The Wished-For Country

This website and the accompanying book project, started in 2009, profile courageous Americans, past and present. Many of these amazing people have been largely unsung. Some are known only in progressive circles, and others have been forgotten by all but historians. This book aims to change that with a fresh look at these inspiring and heroic individuals. I'm Rebecca Del Giudice, a writer with an MA in history. Contact me at [email protected]. Read the eBook: http://www.amazon.com/The-Wished-For-Country-American-ebook/dp/B00BEJWMES

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Two Tributes to a Social Justice Hero

Recently I came across this touching article detailing two tributes to the late Elissa Froman. Froman was a member of the National Council of Jewish Women who advocated for social justice in her daily life.  Like so many other progressive heroes, she's a great example of how thousands of small acts add up to something huge that can change people's lives. You don't have to change the world in one day or one year (and most of us wouldn't be able to). But heeding your inner moral compass and following where it points day after day -- that's the way to achieve amazing things.

RIP Elissa.

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The Wished-For Country eBook is Out!

The project that started as this series of blog posts back in 2010 is now an eBook! A Danish immigrant who exposes injustice – with the help of Theodore Roosevelt. The first African-American woman to run for President of the United States. The intrepid reporter who dared to expose the truth behind the lynching of thousands of Americans.

The stories of these extraordinary people and many more like them are the focus of The Wished-For Country: Stories of American Courage.  Author Rebecca Del Giudice has been researching and writing about American history for more than 20 years. During that time, she’s rediscovered powerful and moving stories that most Americans have never read until now. These unsung heroes embodied the best of America in their fight for civil rights and human dignity.

From a man who risked his life to uncover the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan to a man who gave his life for the freedom of the press, these stories of unbelievable bravery will inspire and move you. Read The Wished-For Country: Stories of American Courage now and get to know these incredible people. Just $3.99 - Kindle edition (also available via the Kindle apps for iPad and iPhone).

The Wished-For Country profiles 14 great Americans: Elijah Parish Lovejoy; Elizabeth Blackwell; John Muir; Robert Smalls; Jacob Riis; Ida B. Wells-Barnett; Frances Perkins; Earl Warren; Wayne Morse; Emma Tenayuca; Stetson Kennedy; Fannie Lou Hamer; Shirley Chisholm, and Harvey Milk. 

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More Unsung Heroes

This great blog post by Maria Popova looks at five unsung heroes who had a big effect on our daily lives.  

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Unbought and Unbossed: Shirley Chisholm

Shirley Chisholm had guts. And like many people who unfailingly follow their own moral compass, she earned both enemies and admirers.

Born Shirley Anita St. Hill in 1924, Chisholm grew up in a working-class family in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Her mother was a domestic worker and a seamstress, and her father was a factory worker. At Brooklyn College, she excelled at debating; one professor told her she should be a politician. After college, though, Chisholm worked as a nursery school teacher and administrator and went on to earn a master’s degree in elementary education at Columbia University.

In 1964, Chisholm entered the political realm. She was elected to the New York State Legislature, only the second African-American woman to join that body. With her straightforward manner of speaking and her bold stance on a number of issues, Chisholm was a striking figure in New York politics. She alienated liberals by making statements like “there is an undercurrent of resistance [to integration] among many blacks in areas of concentrated poverty.” In 1968, Chisholm decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in a newly created district that included part of her native Brooklyn. As she campaigned around the city, she announced herself by saying “Ladies and Gentlemen…this is fighting Shirley Chisholm coming through!” Chisholm faced down her challengers in the Democratic primary and faced James Farmer, a well-known civil rights figure, in the general election. Farmer condescendingly referred to Chisholm as a “little schoolteacher” and told the district that they needed “a man’s voice in Washington.”

Chisholm fought back, saying “There were Negro men in office here before I came in five years ago, and they didn’t deliver.” Her campaign slogan was “Shirley Chisholm: Unbought and Unbossed.”

Chisholm defeated Farmer and went on to become the first African American woman to serve in the United States Congress.

Once there, she derided the patriarchal and sometimes nonsensical seniority system that led House leadership to assign her to the agriculture committee, saying “Apparently all they know here in Washington about Brooklyn is that a tree grew there.”

Eventually she was reassigned to the Education and Labor Committee, which was a good forum for her background in early education. But her experience in Congress made Chisholm more outspoken than ever. Her first speech on the floor of the house was a condemnation of the Vietnam War, and she assessed her colleagues this way:

“The Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.”

Chisholm believed running for president would help her spur change on a national level. She entered the race for the Democratic ticket in 1972, ultimately losing to George McGovern. While running, she often surprised her rivals, like the time she went to visit the infamous segregationist (and fellow presidential candidate) George Wallace while he recuperated from an assassination attempt. She later recounted the incident:

[Wallace said,] "Shirley Chisholm! What are you doing here? What will your people say?"

[Chisholm] responded, "I know what they are going to say. But I wouldn't want what happened to you to happen to anyone."

Chisholm recalled that Wallace wept and they prayed together. Later, she said that “Black people in my community crucified me.” But she was still popular; her Congressional career continued and in 1974, a Gallup poll named her one of the ten most admired women in America.

