Mary Dyson Martin was born in 1914 in Dallas, Texas. Her grandmother had been enslaved in Tennessee, and she grew up conscious of that legacy. Martin graduated from Fisk University and got her masters in library science at the University of Illinois. She taught swimming lessons for the YWCA Girl Reserves during the summers. She was a high school librarian in Gary, Indiana and Detroit, Michigan for over thirty years. Her husband was a doctor and a World War II veteran.

Benita Kaimowitz was born in 1935 and grew up in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where her father ran a general store. When she was 11, her family moved to Nashville, Tennessee. After graduating from college at the University of Hawaii, she got her master’s at Sarah Lawrence College. Kaimowitz helped register voters in Louisiana as a volunteer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She was a teacher and a longtime employee of Borders Bookstore in Ann Arbor.

Andrew Zweifler was born in 1930 in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Haverford College and Jefferson Medical College. In the 1950s he and his wife Ruth spent two years in Ashiya, Japan while he was a physician in the Air Force. Zweifler is Emeritus Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, former Director of the Hypertension Clinic at the University Hospital, and co-founder of Physicians for Prevention of Gun Violence.