Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Saturday, February 2, 2019
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm
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)
Shirley Chisholm speaking at UCLA 5/22/1972
https://www.6sqft.com/a-monument-honoring-shirley-chisholm-will-be-built-near-prospect-park/
https://www.brownstoner.com/brooklyn-life/shirley-chisholm-brooklyn/
https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/shirley-chisholm-1985/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Shirley-Chisholm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Chisholm
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/shirley-chisholm
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
WOMEN WERE AT THE FOREFRONT OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE
"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
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.”
Monday, January 14, 2019
Saturday, December 29, 2018
Friday, December 28, 2018
KWANZAA -- Habari Gani!
Kwanzaa
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
Quaver Music's "Kwanzaa Celebration"
Happy Happy Kwanzaa
https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/kwanzaa-2018-begins-wednesday-december-26-january-1/
http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/index.shtml
https://pasadenajournal.com/kwanzaa-fact-sheet/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwanzaa
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Friday, December 14, 2018
NANCY WILSON – The Very Thought Of You (1964, HD)
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 . . . ."
Monday, October 29, 2018
Friday, October 26, 2018
I AM A CHRISTIAN
I AM A CHRISTIAN By Maya Angelou
When I say... "I am a Christian"
I'm not shouting "I'm clean livin."
I'm whispering "I was lost,"
Now I'm found and forgiven.
When I say..."I am a Christian"
I don't speak of this with pride.
I'm confessing that I stumble
and need CHRIST to be my guide.
When I say... "I am a Christian"
I'm not trying to be strong.
I'm professing that I'm weak
and need HIS strength to carry on.
When I say... "I am a Christian"
I'm not bragging of success.
I'm admitting I have failed
and need God to clean my mess.
When I say... "I am a Christian"
I'm not claiming to be perfect,
My flaws are far too visible
but, God believes I am worth it.
When I say... "I am a Christian"
I still feel the sting of pain,
I have my share of heartaches
So I call upon His name.
When I say... "I am a Christian"
I'm not holier than thou,
I'm just a simple sinner
who received God's good grace, somehow
Friday, October 19, 2018
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Friday, September 7, 2018
Monday, September 3, 2018
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
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