The child of slave parents, Wells initiated her long and dedicated struggle for equality for blacks by sitting in a whites-only railroad coach. She was forcibly removed, after which she instituted a legal suit, which she won. Unfortunately, a higher court struck down the decision.
She then became a part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, writing articles condemning lynching. Undeterred even by the destruction of her office by racist mobs in 1895, she began a one woman campaign against this terrible practice, lecturing in New York and Boston. Wells also founded anti-lynching societies and black women's clubs. In 1893, she published A Red Record, an uncompromising account of three years of lynching. She also participated in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927)
Victoria Woodhull, born to a poor family in Homer, Ohio, was a passionate campaigner for social justice who combined deep belief in Spiritualism, radical views on achieving equal rights for women, advocacy of divorce law changes, birth control, working people’s rights, and tax reform. She was the first American woman to address Congress and the first to run for the office of President of the United States.
Overcoming childhood poverty, abuse and exploitation, Woodhull supported her family by working as a medium and fortuneteller. Her success as a clairvoyant connected her with Cornelius Vanderbilt. His backing made it possible for Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, to own and operate a brokerage firm and publish the highly successful Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.
Woodhull’s charisma, sense of mission, incisiveness, wealth, and independence made it possible for her to briefly reinvigorate the women’s movement. Many of Woodhull’s views and themes were prophetic of issues and debates of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at first embraced Woodhull but drew back as her extreme critiques of marriage and America’s class disparities, involvement in flamboyant scandals, and “free love” doctrines made her increasingly controversial.
Annie Dodge Wauneka (1910-1997)
Annie Dodge Wauneka, tribal leader of the Navajo Nation and public health activist, worked tirelessly to improve the health and welfare of the Navajo Tribe and reduce the incidence of tuberculosis nationwide.
Born in 1910 in a traditional Navajo hogan, Wauneka was raised by her father, one of the wealthiest men of the Navajo Tribe. When she was eight, an influenza epidemic struck. Thousands of Navajos, including many of Wauneka's classmates, died. Wauneka escaped with only a mild case that left her resistant to the disease. Thus she was able to care for those who were too ill to feed themselves. After graduation she continued to travel with her father, observing the poverty and disease that plagued most of the Navajo. She studied public health and realized that the best way to change the standards of health and sanitation among tribal members was from within. Wauneka gained election in 1951 to the Tribal Council, the second woman ever elected.
During her three terms in office, Wauneka led the fight against tuberculosis. She wrote a dictionary to translate English words into Navajo for modern medical techniques, such as vaccination. Her weekly radio broadcasts, in the Navajo language, explained how modern medicine could help improve health among the Navajo. She also worked on other health problems including better care for pregnant women and new babies, regular eye and ear examinations, and alcoholism.
In 1984, the Navajo Council designated her "The Legendary Mother of the Navajo Nation," recognizing that through her efforts in education and health, the lives of every Navajo, as well as the nation at large, had been improved. She continued working in her community on health issues until her death in 1997.
Dolores Huerta (1930- )
Dolores Huerta is one the century's most powerful and respected labor movement leaders. Huerta left teaching and co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in 1962. "I quit because I couldn't stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children," said Huerta. She raised her own 11 children while organizing for the labor movement.
The 1965 Delano Grape Strike launched UFW into a period of fast-paced organizing, with Huerta negotiating contracts with growers, lobbying, organizing strikes and boycotts as well as spearheading farm worker political activities. Always politically active, she co-chaired the 1972 California delegation to the Democratic Convention. She led the fight to permit thousands of migrant and immigrant children to receive services. She also led the struggle to achieve unemployment insurance, collective bargaining rights, and immigration rights for farm workers under the 1985 Rodino amnesty legalization program. Huerta continues as an outstanding labor and political activist.
Barbara Jordan (1936-1996)
Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas in 1972, Barbara Jordan became the first African-American congresswoman to be elected, and re-elected, from the deep South. Before her election to Congress, she was a Texas State Senator, the first African-American woman to serve there.
