Each year on the third Monday of January, America honors the birth, life, and dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
He helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement.
The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently.
King was jailed several times. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI’s COINTELPRO from 1963 forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War.
In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was convicted of the assassination, though the King family believes he was a scapegoat. A King’s death was followed by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities.
During the March on Washington, King delivered a seventeen-minute speech known later as the ‘I have a Dream’ speech. An excerpt:
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
Today is Constitution Day in Norway. It is the National Day of Norway and is an official national holiday each year on May 17th. Among Norwegians, the day is referred to as ‘Syttende Mai‘ (simply meaning May Seventeenth), Nasjonaldagen (National Day) or less commonly, Grunnlovsdagen (Constitution Day).
Following the Napoleonic Wars, Norway’s Constitution, which declared the country as a kingdom independent of Sweden was signed at what is now widely considered one of Norway’s most symbolic markers of national pride, the Eidsvoll Manor House, officially beginning its path to total independence.
Constitution Day is often kicked off by many Norwegians with a traditional 17. Mai breakfast of smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, and a fresh loaf of bread, accompanied by a glass of champagne. Breakfast is just the start of the spring holiday that many view as a time to indulge in guilty food pleasures, especially ice cream and hot dogs. The national pastry for May 17th is pavlova, a cake filled with cream and fruit made from a meringue mass.
The May 17th celebrations vary across Norway, but they all follow a traditional pattern that makes this a day centered on the children.
The highlights are the children’s processions, made up of school classes marching through the local community, led by the school band. Most children have their own small Norwegian flag to wave, and the route is lined with enthusiastic onlookers. The first children’s processions were duly arranged in 1870. Since 1906, the Royal Family have gathered on the balcony of the Royal Palace in Oslo to wave to the children marching by.
Gratulerer med dagen, Norge!
Today is the birthday, in 1961, of Enya Ni Bhraonain, from Irish family band Clannad who had the 1982 UK No.5 single ‘Harry’s Game’. Enya had the solo, 1988 UK No.1 single ‘Orinoco Flow’, and the 2001 US No.2 album ‘A Day Without Rain’. Enya is Ireland’s biggest selling solo artist and second overall behind U2 with an estimated 75 million records sold worldwide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wfYIMyS_dI
February was Black History Month and March is Women’s History Month. I thought I might recognize both.
Kamala Harris
We’re all happy to see Kamala Harris poke a hole in the glass ceiling by being the first woman of color to be elected Vice-President of the United States. But there are many others who came before her.
Birthplace of Mary McLeod Bethune in Mayesville, SC
Bethune was born in 1875 to parents who had been slaves. With the help of benefactors, she attended college hoping to become a missionary. Instead she began teaching school and founded a school for girls in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Mary McLeod Bethune with students in Daytona Florida
In 1931, the school merged with the Cookman Institute for Boys eventually becoming Bethune-Cookman University.
She was active politically, working to register black voters. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women and went to work straightening out their finances and establishing a national headquarters in Washington, DC – the first black-controlled organization to be headquartered in Washington. In 1935, she founded the National Council of Negro Women in New York.
She worked to elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The National Youth Administration was a creation of the Roosevelt Administration. She lobbied the organization for minority involvement so aggressively that she was offered an appointment as administrative assistant. Within two years she was promoted to Director of the Division of Negro Affairs, becoming the first African-American female division head in the US Government. More than 300,000 black young men and women were given employment and work training on NYA projects.
She became friends with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt – especially Eleanor. She had unprecedented access to the White House through her friendship with the First Lady and used her access to Create a coalition of black leaders called the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, but more popularly ‘The Black Cabinet’.
Mary McLeod Bethune (left) and Eleanor RooseveltOfficial Portrait of Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris
Patricia Roberts Harris, a native of Mattoon, Illinois was a gifted scholar who graduated from Howard University with honors in 1945. After earning her law degree from George Washington University Law School, Harris became an attorney in the criminal division of the Department of Justice in 1960. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy appointed Harris co-chairman of the National Women’s Committee of Civil Rights.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Harris as Ambassador to Luxembourg. By accepting this appointment, Harris was the first African American woman to serve the United States as an ambassador. Harris would continue to be a force in the Democratic Party serving as chairman of the credentials committee in 1972 and a member-at-large of the Democratic National Committee in 1973. Her due diligence and commitment to social justice and civil rights would catch the attention of presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976.
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Harris as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, which made her the first African American to serve in the United States Cabinet, and the first African American woman to enter the line of succession to the presidency. At Harris’ confirmation hearing, she was asked would her background prevent her from effectively serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban and Development. Harris responded:
“I am one of them. You do not seem to understand who I am. I am a Black woman, the daughter of a Pullman car waiter. I am a Black woman who even eight years ago could not buy a house in parts of the District of Columbia. I didn’t start out as a member of a prestigious law firm, but as a woman who needed a scholarship to go to school. If you think I have forgotten that, you are wrong.”
After serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in 1979 Harris became Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, the largest cabinet agency in President Carter’s administration.
In 1969, Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman to serve in Congress, or, as she preferred, the “first black woman congressman.” She was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 and the Congressional Women’s Caucus in 1977. Chisholm was also the first woman and the first African American to seek the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972.
n 1977, Shirley Chisholm made history again when she became the first Black woman and second woman ever to serve on the powerful House Rules Committee, which sets the conditions for debating legislative bills on the floor of the House of Representatives.
On November 3, 1992, Carol Moseley Braun became the first African-American woman elected to the US Senate. She was quite liberal on social issues and was strongly pro-choice. When she was elected, women were not allowed to wear pants on the floor of the Senate. She and Barbara Mikulski challenged the rule and both wore pants onto the floor. Female support staff soon followed their lead and the rule was changed in 1993.
She made headlines when she convinced the Judiciary Committee not to renew a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy because it contained the Confederate Flag. She also made a plea to her colleagues about the symbolism of the Confederate flag, declaring, “It has no place in our modern times, place in this body, place in our society”.
I’ve left out lots and lots of courageous and trailblazing women. I’ll try to post about some of them in the coming months.
A contingent of nurses arrive in the southwest Pacific area, received their first batch of home mail at 268th Station Hospital, Australia, 11/29/1943Mae Carol Jemison became the first African American woman accepted into NASA’s space training program on June 4, 1987. Five years later, on September 12, 1992, she became the first black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor.
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