Stick It To The Man
What else is there to say…To read the profile of this brother please visit his site at www.myspace.com/jasirix
Dorothy Height marched alongside Martin Luther King and led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, was known for her determination and grace as well as her wry humor. She remained active and outspoken well into her 90s and often received rousing ovations at events around Washington, where she was easily recognizable in the bright, colorful hats she almost always wore.
In awarding the congressional medal, President George W. Bush noted that Height had met with every U.S. president since Eisenhower, and “she’s told every president what she thinks since Dwight David Eisenhower.”
Height was born in Richmond, Va., before women could vote and when blacks had few rights. Her family moved to the Pittsburgh area when she was 4. Distinguishing herself in the classroom, she was accepted to Barnard College but then turned away because the school already had reached its quota of two black women. She went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University.
As a teenager, Height marched in New York’s Times Square shouting, “Stop the lynching.” After earning her degrees, she became a leader of the Harlem YWCA and the United Christian Youth Movement of North America, where she pushed to prevent lynching, desegregate the armed forces and reform the criminal justice system.
She traveled to Holland and England as a U.S. delegate to youth and church conferences, and in 1938 was one of 10 young people chosen by Eleanor Roosevelt to spend a weekend at the first lady’s Hyde Park, N.Y., home preparing for a World Youth Conference at Vassar College.
One of Height’s sayings was, “If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.” She liked to quote 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said the three effective ways to fight for justice are to “agitate, agitate, agitate.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping King and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement, often reminding the men heading not to underestimate their female counterparts.
Height was on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting only a few feet from King, when he gave his famous “I have a dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963.
“He spoke longer than he was supposed to speak,” Height recalled in a 1997 Associated Press interview. But after he was done, it was clear King’s speech would echo for generations, she said, “because it gripped everybody.”
She lamented that the feeling of unity created by the 1963 march had faded, that the civil rights movement of the 1990s was on the defensive and many black families still were not economically secure.
“We have come a long way, but too many people are not better off,” she said. “This is my life’s work. It is not a job.”
When Obama won the presidential election in November 2008, Height told Washington TV station WTTG that she was overwhelmed with emotion.
“People ask me, did I ever dream it would happen, and I said, ‘If you didn’t have the dream, you couldn’t have worked on it,” she said.
Height dedicated most of her adult life to the National Council of Negro Women, where she first worked under her mentor, Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the group. Height took over in 1957 and led it until 1997, fighting for women’s rights on issues such as equal pay and education. She developed programs such as “pig banks” to help poor rural families raise their own livestock, and “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” in which black and white women from the north traveled to Mississippi to meet with their Southern counterparts in an effort to ease racial tensions and bridge differences.
To celebrate Height’s 90th birthday in March 2002, friends and supporters raised $5 million to enable her organization to pay off the mortgage on its Washington headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the White House. Herman said Height “believed very strongly that we as black women deserved to be on this corridor of power.”
Dorothy Height, a leading civil rights pioneer of the 1960s, died Tuesday April 20, 2010 at age 98, Howard University Hospital confirmed.
Source: Associated Press
Mr. Hooks told Ebony magazine soon after he became the association’s executive director in 1977. “The civil rights movement is not dead. “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”
Yet under his leadership the N.A.A.C.P. faced a growing white backlash against school busing and affirmative action programs intended to redress past discrimination. And it repeatedly tangled with the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush to preserve the gains that minorities had made in the 1960s and ’70s. When Mr. Bush selected a conservative black federal judge, Clarence Thomas, to serve on the Supreme Court, the N.A.A.C.P. ultimately opposed the nomination.
“I’ve had the misfortune of serving eight years under Reagan and three under Bush,” Mr. Hooks said in 1992, the year he stepped down as executive director. “It makes a great deal of difference about your expectations. We’ve had to get rid of a lot of programs we had hoped for, so we could fight to save what we already had.”
Mr. Hooks shifted much of the N.A.A.C.P.’s focus to increasing educational and job opportunities for blacks as recession gave way to economic recovery in the Reagan years. But the association had been weakened under the weight of declining membership and shaky finances.