Jordan captured the attention of the nation during the 1974 Nixon impeachment hearings. As a member of the House Judiciary hearings she served on the committee charged with hearing and evaluating the evidence bearing on the possible impeachment of then-President Nixon. It was on this committee that her incisive questioning and her impassioned defense of the Constitution made her a respected national figure.
In l976, Barbara Jordan became the first woman and first African-American to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. In 1978, she announced that she would not seek re-election and returned to Texas as a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and also became a counselor to Texas Governor Ann Richards.
Lois Jenson (1948 - )
In 1975, Lois Jenson, a single mother on welfare, began working at Eveleth Mines after she heard that the local iron mine had begun hiring women. Jenson, along with other women, endured a continuous stream of abhorrent behavior from male employees, including sexual harassment, abusive language, threats, stalking and intimidation. Jenson mailed a complaint to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights outlining the problems she experienced. The state requested that Ogelbay Norton Co., a Cleveland, Ohio-based part-owner of the mine, pay $11,000 in damages to Jenson, but the company refused.
From Jenson's first day on the job, through three intensely humiliating trials, to the emotional day of settlement, it would take her twenty-five years and most of her physical and mental health to fight the battle with the mining company. Jenson eventually prevailed, helping to make both the workplace and the courtroom safer for victims of sexual harassment. The most important precedent established by Jenson v. Evelth was the certification of the case as a class action. That decision elevated sexual harassment from an individual complain by one, usually a powerless person against another, more powerful one – a complaint that could easily be ignored or swept under the rug – to a significant civil rights issue.
March 8 – Celebrating International Women’s Day
Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, India (1889-1964)
Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was the health minister in the Indian Cabinet for ten years after India's independence from the British Raj in 1947. She was an eminent freedom fighter and a social activist.
Rajkumari got interested in India's freedom struggle through the occasional visits of those leaders to her father's home. After meeting Mahatma Gandhi in 1919 in Bombay, she felt drawn to his thoughts and vision for the country. The notorious Jālianwālā Bāgh massacre of Indian civilians the same year by the British Raj troops convinced her of the necessity of India's gaining its freedom from the Raj. She began to participate in India's struggle for freedom, and also in social reform activities in India.
Rajkumari co-founded the All India Women’s Conference in 1927, became its secretary in 1930, and president in 1933.
Rajkumari went to live at Mahatma Gandhi's ashram in 1934, and adapted to the harsh lifestyle despite her aristocratic background. She served as one of Gandhi's secretaries for sixteen years.
Rajkumari championed the cause of universal suffrage, worked to reduce illiteracy, and eradicate the custom of child marriages and the purdah system for women, which were prevalent then among some Indian communities.
After India’s independence, Rajkumari was assigned the Ministry of Health and was one of only two Indian Christians in the Cabinet. In 1950, she was elected the president of World Health Organization, becoming the first woman and the first Asian to hold that post. For the first 25 years of that organization's history, only two women held that post.
Maria Teresa Tula, El Salvador (1951 - )
Maria Teresa Tula is a leader of the Co-Madres (Mothers of the Disappeared) of El Salvador, a group of impoverished, mostly illiterate women whose husbands or children were kidnapped or killed by death squads and government security forces during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. The 1980s conflict pitted leftist organizations and farmer-based guerrillas against an entrenched alliance of landowners and the military, with each side aided by different Cold War backers. In 1992, when a peace accord was signed by the government and the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front, the reign of terror that had ruled in El Salvador for over a decade finally ended.
After Tula was threatened, abducted, and tortured, she returned to Co-Madres to continue her work for justice and for women’s empowerment. A self-described feminist, she went to the United States and spent the next several years running the Co-Madres office in Washington, D.C., and fighting deportation for herself and all Salvadorans. She now lives in the U.S. as a citizen, fulfilling her dream of providing her children with a safe environment and a good education.
