Pioneering Black physician Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., whose invention of the automatic implantable defibrillator forever changed the world of cardiothoracic surgery, On February 4, 1980, he and Dr.Vivien Thomas were the first to successfully implant an automatic defibrillator in a human patient at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Levi Watkins Jr
"Levi was a son of the South who was birthed in the middle of segregationist America and the middle of a civil rights movement and became somebody who defied the limits of the expectations of him," said former Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who first met Dr. Watkins in the 1980s on a picket line calling for better treatment of African-Americans in the criminal justice system.
Dr. Watkins was outspoken yet humble, those who knew him said. He never took his success for granted and worked tirelessly to help create the next generation of African-American doctors and activists. Dr. Watkins’ experiences fueled his determination to increase opportunities for African American and other minority students and doctors in the field. According to Johns Hopkins, largely due to his efforts, by 1983, minority representation at the school had increased by 400 percent. He also championed diversity nationally through his work on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, whose chief aim was diversity.
Dr. Watkins was born in Parsons, Kansas to Levi Watkins, Sr. (1911–1994)and Lillian Varnado (1917–2013). He grew up with five siblings: two brothers, James Watkins and Donald V. Watkins Sr., and three sisters, Doristine L. Minott, Emma Pearl McDonald, and Annie Marie Garraway. The family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where his father served as president of Alabama State College [HBCU] from 1962 to 1983 and his mother worked as a high school teacher. As a child, Watkins was baptized by Reverend Ralph Abernathy in Birmingham, Alabama. Reverend Abernathy served as a leader in civil rights and worked diligently with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Watkins was the valedictorian of his class at Alabama State Laboratory High School. There he got his first taste of the civil rights movement. He met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the age of 8 when he and his family attended Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, where Dr. King was the pastor. When he grew older, Dr. Watkins would act as a driver, shuttling the pastor around town. Disheartened by the injustices he saw, Dr. Watkins would later join Dr. King's movement,
He attended Tennessee State University as an undergraduate, studying biology. He was motivated to seek a career in the medical field by a Biology professor at Tennessee State University. Watkins graduated from Tennessee State University with a degree in Biology and applied to the University of Alabama School of Medicine, but was rejected. Instead, he attended the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and became the first African American to obtain a medical degree from that institution. It was an experience he described over the years as isolating and lonely but would be the first of many milestones.
Watkins began his medical residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1971. There, he became chief resident of cardiac surgery, acting as the first African American chief resident at the university. Two years after his research on angiotensin blockers at Harvard, Watkins returned to Johns Hopkins and joined the admissions department in 1979. In 1980, he began his work on the defibrillator, with Dr.Vivien Thomas, which he improved upon during this time at Johns Hopkins. Watkins also used this time to enhance techniques for open heart surgery, many of which are still used today. He was named a professor of cardiac surgery in 1991, and concurrently held the post of Associate Dean of the School of Medicine until his retirement in 2013.
In 1993, his father, Levi Watkins Sr., had a stroke and required vascular surgery. His siblings requested that Watkins perform the surgery, as they knew he was an exceptional cardiac surgeon. He prayed before the surgery, which resulted in success.
From his earliest days at Johns Hopkins, Watkins played a pivotal part in changing the institution's role in medical education. In 1975, at the request of newly appointed dean Richard Ross, Watkins and Earl Kidwell, a fellow African-American faculty member, launched a concerted nationwide effort to recruit talented minority students to the school of medicine. The success of the Johns Hopkins minority recruitment campaign quickly became a model followed by other medical schools.
Watkins died in Baltimore on April 11, 2015, at the age of 70, due to a heart attack and subsequent stroke. Today, much of his work is still represented in the field of medicine. Watkins contributed to the advancement of surgical techniques and to the defibrillator, which is all still used today. In addition, his work on angiotensin blockers has helped many patients in need of treatment for congestive heart failure, even those who are unable to tolerate other drugs.
Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Dr. Levi Watkins Jr.
Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr. (1945-2015) - Breaking Down Walls in Medicine
Juneteenth 2010 - Levi Watkins Jr., MD
Memorial service celebrating the life of Dr. Levi Watkins Jr.
