Our Heroes
Inland Southern California has a rich civil rights history and can serve as an important center for inclusion regionwide. Here are only a few of the better known figures that will be featured on the Walk of Fame.
Santos Manuel
1866
Yuhaaviatam tribal leader Santos Manuel defended the lives of First Americans in San Bernardino. The sovereign nation of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians is named in his honor.
John W. North
1870
Abolitionist, Lincoln appointee, founder of Riverside, based on equality, education, and shared opportunity.
Eliza Tibbets
1871
Suffragist, abolitionist; took women’s suffrage to the Washington, DC Supreme Court.
1904
1915Rupert Costo
1930s
Cahuilla tribal leader, lobbyist for Native American land rights, founder of American Indian Historical Society, scholar and author exploring Native American history under the mission system and the U.S. government.
Mine Okubo
1942
Artist and documentarian of life in Japanese internment camps during World War II.
Jack Clarke, Sr.
1946
One of the first full-time African American professionals hired at the California Youth Authority, he was an affirmative action pioneer. In 1981, he was the first African American elected to the Riverside County Office of Education, and in 1986 the first elected to the Riverside City Council.
Barnett and Jean Grier
1951
Barnett Grier was a equal employment leader in federal employment while at the Corona Naval Ordinance Laboratories, fair housing and education desegregation leader regionally. Jean was one of the first African American teachers at a predominantly white school in the region.
Dalip Singh Saund
1951
Campaigner for the rights of people of South Asian descent, first Asian American to be elected to Congress.
Lulamae Clemons
1960’s
Nurse, public health leader, and equal education pioneer, Dr. Clemons led the federally funded University of California Title IV Schools Desegregation Project in four western states.
César Chávez
1962
As a child, César Chávez followed the crops in the Salinas, Central, Imperial, and Coachella Valleys with his migrant parents, working in the fields and experiencing the unsafe working conditions and starvation wages that led him to found the United Farm Workers in 1962.
John Sotelo
1963
Civil rights activist in the American GI Forum and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Businessman and leader of coalition to elect the first minority member to Riverside city council.
1965Arthur L. Littleworth
1965
President of the Riverside Unified School District board, Littleworth led the school board to approve voluntary integration of Riverside schools, the first large school district in the nation to do so.
Edna Milan
1966
Edna Milan was a veteran of the civil rights movement starting in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, and later in the 1960s as a parishioner at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. She was recruited as a teacher by Riverside Unified School District to assist with integration as a part of a model for voluntary integration nationwide.
Tim Hays
1967
Editor of Pulitzer-winning series of 100 plus articles exposing abuse of authority by conservator for the Agua Caliente. Freedom of information advocate in two winning cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984 and 1986.
1979Richard Milanovich
1984
As tribal chairman of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, Richard Milanovich negotiated ground breaking intergovernmental land use agreements that were models nationwide.
Justice Richard T. Fields
1990
The first African-American jurist in the history of Riverside County.
Kay Berryhill Smith and Carolyn Confer
1991
Carolyn Confer, as assistant city attorney for Riverside, defended the city in a lawsuit that sought to force the city to put a discriminatory measure against homosexuals and persons with AIDS on the ballot. Kay and Carolyn founded PACE, a regional gay and lesbian political action committee.
Judge Virginia A. Phillips
2010
Gave justice to homosexual members of the armed forces by ruling “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” unconstitutional.
Juan Felipe Herrera
2015
Child of farm workers, poet focusing on civil rights issues, nation’s first Chicano Poet Laureate.