Meena, Afghanistan (1956-1987)
MEENA was born on February 27, 1956 in Kabul. During her school days, students in Kabul and other Afghan cities were deeply engaged in social activism and rising mass movements. She left the university to devote herself as a social activist to organizing and educating women. In 1977, in pursuit of gaining the right of freedom of expression and conducting political activities, Meena laid the foundation of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This organization was meant to give voice to the deprived and silenced women of Afghanistan. She started a campaign against the Russian forces and their puppet regime in 1979 and organized numerous processions and meetings to mobilize public opinion.
Another service she provided for Afghan women was the creation of a bilingual magazine, Payam-e-Zan (Women's Message), in 1981. Through this magazine RAWA has been projecting the cause of Afghan women boldly and effectively. The magazine has constantly exposed the criminal nature of fundamentalist groups. Meena also established Watan Schools for refugee children, a hospital and handicraft centers for refugee women in Pakistan to support Afghan women financially.
Her active social work and effective advocacy against the views of the fundamentalists and the puppet regime provoked the wrath of the Russians and the fundamentalist forces alike and she was assassinated by agents of KHAD (Afghanistan branch of KGB) and their fundamentalist accomplices in Quetta, Pakistan, on February 4, 1987.
May Bood, Northern Ireland (1938- )
Baroness May Blood works to address the totality of problems facing communities on Northern Ireland’s peace line, particularly as they affect disadvantaged youth. She is chairperson of Impact Training, an organization that guides the education of young people at risk, and chair of the Campaign Executive of the Integrated Education Fund.
Baroness Blood is a member of the Springfield Inter-Community Development Project and the Blackmountain Action Group, both located on the peace line and working to find new approaches to deep-rooted violent conflict through cross-community development.
Baroness Blood is a founder and former member of the Women’s Coalition Party, a cross-community party working for inclusion, human rights, and equality in Northern Ireland, with members from diverse political, religious, gender, and age groups. In 1999, she became the first woman in Northern Ireland to be given life peerage. Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan (1953-2007)
She was elected co-chairwoman of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) along with her mother, and when free elections were finally held in 1988, she herself became Prime Minister. At 35, she was one of the youngest chief executives in the world, and the first woman to serve as prime minister in an Islamic country.
Only two years into her first term, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed Bhutto from office. She initiated an anti-corruption campaign, and, in 1993, was re-elected as Prime Minister. While in office, she brought electricity to the countryside and built schools all over the country. She made hunger, housing and health care her top priorities, and looked forward to continuing to modernize Pakistan.
At the same time, Bhutto faced constant opposition from the Islamic fundamentalist movement. In 1996, President Leghari of Pakistan dismissed Benazir Bhutto from office, alleging mismanagement. The following year Bhutto's husband was imprisoned, and she was forced to leave her homeland. For nine years, she and her children lived in exile in London, where she continued to advocate the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. In the autumn of 2007, in the face of death threats from radical Islamists and the hostility of the government, she returned to her native country.
Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007, after departing a PPP rally two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008 where she was a leading opposition candidate.
Huda Shaarawi, Egypt (1879-1947)
Huda Shaarawi was an Egyptian educator and women's rights activist. Born in Cairo in 1879, she was the daughter of a wealthy administrator. She envied her brother for all the advantages he had because he was a male.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, women in Egypt were confined to the house or harem. When in public, women were expected to show modesty by covering their hair and faces with a veil. Shaarawi resented such restriction on women's dress and movements. She started organizing lectures for women on topics of interest to them. This brought many women out of their homes and into public places for the first time. Shaarawi convinced the royal princesses to help her establish a women's welfare society to raise money for poor women of their country. In 1910 Huda Shaarawi opened a school for girls where she focused on teaching academic subjects rather than practical skills such as midwifery.
