Mary Sansone

Mary Sansone has been an activist since she was 8 (in 1924), when her father, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, took her to Union Square and set her atop a soapbox while he spoke. She still has his small, worn copy of the “Little Red Songbook,” a collection of labor songs. In 1964, she and her husband founded the Congress of Italian-Americans Organization, a social services group known by the acronym CIAO, whose early meetings were held in the couple’s basement. In 1988 she founded a group called CURE (Community Understanding for Racial and Ethnic Equality). And those were just two chapters of a life devoted to a range of causes. “Gays, women, human rights—I’m there.”