Over A century ago, an African American seventh-grader from segregated Daytona, Fla., prepared to board a train for Jacksonville and high school. His family dropped him at the train station with the fare but neglected to give him enough money to ship his luggage. A boy like other boys, without an adult’s self-sufficiency, he did what any stranded child might do—he sat down and cried. Then a black man, a stranger, covered the bill for him. Years later, when the boy became a man and wrote his life story, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman, he dedicated it to the stranger who “restored my broken dream.”
Dr.Howard Washington Thurman
Howard Washington Thurman was an African-American author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the movement, including Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr.
Howard Thurman was born in 1899 in Florida, probably in West Palm Beach. He spent most of his childhood in Daytona, Florida, where his family lived in Waycross, one of Daytona's three all-black communities. He was profoundly influenced by his maternal grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who had been enslaved on a plantation in Madison County, Florida. Nancy Ambrose and Thurman's mother, Alice, were members of Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Waycross and were women of deep Christian faith. Thurman's father, Saul Thurman, died of pneumonia when Howard Thurman was seven years old. After completing eighth grade, Thurman attended the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, Florida. One hundred miles from Daytona, it was one of only three high schools for African Americans in Florida at the time.
In 1923, Thurman graduated from Morehouse College as valedictorian. In 1925, he was ordained as a Baptist minister at First Baptist Church of Roanoke, Virginia, while still a student at Rochester Theological Seminary. He graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary in May 1926 as valedictorian in a class of twenty-nine students. From June 1926 until the fall of 1928, Thurman served as pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. In the fall of 1928, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he had a joint appointment to Morehouse College and Spelman College in philosophy and religion. During the spring semester of 1929, Thurman pursued further study as a special student at Haverford College with Rufus Jones, a noted Quaker philosopher and mystic.
Morehouse, when Sue was a student at Spelman. Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman's daughter Anne was born in October 1933. Sue Bailey Thurman was an author, lecturer, historian, civil rights activist, and founder of the Aframerican Women's Journal. She died in 1996.
Thurman married Katie Kelley on June 11, 1926, less than a month after graduating from seminary. Katie was a 1918 graduate of the Teacher's Course at Spelman Seminary (renamed Spelman College in 1924). Their daughter Olive was born in October 1927. Katie died in December 1930 of tuberculosis, which she had probably contracted during her anti-tuberculosis work. On June 12, 1932, Thurman married Sue Bailey, whom he had met while at
Thurman served as dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University from 1932 to 1944 and as dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965. In 1944, he co-founded, along with Alfred Fisk, the first major interracial, interdenominational church in the United States.
Thurman remains unknown to most people in this country. His life bridged eras: born the grandson of a former slave in horse-and-buggy days, he died the year the IBM personal computer debuted. Death took Thurman long enough ago to fog the history he made. He preached a philosophy of Common Ground, which taught that humans need to seek inner spiritual happiness that would lead them to share their experience in community with others. In 1944, Thurman co-founded San Francisco’s Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the first integrated, interfaith religious congregation in the United States. In 1953, he became the dean of Marsh Chapel, the first black dean at a mostly white American university, mentoring, among many others, Martin Luther King, Jr.as he developed his philosophy of nonviolence.
Thurman believed that the first order of social change was changing one’s individual, internal spirit. “He rather gently and powerfully moved through the world in a spirit of grace, dignity, and humility,”
Thurman said he caught the “contagion” of religion from his grandmother, who cared for him after his father died when Thurman was seven and his mother became the family breadwinner. His grandmother recited for Howard the mantra of the black preacher she’d heard as a child on her owner’s plantation: “You are not slaves. You are not niggers. You’re God’s children!” His grandmother’s charismatic rendition, Thurman said this inspired in him the belief that “the creator of existence also created me.”
His first pastorate after his 1925 ordination as a Baptist minister, in Ohio in the 1920s, led to study with Quaker pacifist Rufus Jones, which Thurman said changed his life. His thinking was honed by a 1935 trip to India with other African Americans to meet Mohandas Gandhi, who completed Thurman’s conversion to nonviolent social activism.