After World War I, many women left the harem to take part in political actions against the British rule. In 1919, Shaarawi helped organize the largest women's anti-British demonstration. In defiance of British orders to disperse, the women remained still for three hours in the hot sun.
In 1923 Shaarawi helped found the Egyptian Feminist Union. She was elected its president and held the position for twenty-four years. The Union campaigned for various reforms to improve women's lives. Among them were raising the minimum age of marriage for girls to sixteen, increasing women's educational opportunities and improving health care. Egypt's first secondary school for girls was founded in 1927 as a result of this pressure.
Huda Shaarawi died in 1947.
Trailblazing the Dream: Non-Violent Sit-In Movement
Southern cities maintain segregated public facilities -- like movie theaters, hotels, and lunch counters in downtown stores. In Greensboro, North Carolina, four black college students stage the first sit-in at a white lunch counter. Activist Jim Lawson holds workshops in non-violent protest at Nashville's Fisk University. He attracts people like college student Diane Nash and seminarians John Lewis and C. T. Vivian, and teaches non-violent direct action tactics adopted from Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, including peaceful resistance.
The protesters, dressed in their best clothes, target Nashville's lunch counters, where they sit and wait to be served. The stores respond by closing the counters, but the students continue to sit, quietly doing homework. After several weeks, their protest attracts gangs of white toughs, and police who arrest the activists for disorderly conduct. More students sit to take their places, filling the jails and refusing to pay fines. When punched or assaulted by segregationists, the protesters do not retaliate, but simply protect themselves and each other.
The sit-in movement spreads to 69 cities across the South, black communities organize economic boycotts, and sympathetic Northerners picket local branches of the department stores. In Nashville, a climate of fear culminates in a bombing that destroys the house of Alexander Looby, a black lawyer who has been working with the activists. Thousands march to City Hall and confront Mayor Ben West. After the mayor concedes that the lunch counter segregation is wrong, businesses quickly desegregate.
After the 1960
presidential election, civil rights activists pressure the Kennedy
administration to support their cause and existing laws. The Supreme Court has
banned segregation in interstate travel twice, but Southern states widely
ignore the rulings. In May 1961, the Congress
of Racial Equality sends mixed-race groups of non-violent volunteers, known
as Freedom Riders, on bus trips into Dixie. They meet minor resistance in the
upper South, but when they get to Alabama trouble
erupts. Segregationists firebomb a bus in Anniston, Alabama, and Klan
members attack the passengers as they disembark in Birmingham.
Attorney
General Robert
Kennedy tries to protect the Riders, telling Governor John Patterson he
will send Federal troops if the state can't maintain law and order. On the next
leg of the trip, from Birmingham to Montgomery, the promised state police
escorts evaporate. The Riders are assaulted and bloodied when they arrive in Martin
Luther King's home town. As the violence rages, Kennedy calls in U.S.
marshals, and ultimately Patterson is forced to dispatch the Alabama National
Guard as well.
When
the riders continue into Mississippi under protection, they encounter heavy
police presence and no violence -- but they are arrested in Jackson and
sentenced to the maximum-security Parchman Penitentiary for trespassing. CORE sends more riders to the South to keep the
protest going. Over the course of the next few months, 300 riders are arrested
and sentenced in Mississippi. The activists find camaraderie in Parchman, singing
freedom songs and providing mutual support. Ultimately, the Freedom Riders win
their battle when Kennedy gets the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban
segregation in interstate travel.
Soon after the events in Birmingham,
civil rights leaders announce plans for a mass march in Washington, D.C. to
demonstrate for jobs and freedom. Attorney general Robert
Kennedy, fearing more violence, is opposed to the plan. But long-time labor
and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, who first proposed such a march
during Franklin Roosevelt's administration in 1941, and Bayard Rustin,
organizer of the march's complex logistics, press ahead.
