He hated supervisors with a serious passion. To him, all the raises in the world wouldn't change the fact that teachers were forced to work in a system he called "a thinly veiled despotism."

Militancy lost its romance early in Fanny Simon’s life. Only a teenager, she found out that a strike doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Her father lost his job and the family was uprooted when a strike by glove cutters was crushed.

They made for an odd couple. Henry Linville, soft-spoken and almost courtly, with neither the temperament nor talent for personal confrontation. Not so his longtime and much younger sidekick Abraham Lefkowitz. “He was a fighter,” remembers Ruben...

Born in 1898, Layle Lane was a toddler when a vow to lynch her Congregational minister father forced the family to flee their Marrietta, Ga. home. A graduate of Howard University with a master's from Columbia, she became a high school social studies...

By the mid-1950s it was apparent there was no shortage of rising young stars on the horizon. Still, none shone brighter than Ely Trachtenberg.

The youngest of seven children, Martha Straus grew up on the Lower East Side. "There was no starvation but there were no luxuries either," she says. Her father and older brother took part in the 1910 cloak makers strike that came to be known as "the...

If your idea of an accountant is a conservative, number-crunching nerd, you should have known Dave Wittes.

Born in 1866, Henry Richardson Linville grew up in St. Joseph, Mo., and earned his Ph.D at Harvard before moving to the city and becoming a biology teacher at Jamaica HS. That’s when the newly formed Teachers Union chose Linville as its head.

When the union needed a sharp lawyer, it didn’t have far to look as long as Jules Kolodny was around.

Brilliant and articulate, no one ever doubted that Rebecca Simonson had a way with words. But it wasn't so much poetry as strategy that led the leader of the Teachers Guild in the 1940s to compare organizing to "opening a flower one petal at a time."