In 1935, Howard Thurman, one of the most influential African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century, took a pivotal “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to India that would forever change him—and that would ultimately shape the course of the civil rights movement in the United States. When Thurman became the first African American to meet with Mahatma Gandhi, he found himself called upon to create a new version of American Christianity, one that eschewed self-imposed racial and religious boundaries, and equipped itself to confront the enormous social injustices that plagued the United States during this period.
Thurman stood on the other side of the world, gazing into Afghanistan across the Khyber Pass, the fabled mountain trade route. The last place he could have ever imagined life taking him that day at the train station in Jacksonville. It was 1936, and Thurman was an esteemed professor of religion at Howard University. He’d been invited to India, Ceylon and Burma on a months-long trip as part of an African-American delegation representing the YMCA and YWCA—a “Pilgrimage of Friendship.” Thurman had resisted going. He didn’t think he was the right person for the job, even if it meant a chance to meet Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of satyagraha, or “soul force,” would have a momentous impact on Thurman, showing him the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance. After the journey to India, Thurman’s distinctly American translation of satyagraha into a Black Christian context became one of the key inspirations for the civil rights movement, fulfilling Gandhi’s prescient words that “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”
The main thing that had drawn the distinguished members to Gandhiji,” his philosophy of ahimsa (nonviolence) and satyagraha (civil disobedience campaigns). “Is non-violence from your point of view a form of direct action?” Thurman asked. “It is not one form,” Gandhi replied, “it is the only form.” Nonviolence, Gandhi said, does not exist without an active expression of it, and indeed, “one cannot be passively nonviolent.” Gandhi went on to lament that the term had been widely misunderstood.
Ahimsa was a Sanskrit word with deep resonance in all of South Asia’s ancient karmic religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, and (especially) Jainism, in which ahimsa stood for a commitment to refrain from harming living things. He felt there was no good English language equivalent for ahimsa, so he created the term nonviolence (the earliest usage in the Oxford English Dictionary, citing Gandhi, is from 1920), but told Thurman that he regretted the fact that his coinage started with the “negative particle ‘non.’ ” On the contrary, Gandhi insisted nonviolence was “a force which is more positive than electricity” and subtler and more pervasive than the ether.
Gandhi went on to expound his theory of nonviolence to the delegation. “We are surrounded in life by strife and bloodshed, life living upon life.” But “some great seer [unnamed by Gandhi, perhaps Jesus or Buddha], who ages ago penetrated the center of truth said: It was not through strife and violence, but through non-violence, that man can fulfill his destiny and his duty to his fellow creatures.” He continued: “At the center of non-violence is a force which is self-acting.” “Ahimsa,” Gandhi told the visiting Christians, meant “ ‘love’ in the Pauline sense, yet something more,” presumably referring to the famous passage in 1 Corinthians, “Faith, hope, and love abides, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” (Although the passage Gandhi referred to was Thurman’s favorite passage from the corpus of the Pauline epistles, the two men agreed that the religion of Paul was a fateful detour from the authentic religion of Jesus. Gandhi had written in 1928, “I draw a great distinction between the Sermon on the Mount and the Letters of Paul. They are a graft on Christ’s teaching, his own gloss apart from Christ’s experience.”)
Thurman, always at his religious core a nature mystic, a romantic vitalist, was very sympathetic to Gandhi’s broader point that the ultimate truth, whether it was labeled God or ahimsa, was at once natural and supernatural, profoundly alive but not limited to any specific living thing. “If the source of life is alive, then it follows that life itself is alive,” Thurman would write, somewhat cryptically but characteristically, in 1944. What he meant by this was that there was an underlying moral order in the universe. “The cosmos is the kind of order that sustains and supports the demands that the relationships between men and between man and God be one of harmony [and] integration.” Gandhi’s ahimsa was a close relative of Thurman’s increasingly unconventional notion of God.
When King arrived at Boston University as a doctor of theology student, he was already aware of Thurman. Thurman, who was on the faculty at the university and served as dean of its chapel, had attended Morehouse College with King’s father, Martin Luther King Sr. Thurman’s association with Martin Luther King, Jr., predated BU. Thurman and King’s father, an Atlanta minister, were friends when the young King was growing up. “Thurman was at the King home many times,”Their BU time overlapped for only a year, and King considered his father and Thurman a different, older generation. Nonetheless, King carried Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman’s most important book, while leading the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott.
