Protest fasts and hunger strikes

César Estrada Chávez (also March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) was an American labor leader, community organizer, businessman, and Latino American civil rights activist. Along with Dolores Huerta, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW) labor union. Ideologically, his world-view combined leftist politics with Roman Catholic social teachings.

Irom Chanu Sharmila (born 14 March 1972), also known as the "Iron Lady of Manipur" or "Mengoubi" ("the fair one") is a civil rights activist, political activist, and poet from the Indian state of Manipur. On 5 November 2000, she began a hunger strike for the abolition of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 that applies to the seven states and grants security forces the power to search properties without a warrant, and to arrest people, and to use deadly force if there is "reasonable suspicion" that a person is acting against the state. She ended the fast on 9 August 2016, after 16 years of fasting. Having refused food and water for more than 500 weeks (she was nasally force fed in jail), she has been called "the world's longest hunger striker". On International Women's Day, 2014 she was voted the top woman icon of India by MSN Poll.

A suffragette was a member of an activist women's organisation in the early 20th century who, under the banner "Votes for Women", fought for the right to vote in public elections in the United Kingdom. The term refers in particular to members of the British Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), a women-only movement founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, which engaged in direct action and civil disobedience. In 1906, a reporter writing in the Daily Mail coined the term suffragette for the WSPU, derived from suffragist (any person advocating for voting rights), in order to belittle the women advocating women's suffrage. The militants embraced the new name, even adopting it for use as the title of the newspaper published by the WSPU.

Charles Robert "Charlie" Moore (July 18, 1934 – June 23, 2014) was an American Methodist minister, social justice and anti-racist activist who drew attention to himself when he committed suicide by setting himself on fire in the East Texas town of Grand Saline, Texas. He also drew attention to how the United Methodist Church (UMC) treated gays and lesbians by going on a hunger strike years earlier. He had aligned himself with several progressive, liberal and left-leaning causes throughout his life, leaving behind a typed letter urging the community of Grand Saline and the United States to repent for its racism.

Alice Davies (1870 - alive in 1919) British suffragette and nurse, was imprisoned for protesting for women's right to vote by smashing windows, went on hunger strike and was awarded the Women's Social and Political Union Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour'.

The Frisco Five, also known as #Frisco5, are a group of protesters who went on hunger strike on April 21, 2016 in San Francisco, California in front of the San Francisco Police Department Mission Station to demonstrate against episodes of police brutality, use-of-force violations, and racial bias. specifically the deaths of Alex Nieto on March 21, 2014, Mario Woods on December 2, 2015, Amilcar Perez Lopez on February 26, 2015, and Luis Gongora on April 7, 2016.

The Hunger Strike Medal was a silver medal awarded between August 1909 and 1914 to suffragette prisoners by the leadership of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). During their imprisonment, they went on hunger strike while serving their sentences in the prisons of the United Kingdom for acts of militancy in their campaign for women's suffrage. Many women were force-fed and their individual medals were created to reflect this.

The 1981 Irish hunger strike was the culmination of a five-year protest during the Troubles by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The protest began as the blanket protest in 1976 when the British government withdrew Special Category Status (prisoner of war rather than criminal status) for convicted paramilitary prisoners.

A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance where participants fast as an act of political protest, usually with the objective of achieving a specific goal, such as a policy change. Hunger strikers that do not take fluids are named dry hunger strikers.

Cesar's Last Fast is a 2014 American documentary film co-directed and produced by Richard Ray Perez and Lorena Parlee. The film premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 19, 2014.