Pageofmusic2 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Raised in Oakland by a South African anti-apartheid activist father and a German Jewish mother, and built a music career on the same independence, self-releasing her debut album Closer in 2001 before wider success arrived. 2005's Change It All produced the hit "First Love" and reached a national audience without a major label behind her early work. The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights gave her its first Human Rights Cultural Hero Award in 2006 for pairing performance with activism.