What’is important, historically is not just the personal friendship but the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. would come and sit in those homilies and those lectures that Howard Thurman gave. He took voluminous notes because he really did believe that Howard Thurman had a lot to say and then would go on often times and quote Howard Thurman in his speeches over the course of his life.
Dr.King is said to have carried Thurman’s 1949 book “Jesus and the Disinherited” with him in his travels. It was Thurman’s explanation of his theology to uplift the oppressed. Thurman emphasized the inherent worth and dignity of all people, often recounting a sermon of a slave preacher his grandmother recalled hearing who told his congregation they were God’s children and not slaves. King later recounted the anecdote in a sermon at his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who also worked with King, recalled that it was Thurman who provided Dr.King with a spiritual basis for nonviolence after visiting Mahatma Gandhi in India, shaping King’s strategy for resisting Jim Crow laws in the American South of the 1950s. Dr.Thurman helped Dr.King realize that nonviolence was not just a tactic, but a lifestyle, scholars and activists say. And the theologian, who practiced times of silence and contemplation, urged King to do the same.
The creator of existence also created me and therefore with that sort of backing, I could absorb all the
Dr.Thurman traveled broadly, heading Christian missions and meeting with world figures such as Mahatma Gandhi. When Thurman asked Gandhi what message he should take back to the United States, Gandhi said he regretted not having made nonviolence more visible as a practice worldwide and suggested some American black men would succeed where he had failed.
The Legacy of Howard Thurman: Mystic and Theologian
Landrum Interviews Howard Thurman
Conversations with Howard Thurman Pt 2
Backs Against The Wall: The Howard Thurman Story
Howard Thurman - "What Do You Want, Really"
For a Time of Sorrow By Howard Thurman
I share with you the agony of your grief,
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;
I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.
This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You may not walk alone.
Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country’s most prominent surgeons. African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome (now known as cyanotic heart disease) in the 1940s.
Dr.Vivien Theodore Thomas
Dr.Vivien Theodore Thomas August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985 was born to Mary Eaton and William Marco Thomas in New Iberia, La., and the family moved to Nashville, Tenn., when he was 2. At 13, he was paid to work for his carpenter father after school and in summer, letting him save for college Thomas was so impressed as a youth by his family's physician that he pledged to "be like him." He hoped one day to become a surgeon. A bank failure during the early days of the Great Depression wiped away his medical-school savings and nearly his dream. He had scraped together the money for his medical education by working after school and as an orderly in a private infirmary.
Thomas planned to enter Tennessee State College after his high school graduation in 1929, but the stock market crashed, and he was laid off and unable to find another job.
In a few months, a friend who worked at Vanderbilt -- which only whites could attend -- told him there was an opening to assist Blalock, though he was warned the surgeon was "hell to work with." Thomas met him in the experimental surgery lab. On his first day of work, Thomas assisted Blalock with a surgical experiment on a dog. At the end of Thomas's first day, Blalock told Thomas they would do another experiment the next morning. Blalock told Thomas to "come in and put the animal to sleep and get it set up". Within a few weeks, Thomas was starting surgery on his own. Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor, despite the fact that by the mid-1930s, he was doing the work of a Postdoctoral researcher in the lab.
Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. This work later evolved into research on crush syndrome and saved the lives of thousands of soldiers on the battlefields of World War II. In hundreds of experiments, the two disproved traditional theories which held that shock was caused by toxins in the blood. Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed and that the condition could be effectively treated by fluid replacement.
Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory, and in so doing, he gained wide recognition in the medical community by the mid-1930s. At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery, defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary lifesaving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later.
Thomas and Dr. Blalock succeeded in proving that the crush syndrome of which a lot of patients were dying was not due to bleeding as generally admitted, but to the muscular toxins emission. After the experiment of the vascular reparation for that disease on animals without success, Blalock was able to confirm that hypothesis and he has been acknowledged worldwide. That discovery allowed saving thousands of lives during the 1939-1945 World War II.
Dr. Blalock accepted a position as a senior surgeon at John Hopkins, the best medical school in the USA where he asked Thomas to come along. When he arrived in Baltimore, in the University location, with his wife and his two daughters, Vivien Thomas faced an ambiance of racism and segregation worse than in the South. He suffered to find accommodation.
