyes.
“In telling these stories … this book brings human rights ‘close to home’, where universal human rights begin, as Eleanor Roosevelt put it. Michael Curtotti has … done us all a great service in this.”