Agnes Smedley (February 23 1892-May 6 1950)

At the age of of ten,the family to Trinidad,Colorado.Her father,Charles Smedley,deserted the family in 1903 when she was fourteen.Agnes found work as a domestic servant in order to help support her family.In 1908 she passed the New Mexico teacher's examination only sixteen years old,started to teach only to return to Osgood to look after her younger brothers and sisters on the death of her mother.In 1911 Agnes came to Tempe College,immediately getting involved in student politics and the campus newspaper.She married in 1912 and moved to a teacher's college in San Diego where she was dismissed for her socialist beliefs.In 1918,divorced and living in New York City,she was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for attempting to stir up rebellion against British rule in India.While in Prison,Margaret Sanger and John Haynes Holmes led the campaign for her release.After being released,Agnes began writing for New York call and the Birth Control Review, a journal run by Margaret Sanger,Agnes also published Cell Mates, a collection inspired by women she met in prison.In 1920 she moved to Germany with the Indian revolutionary leader and set up Berlin's first birth control clinic.Agnes returned to the United States in May 1941 and went on a nationwide lecture tour of the Deep South where the Jim Crow laws appalled her.Agnes caused a stir when she gave an interview to the Los Angeles Tribune where she complained,"We can't treat men like dogs and expect them to act like men."As a result of this outburst,J Edgar Hoover instructed FBI agents to investigate her political past.In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),chaired by J.Parnell Thomas,began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry.Agnes responded to these events by helping to form the Progressive Citizens of America,a civil rights group that was committed to defending Hollywood writers,directors,and producers who had been named as communists or communist sympathizers by the HUAC.America was now entering the period of McCarthyism and this was the first of many smear stories circulated about Agnes and she decided to move to England in November 1949.She went to Oxford in poor health and died of acute circulatory failure.