In 1941, the move to Johns Hopkins University, shocking Baltimore's segregated society. They began searching for a cure for blue baby syndrome, a heart defect that reduced circulation and led to death.
In 1943, Dr. Blalock was approached by Dr. Helen Taussig, a cardiologist pediatrician who was seeking for solutions to solve a complex heart problem called tetralogy of Fallot, which makes the child look blue because of the lack of oxygen in the blood, hence the term “blue baby”. She mentioned the possibility of a surgical operation by reconnecting the blood vessels. Blalock assigned Vivien Thomas to conduct research on the matter.
Thomas carried out 200 operations on dogs that he, himself, turned into blue beforehand and was able to create a connection between the blood vessels that treated the disease. He succeeded in proving that the surgery to correct the problem does not lead to death and persuaded Blalock, who carried out only one experimental surgery in this matter, to operate on human beings.
Thomas adjusted surgical tools so that they could be used on human beings and on the 29th November 1944, Vivien Thomas who was 34 by then assisted Dr. Blalock, 45 by then, during a surgical operation on an 18 years old teenager. As per Blalock’s request, Thomas stood behind his shoulder and was guiding his gestures during the operation. After 3 surgeries, the method was mastered and success was met. The whole world saluted that innovation called “anastomosis of Blalock-Taussig”. Thomas was not mentioned and his contribution was ignored by Blalock and the University.
Vivien Thomas created other surgical methods and invented instruments for heart operations. Thomas taught several surgeons known worldwide. Underpaid, Vivien had a second job as a waiter and often was serving his own students at the receptions organized by Dr. Blalock. He ended up by being the highest paid technician of Johns Hopkins University and attained an honorary PhD in 1976 before being appointed as a senior surgeon instructor. He assisted Levi Watkins when the latter developed the implantable defibrillator.
People didn’t really know about him. What he did should have been written down in record books forever. He was a person that never went to college but still had knowledge about a person's health and well-being. He was a doctor's assistant, making barely enough money to feed his family. But he didn’t care because he knew deep inside of himself that something was waiting for him, something spectacular.
"In the context of Jim Crow segregation, Thomas shines as an example of self-motivation, persistence and doing whatever it takes," Andrea Kalin, president of Spark Media and director of a film documentary with the same title as Thomas' memoir, told IBD. "He was not a product of his times, as is often said of people who achieve great things. He was a product of his own brilliance, persistence and inner drive. Instead of wallowing in the disappointment of not being able to become a doctor, he threw himself into research that would revolutionize cardiac surgery."
Vivien Thomas wasn’t treated fairly, but he didn’t let that stop him. He kept on pursuing his goal. He was presented with the degree of Honorary Doctor of Laws by the Johns Hopkins University in 1976. Sadly, he died in 1985. He left behind his wife Clara Flanders Thomas and two daughters.
𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐞
The HBO made for television “Something the Lord Made” starring Mos Def as Vivien Thomas exposed many to the history-making Vivien Thomas.
Tell IT~Tuesday: Vivien Thomas
NHD Nationals 2016 -- Vivien Thomas and the Blue Babies
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972). Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbossed and Unbought—illustrated her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 30, 1924, Shirley Anita St. Hill was the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents Charles St. Hill, a factory worker from Guiana, and Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados.Their father, Charles Christopher St. Hill, was born in British Guiana, lived in Barbados for a while, and then arrived in the United States via Antilla, Cuba, on April 10, 1923, aboard the S.S. Munamar in New York City. Their mother, Ruby Seale, was born in Christ Church, Barbados, and arrived in New York City aboard the S.S. Pocone on March 8, 1921.
Her father was an unskilled laborer who sometimes worked in a factory that made burlap bags, but when he could not find factory employment instead worked as a baker's helper, while her mother was a skilled seamstress and domestic worker who had trouble working and raising the children at the same time. As a consequence, in November 1929 when St. Hill turned five, she and her two sisters were sent to Barbados on the S.S. Vulcana to live with their maternal grandmother, Emaline Seale. There they lived on the grandmother's farm in the Vauxhall village in Christ Church, where she attended a one-room schoolhouse that took education seriously. She did not return to the United States until May 19, 1934, aboard the SS Nerissa in New York. As a result, St. Hill spoke with a recognizable West Indian accent throughout her life.
