Nicknamed “peaceful warrior,” Eva Jefferson Paterson was Northwestern’s first African American student government president. She participated in the 1968 Bursar’s Office takeover and in 1970, after the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State, Paterson helped lead a student strike. She delivered a powerful speech in front of 5,000 students at an antiwar rally on Deering Meadow. Now a distinguished civil rights attorney, Paterson co-founded a battered women’s shelter in Oakland, Calif., litigated class-action suits against gender discrimination and has advocated for marriage equality and immigrant rights. As co-founding president of the Equal Justice Society, she continues to fight unconscious and structural forms of bias.