Throughout history many people have had to fight hard to earn their rights. Rights that, in hindsight, should have applied to people all along. Sadly this is not the world we live in and everyday people still struggle to be seen as an equal, a peer…. a human. Whilst we continue the relentless march of equality, we’re going to look back at a few people who have been arrested for fighting for what they believed in, some ultimately giving their lives for the pursuit of fairness.

Christabel Pankhurst

We’ll start off with one close to British hearts. Christabel Pankhurst, one of the Pankhurst sisters behind the suffragette movement to give women the vote, spat at a police officer on 13 October 1905 which led to her being arrested, along with Annie Kenny for disorderly behaviour in the street, obstructing the foot and carriage way in South-street and in the case of Christabel, assaulting the police.

Why did she do this? Despite numerous attempts to get ministers to discuss the subject of votes for women, the matter was always ignored or overlooked. Fed up of being ignored, Pankhurst interrupted a Liberal Party meeting by shouting demands for voting rights for women. As the women were being accosted by the police, Christabel came to the realisation that the only way that she would get her voice heard was to be arrested. This way, when she eventually got her day in court, the press would report every word she said. The result was a swelling of the ranks of the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Movement) and the rest is history.

Christabel and many other members of the WSPU were arrested over the coming years, each time as an act of protest against the establishment ignoring votes for women. Despite some of the more extreme acts committed by the women such as arson and bombings, the WSPU and the Suffragette movement are celebrated for gaining women the right to vote.

Mohandas Gandhi

Revered the world over for his nonviolent philosophy of passive resistance, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was known to his many followers as Mahatma, or “the great-souled one.” Prior to his political activism, Ghandi spent nearly 20 years working in South Africa and was appalled by the discrimination he experienced as an Indian immigrant. The turning point being an incident where he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and beaten up by a white stagecoach driver after refusing to give up his seat for a European passenger.

His first taste of protesting began in South Africa. In 1906, after the Transvaal government passed an ordinance regarding the registration of its Indian population, Gandhi led a campaign of civil disobedience that would last for the next eight years. This eventually led to the South African Government to reach a compromise which included important concessions such as the recognition of Indian marriages and the abolition of the existing poll tax for Indians.

Gandhi was first imprisoned in 1922 for civil disobedience and sedition after a protest march turned violent and resulted in the deaths of 22 people. The incident deeply affected Gandhi, who called it a “divine warning’. He was released from prison after serving 5 years of his 6-year sentence and went on to become the most famous advocate of peaceful protest and campaigning in the world.

Gandhi famously led Indians in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km Dandi Salt March in 1930, for which he was imprisoned for a year without trial, and later lead the Quit India Movement, calling for Britain’s withdrawal. He was arrested many times but never gave up. An advocate until the end, Gandhi sadly paid for his beliefs with his life when he was assassinated by a militant nationalist in 1948.

Rosa Parks


A few may know of the bravery Rosa Parks showed on December 1st, 1955. In the midst of the racial tension surrounding African-American citizens in the mid-20th century, 42-year-old Rosa Parks was commuting home from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store by bus. Black residents of Montgomery often avoided municipal buses if possible because they found the Negroes-in-back policy so demeaning. Sadly, most of the bus users on a typical day were black and, on this day, so too was Rosa Parks.

Segregation was written into law; the front of a Montgomery bus was reserved for white citizens, and the seats behind them for black citizens. At one point during the route on that fateful day, a white man had nowhere to sit because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken.

The driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “coloured” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” wrote Parks in her autobiography, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Eventually, two police officers approached the stopped bus, assessed the situation and arrested Rosa for violating segregation laws. This resulted in Rosa being fired from her job and it caused absolute outrage both inside and outside of the civil rights community, leading to a bus boycott led by Martin Luther King. After a year, the boycott successfully made bus segregation unconstitutional and paved the way for later victories of the civil rights campaign. Rosa Parks was a brave and passionate woman who changed the world and became a respected and much loved national symbol of the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King


Martin Luther King had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States, as the face of the Civil-Rights movement in the 1950’s. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. Through his activism, he played a pivotal role in ending the legal segregation of African-American citizens, as well as the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among several other honours.

King was arrested 5 times and wrote his second most influential speech whilst in prison in 1963 for protesting against the treatment of the black community in Birmingham, Alabama. Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent defence of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

Later that year, King organised the ‘March on Washington’ for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices African Americans continued to face across the country. The March on Washington culminated in King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Tragically, in 1968 he was assassinated in his hotel at the age of just 39.