In her 1970 autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, she wrote: "Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason." As a result of her time on the island, and regardless of her U.S. birth, St. Hill would always consider herself a Barbadian American. Regarding the role of her grandmother, she later said, "Granny gave me strength, dignity, and love. I learned from an early age that I was somebody. I didn't need the black revolution to tell me that."
Shirley Anita St. Hill graduated from Brooklyn Girls’ High in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, a highly regarded, integrated school that attracted girls from throughout Brooklyn,in 1942 and from Brooklyn College cum laude in 1946. St. Hill earned her Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1946, where she won prizes for her debating skills.She stated that she faced a “double handicap” as both black and female.
Chisholm taught in a nursery school while furthering her education, earning her MA in elementary education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952.. In 1949, she married Conrad Q. Chisholm, a private investigator (they divorced in 1977). She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in early childhood education in 1951. By 1960, she was a consultant to the New York City Division of Day Care. Ever aware of racial and gender inequality, she joined local chapters of the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, as well as the Democratic Party club in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
From 1953 to 1959, she was director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and of the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center in lower Manhattan. From 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant for the Division of Day Care. She became known as an authority on issues involving early education and child welfare.
In 1964, Chisholm ran for and became the second African American in the New York State Legislature. Her successes in the legislature included getting unemployment benefits extended to domestic workers. She also sponsored the introduction of a SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) to the state, which provided disadvantaged students the chance to enter college while receiving intensive remedial education.
After court-ordered redistricting created a new, heavily Democratic, district in her neighborhood, in 1968 Chisholm sought—and won—a seat in Congress. Chisholm was assigned to the House Agricultural Committee. Given her urban district, she felt the placement was irrelevant to her constituents. When Chisholm confided to Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson that she was upset and insulted by her assignment, Schneerson suggested that she use the surplus food to help the poor and hungry. Chisholm subsequently met Robert Dole, and worked to expand the food stamp program. She later played a critical role in the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program. Chisholm would credit Schneerson for the fact that so many "poor babies [now] have milk and poor children have food".
Chisholm was then also placed on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. Soon after, she voted for Hale Boggs as House Majority Leader over John Conyers. As a reward for her support, Boggs assigned her to the much-prized Education and Labor Committee, which was her preferred committee. She was the third highest-ranking member of this committee when she retired from Congress.
All those Chisholm hired for her office were women; half of these were black. Chisholm said that she had faced much more discrimination during her New York legislative career because she was a woman than because of her race.There, “Fighting Shirley” introduced more than 50 pieces of legislation and championed racial and gender equality, the plight of the poor, and ending the Vietnam War. She was a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, and in 1977 became the first black woman and second woman ever to serve on the powerful House Rules Committee. That year she married Arthur Hardwick Jr., a New York State legislator.
Discrimination followed Chisholm’s quest for the 1972 Democratic Party presidential nomination. She was blocked from participating in televised primary debates, and after taking legal action, was permitted to make just one speech. Still, students, women, and minorities followed the “Chisholm Trail.” She entered 12 primaries and garnered 152 of the delegates’ votes (10% of the total)—despite an under-financed campaign and contentiousness from the predominantly male Congressional Black Caucus.
Chisholm retired from Congress in 1983. She taught at Mount Holyoke College and co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women. In 1991 she moved to Florida, and later declined the nomination to become US Ambassador to Jamaica due to ill health. Of her legacy, Chisholm said, “I want to be remembered as a woman … who dared to be a catalyst of change.”
Chipping away at the lack of women represented among New York City sta tues, the city announced it is commissioning a permanent statue of Shirley Chisholm to be built in Brooklyn. Chisholm, who lived in Bed-Stuy, became in 1968 the first black woman to serve in the House of Representatives. The statue, expected to be completed in 2020, will be placed outside of the Parkside entrance to Prospect Park.
Shirley Chisholm Speech
Shirley Chisholm : The First Black Congresswoman
Conversation with Shirley A. Chisholm (Talking Leadership series)
"WOMEN WERE AT THE FOREFRONT OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE, BUT THEIR INDIVIDUAL STORIES WERE RARELY HEARD,” said Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University. She is co-editor of Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement.
