List of Famous people who born in 1920

John Howard Griffin was an American journalist and author from Texas who wrote about racial equality. He is best known for his project to temporarily pass as a black man and journey through the Deep South of 1959 to see life and segregation from the other side of the color line. He first published a series of articles on his experience in Sepia Magazine, which had underwritten the project. He published a fuller account in a book Black Like Me (1961). This was later adapted as a 1964 film of the same name. A 50th anniversary edition of the book was published in 2011 by Wings Press.

Elizabeth Shaw was an Irish artist, illustrator and children's book author.

Douglass Cecil North was an American economist known for his work in economic history. He was the co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."

Frances Rix Ames was a South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist, best known for leading the medical ethics inquiry into the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died from medical neglect after being tortured in police custody. When the South African Medical and Dental Council (SAMDC) declined to discipline the chief district surgeon and his assistant who treated Biko, Ames and a group of five academics and physicians raised funds and fought an eight-year legal battle against the medical establishment. Ames risked her personal safety and academic career in her pursuit of justice, taking the dispute to the South African Supreme Court, where she eventually won the case in 1985.

Gaston Lenôtre was a French pastry chef known as a possible creator of the opera cake, the founder of "Lenôtre" a culinary empire; whose brand includes restaurants, catering services, retail concerns and cooking schools, and one of the three founders with Paul Bocuse and Roger Verge of Les Chefs de France at EPCOT in Orlando, Florida.

Juan Antonio Samaranch y Torelló, 1st Marquess of Samaranch was a Spanish sports administrator under the Franco regime (1973–1977) who served as the seventh President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1980 to 2001. Samaranch served the second-longest term as the head of the IOC, the longest being that of Pierre de Coubertin.

Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Zhurkina was a radio operator and gunner in the 99th Guards Separate Reconnaissance Aviation Regiment during the Second World War and one of only four women to be awarded all three classes of the Order of Glory.

Aloysio de Andrade Faria was a Brazilian banker and billionaire. At the time of his death he was noted as being one of the world's oldest billionaires.

Louise Marie Zibold Reiss was an American physician who coordinated what became known as the Baby Tooth Survey, in which deciduous teeth from children living in the St. Louis, Missouri area who were born in the 1950s and 1960s were collected and analyzed over a period of 12 years. The results of the survey showed that children born in 1963 had levels of strontium-90 in their teeth that were 50 times higher than those found in children born in 1950, before the advent of widespread nuclear weapons testing. The findings helped convince U.S. President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, which ended the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons that placed the greatest amounts of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere.

Colonel Harry Katsuharu Fukuhara was a United States Army soldier who was inducted in the United States Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1988.