It had also developed an image problem, as that of an outmoded and increasingly irrelevant civil rights group. For some who had watched the N.A.A.C.P. over the years, Mr. Hooks came to symbolize an older generation of leaders who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who had fought for the passage of landmark civil rights legislation but who had become unwilling or unable to adapt to modern times and changed political circumstances.
Mr. Hooks rejected that notion, maintaining that he had succeeded in advancing a just cause, to improve the lot of African-Americans. “I have fought the good fight,” he said in his valedictory to the N.A.A.C.P. in 1992. “I have kept the faith.”
Mr. Hooks had a varied career. He was a lawyer, a businessman and a Baptist minister, heading two separate churches. He was also a gifted orator, mixing quotations from Shakespeare and Keats with the cadence and idioms of the Mississippi Delta.
“There is a beauty in it and a power in it,” Mr. Hooks once said of black preachers’ speaking style.
Mr. Hooks was the first black to be appointed to the criminal court bench in his native Tennessee, and he was the first African-American to be named to the five-member Federal Communications Commission.
“Most people do one or two things in their lifetimes,” Julian Bond, a former chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., said of Mr. Hooks. “He’s just done an awful lot.”
Benjamin Lawson Hooks was born Jan. 31, 1925, in Memphis, the fifth of seven children of Robert and Bessie Hooks. His father’s photography business gave the family a stable middle-class grounding, allowing Mr. Hooks to attend LeMoyne College in Memphis. Mr. Hooks died on April 25, 2010.
Source: Associated Press
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough
She Was Ahead Of Her Time
This tireless fighter for the poor made history in Congress and at the Democratic National Convention.
Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 30, 1924. As a young girl, she was sent to Barbados to stay with her grandmother and attend the British school system, which she later credited with giving her a “good education.”
She returned to New York, where she attended Girls H.S. and Brooklyn College. She was an excellent student, graduating with honors, but she, like so many other Blacks, was unable to find work equal to her educational background. She took a job at a day-care center in Harlem. It was there that her life-long mission of helping children began. She attended Columbia University at night and received her master’s degree.
In 1949, she married Conrad Chisholm, and began to get involved in local politics.
In 1964, she ran for and won a seat in the state assembly. She fought to get funding for day-care centers and schools. She had spent much of her time with poor people and children, and was especially sensitive to their needs.
Four years later, she made history by running for and winning a seat in Congress. She was the first Black woman to do so. Her famous motto was: “Shirley Chisholm - Unbought and Unbossed.”
Chisholm hired an all-female staff and began focusing on women’s issues. She helped create the National Organization for Women. “Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt,” she said.
In 1972, Chisholm made history again as the first Black woman to run for president. Virginia Woodhull was the first woman to run, doing so in 1872.
As she announced her candidacy, Chisholm said, “I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people.”
But Chisholm didn’t have enough political support, not even that of the male-dominated Black Caucus. Her supporters were young voters, Blacks and feminists.
The voting age had just been turned back to 18 from 21 and there were millions of young, first-time voters.
Chisholm won 151 delegates, but lost the nomination to Sen. George McGovern. She knew all along that her chances for winning were slim. “I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo,” she said.
The focus of her campaign was to make way for change. She would open the door for other Black candidates, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Barack Obama, who is now our 44th president. Chisholm’s campaign, which championed the concerns of Blacks, Latinos, gays, the poor, the young and women, would serve as a model for Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Chisholm served for ten more years and retired in 1982 after seven terms in Congress.
Chisholm became a much sought after speaker and political mentor. She received hundreds of honorary degrees and awards for a lifetime of service.
Shirley Chisholm died on New Year’s Day, 2005, at her home in Florida. When asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said, “I want history to remember me not just as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first Black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a Black woman who lived in the 20th century and dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.”
On March 3, 2009, the 40th anniversary of her swearing in as a member of the House of Representatives, her portrait was unveiled at the Capital.
Source: Jasmin K. William