Those unsung women activists included: Daisy Bates, Ella Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Richardson, Amelia Boynton Robinson, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman.
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY, REMEMBERING THE WOMEN CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS LEFT OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT
by Valerie Russ | @ValerieRussDN | russv@phillynews.com January 21, 2019 - ASSOCIATED PRESS
As the country observes Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, there will be many news clips of the civil rights leader at the 1963 March on Washington.
That iconic image of King delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech to 250,000 at the Lincoln Memorial is seared into the history of the struggle for equal rights. But generally, beyond Rosa Parks refusing to relinquish her bus seat, little is known about the women of the civil rights movement.
“Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their individual stories were rarely heard,” said Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University. She is co-editor of Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement.
Those unsung women activists included: Daisy Bates, Ella Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Richardson, Amelia Boynton Robinson, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman.
They led Freedom Rides; organized citizenship and freedom schools; persuaded poor, rural blacks to try to register to vote; fought for economic justice; organized political parties; lost their jobs; went to jail — and were beaten while there.
Dorothy I. Height, the longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women, wrote an essay for Collier-Thomas’ book titled ”We Wanted the Voice of a Woman To Be Heard.” The chapter described how women argued for having a woman give a major speech at the march. “They [the male organizers] said, ‘We have too many speakers as it is. The program is too long. ... We have Mahalia Jackson.’ “ The women countered that she was singing, not speaking.
At the last minute, organizers agreed that Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP who mentored the “Little Rock Nine,” the first black students to desegregate Central High School there in 1957, should present a “Tribute to the Negro Women Fighters for Freedom,” according to the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University. Bates spoke in the place of Myrlie Evers, whose husband, Medgar Evers, had been shot and killed earlier that year because of his voter registration work.
“Most of the people who were arrested and put in jail during the civil rights movement were women and children,” said Mary Frances Berry, a Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and History at the University of Pennsylvania, whose latest book is History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times.
People referred to the prominent male civil rights leaders as the “Big Six”: King, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, John Lewis, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young.
The men of the movement “were male chauvinists like most males of the period,” Berry said. She added that many people didn’t realize that King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, was a “crucial player. Coretta, for example, strategized, gave advice, and knew as much as Martin did, or more, about nonviolence.”
Here are some women in the movement, selected by academics and activists:
Ella Baker had leadership roles in the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was key to the founding of SNCC, or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After black college students began lunch-counter sit-in protests in 1960, Baker urged students from different colleges to meet at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. and helped to found SNCC. In the 1940s, as an NAACP field secretary and later, as director of branches, Baker traveled the South encouraging black people to fight for their human rights. Rosa Parks attended one of Baker’s workshops.
Baker, who died in 1986 at age 83, is famous for the quote “Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, becomes as important as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, born to a family of Mississippi sharecroppers, had to leave school at 12 to help her parents. After SNCC organizers went to Mississippi to open freedom schools and help people register to vote, she became a leader in her own right. In June 1963, she was jailed and beaten badly after she and other activists left a citizenship workshop. Without a college education, she was a powerful speaker and singer at civil rights gatherings. As a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Hamer testified before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City on Aug. 22, 1964. She charged that the all-white Mississippi Democratic delegation had been illegally elected in a segregated election system.
She was 59 when she died in 1977. Among Hamer’s notable quotes: “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.” “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” And, “If I am truly free, who can tell me how much of my freedom I can have today?”
Diane Nash was a 22-year-old Fisk University student when she led lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville. She later helped the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) when it began Freedom Rides, where black and white college students rode buses from Northern states to the South to challenge segregation. After white men firebombed buses and beat students when they arrived in Alabama, Nash insisted on leading more students to Alabama to continue the bus rides to Mississippi. She was a founding member of SNCC. She also was a leader in the Selma marches in 1965.
“She was a dynamic leader, and she still is,” Berry said of Nash, who is 80. “She had courage. The Freedom Rides would not have continued without her.”