On
August 28, more than 200,000 people gather in peace and unity on the National
Mall. Behind the scenes, SNCC
leader John Lewis' speech causes conflict for its harsh
words against the Kennedy administration and the nation's slowness to
correct injustices. Persuaded by the 75-year-old Randolph to tone down the
rhetoric, Lewis delivers an amended speech and few know of the controversy. The
speech that will go down in the history books, however, is the one delivered by
Martin
Luther King as he stands before the Lincoln Memorial. "I have a
dream," he declares, "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..."
Though
the March on Washington is a triumph, it comes with a tragic coda. Less than
three weeks later, in Birmingham, the Ku
Klux Klan bombs the 16th Street Baptist Church on a Sunday morning. Fifteen
people are injured and four young girls are killed, filling many in the movement
with rage. It will be 14 years before the first of three men, Robert Chambliss,
is brought to justice in 1977; his companions Thomas Blanton, Jr. and Bobby Lee
Cherry will not be convicted until 2001 and 2002, respectively.
Dr. Martin Luther King was one of the most important and influential people of the modern era. His teachings and lectures inspired a generation. The movements and marches he led brought significant changes in American life and created a community of young and old, women and men all fighting for equality. He gave black people and the poor a sense of hope and dignity. He was only 34 years old when he gave his “I have a dream speech” and he died almost five years later but as one Washington correspondent pointed out, King’s “dream” has become part of the political mainstream.
“Political leaders from both major parties supported a memorial to be built in his honor in the nation's capital -- alongside three giants of American history, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt. It is a measure perhaps of how much a nation can grow and change that King's dream now is accepted as irrefutable truth by the overwhelming majority of Americans.” (source)
Lyndon Johnson was sworn into the presidency on Air Force One after
President Kennedy’s death. Johnson believed that he owed it to
Kennedy’s life to push the Civil rights Act through Congress,
especially since he was not an elected president. Eight months later,
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dr. King was present at
the White House while the president signed the Public Accommodation and
Fair Employment sections to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2,
1964. (source)
Over the next few years, King turned his efforts towards the economy
and the notion of economic justice. He began the “Poor People’s
Campaign” to pressure the government into dealing with the nation’s
economic disparities. In the spring on 1968, black garbage workers went
on strike in Memphis Tennessee and King went to support them. He was
assassinated in Memphis by a sniper on April 4 as he stood on a hotel
balcony. Revrend Jesse Jackson was standing next to him. Jackson
described this scene to a BCC reporter.
“He had just bent over. I reckon if he had been standing up he would not have been hit in the face.” (BBC)
It was in the surroundings of his home, church and neighborhood that Martin Luther King Jr. experienced family and Christian love, segregation in the days of "Jim Crow" laws, diligence and tolerance. He led boycotts and sit-ins, which paved the way for the “March on Washington.” It was there that he gave what may be his most famous speech: ‘I have a dream’.
The speech raised people’s consciousness about civil rights. More than 200,000 people attended the peaceful demonstration which they called a “living petition” asking the government for a “redress of grievences” It was given in front of the giant sculpture of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times described the impact of the march the following day on its editorial page.
“The huge assemblage of Negro and white citizens in Washington yesterday to demand equality in all aspects of American life embodied, in concept and in execution, the noblest tradition of our democracy. It reflected their conviction that, if enough of the people demonstrate that they care enough, no force in the United States is more powerful than an appeal to conscience and basic morality.”
The speech put pressure on President John F. Kennedy’s administration and Congress to pass the civil rights legislation proposed by Kennedy. After Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, King did not back away. In reaction to Kennedy’s assassination, King said he too would die for this cause if it meant “freedom the soul of our nation and the children from spiritual death.” (CBS)
Southern cities maintain segregated public facilities -- like movie theaters, hotels, and lunch counters in downtown stores. In Greensboro, North Carolina, four black college students stage the first sit-in at a white lunch counter. Activist Jim Lawson holds workshops in non-violent protest at Nashville's 