Gloria Richardson, born in Baltimore to a middle-class family, was a civil rights leader in Maryland. She moved to Cambridge as a child. After SNCC came to Cambridge, Richardson helped create the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee. She expanded the group’s protests from merely desegregating public spaces to questioning housing and employment discrimination. Now 96, she is famous for a photo in which she was brushing off a bayonet-wielding law officer at a protest.
C. Delores Tucker was a civil rights activist in the 1960s and a controversial critic of rap music in the 1990s. Tucker, former Pennsylvania secretary of state, led a Philadelphia delegation to the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, as well as to the 1963 March on Washington, said Faye Anderson, a Philadelphia activist for historic preservation. After King’s assassination, Coretta Scott King asked Tucker to set up an affiliate of the King Center, which became the Martin Luther King Association for Nonviolence in Philadelphia.
In the 1990s, Tucker became widely known for her protests against misogyny and obscene lyrics in rap music. She went so far as to protest the NAACP, of which she was a board member, for nominating rapper Tupac Shakur for an Image Award. Anderson said Tucker, who died in 2005 at age 78, would be upset that her organization on Monday will be honoring Sheriff Jewell Williams, who has been accused of sexual harassment. Thera Martin, a spokesperson for the association, said that Williams has been an advocate for civil rights and that the association does not believe the allegations.
“She knew it was not just entertainment,” Anderson said of the rap lyrics. “It feeds into implicit bias [where people form opinions about black people based on the lyrics]. It was about self-respect and how we present ourselves to others.”
Is an African American and Pan-African holiday celebrated by millions throughout the world African community, Kwanzaa brings a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense.
The celebration honors African heritage in African-American culture and is observed from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a feast and gift-giving.
Kwanzaa has seven core principles, the Nguzo Saba. It was created by Dr. Maulana Karenga and was first celebrated in 1966–67.
The term “Kwanzaa” comes from the Swahili phrase “matunda ya kwanza,” which translates to “first fruits.” Kwanzaa recognizes the significance of African heritage, family and community.
The Nguzo Saba: Umoja: Unity. To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race. Kujichagulia: Self-Determination: ... Ujima: Collective Work and Responsibility. ... Ujamaa: Cooperative Economics. ... Nia: Purpose. ... Kuumba: Creativity. ... Imani: Faith.
The Black Candle [HD] (Official Kwanzaa Film) Narrated by Maya Angelou
“For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.” - Maya Angelou
“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.” - Maya Angelou
The [Kwanzaa] holiday, then will of necessity, be engaged as an ancient and living cultural tradition which reflects the best of African thought and practice in its reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person in community and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it, and the rich resource and meaning of a people’s culture.” - Dr.Maulana Karenga
“Our children need the sense of specialness that comes from participating in a known and loved ritual. They need the mastery of self-discipline that comes from order. They need the self-awareness that comes from a knowledge of their past. They need Kwanzaa as a tool for building their future and our own.” - Jessica Harris
The Story Of Kwanzaa: From Civil Rights To Corporate America
Farewell to one of my very favorite singers and the first jazz artisit I came to love and learn from her vocalizations in my early adult life. I believed -- and still do -- that no one can actually "touch" her in her artistry with graceful enumciations and vocalized swirls along the sound spectrum. Her enunciation is effortless, and her tonal quality remains precious and sterling in comparison to other jazz singers both male and female. May her glorious renditions be revered for their spectacularity (?) (ness?) over time. Rest gloriously in Jazz Heaven, Nancy Wilson. May we all hear and listen to you "in the Morning . . . ."
National Campaign for Justice
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National Campaign for Justice
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo shot and killed by ICE agent in Houston, authorities
confirm:
Tell Harris Count...
The work is not over we MUST continue to build for real change.
We need to stay involved and pushing in our local communities.
Helping others areas all over the country. This will not be a short term effort, THE PROBLEMS ARE MASSIVE ,so must
our effort be. We must continue to build local and regional group to register new voters and inspire old ones to come back in. We need to organize around local issues and candidates.
The work is not over we MUST continue to build for real change.
We need to stay involved and pushing in our local communities.
Helping others areas all over the country. This will not be a short term effort, THE PROBLEMS ARE MASSIVE ,so must
our effort be. We must continue to build local and regional group to register new voters and inspire old ones to come back in. We need to organize around local issues and candidates.
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