Later in life, Chisholm said she believed her candidacy was a “catalyst for change.” She brought new attention to women’s rights, stating many times that “I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black."  She went on to serve in Congress until 1982.

Chisholm died in 2005. Despite her place in history, she wanted people to remember her this way:

"I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts," she said. "That's how I'd like to be remembered."

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"I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen": Frances Perkins

On March 25, 1911, in New York City, 146 women died trying to escape a blaze that consumed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Many fell from their deaths, forced to leap from the windows because the exit doors were locked by factory managers. Among the horrified onlookers in the street below was Frances Perkins, a Boston-born daughter of wealthy Maine natives who had trained as a social worker. A rare woman among male government leaders, Perkins was working as a factory inspector for Governor Al Smith, and she was appointed to head the Committee on Public Safety, which was formed in response to the fire. Perkins subsequently championed a series of workplace safety laws and labor reform, many of which became law in New York State.

Perkins later worked as the first female Industrial Commissioner, under New York Governor Al Smith; she held the same post under his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She fought for a shortened (48-hour) workweek and for unemployment insurance and minimum wage, among other progressive policies. When Roosevelt was later elected president, he offered Perkins the position of Secretary of Labor. She was the first female cabinet member. Perkins believed that it was the role of government to “give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.” At a time when the United States was still in the grips of a worldwide depression, Roosevelt and his cabinet were exploring a myriad of policies that would help relieve the nation’s suffering. 

Perkins was one of the strongest proponents of the New Deal in Roosevelt's administration. Among the many programs she supported were the Public Works Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. She also fought for the Wagner Act, which supported the right of unions to organize.

Among her many achievements, Perkins remains best known for her championship of The Social Security Act, which established unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. This was a landmark change in American law, but a necessary one, Perkins fervently believed:

...A man might become a victim of circumstances far beyond his control, and finally it took a depression to dramatize for us the appalling insecurity of the great mass of the population...the large majority of our citizens must have protection against the loss of income due to unemployment, old age, death of the breadwinners and disabling accident and illness not only on humanitarian grounds, but in the interest of our National welfare.

Perkins was a tireless advocate for the average working American; she believed, as she said, that “the people are what matter to government.”

Her office also championed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped establish nationwide protections for factory workers -- like the ones she had seen dying in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. 

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"Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for": Earl Warren

Earl Warren was a prosecutor, state attorney general, 3-term governor, and Supreme Court justice. A Republican appointed to the court by Eisenhower, he was expected to maintain a conservative stance on issues that came before the court. But less than a year after his appointment, some conservatives were calling for his impeachment. And years after appointing him, Eisenhower admitted that it was the ‘biggest damn- fool mistake I ever made.’

Warren was a California native who had proven to be a successful politician in his home state. Warren is the only person to date to be elected to three terms as governor of California. The son of Scandinavian immigrants, he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Law School and served in the military during World War I. When he served as the Alameda County District Attorney (1920-1939), none of his convictions were ever overturned on appeal. In 1931, he was voted the country’s best district attorney.

In 1946, he was so popular as a Republican gubernatorial candidate that he not only won the Republican nomination, but he won the Democratic and Progressive party nominations as well.

Warren’s political ambitions eventually reached beyond California. He ran for Vice President on the Dewey ticket and was defeated by the Truman/Barkley ticket in 1948. Warren ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1952, but while popular in California, he was no real threat to Eisenhower. Warren supported Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention, and in return Eisenhower promised to nominate him for the Supreme Court as soon as there was an opening. In 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died.

Eisenhower was reportedly reluctant to appoint the “bland” Warren to the Chief Justice position – Warren was popular with his constituents, but in judicial and political circles he was known mostly for being thorough and rather dull. But at the time, Eisenhower said: 

He has a national name for integrity, uprightness, and courage that...I believe we need on the Court.

Still, he suggested that Warren wait until an associate justice position was open. Warren responded that for him, it was chief justice or nothing. After Eisenhower agreed, Warren resigned as governor and headed to Washington.

Chief Justice Warren proved he was not the conservative Eisenhower thought he had nominated. Despite his conservative background, Warren became a liberal judge who felt that the Constitution — and the court’s job in interpreting it — defends an individual’s rights against a government that might take those rights away. His opinions — and his advocacy for an active, not passive, court — were consistently and passionately in line with this belief.

In his time as chief justice (1953-1969) he presided over many landmark cases, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional. That decision was a major victory for the burgeoning civil rights movement, and Warren worked hard to secure a unanimous decision because he knew the ruling would be that much more powerful if every judge on the court supported it.

Brown v. Board was hailed by liberals as a major step forward for civil rights. At the same time, Warren was vilified by conservatives for the decision, particularly by many white southerners who were adamantly opposed to integration. Some called for Warren to be impeached. Many conservatives felt that the Warren Court was overstepping its bounds as the judicial branch and acting as a political body by supporting progressive social movements.

Other important decisions of the Warren Court included Loving v. Virginia (1967), which found Virginia’s interracial marriage ban to be unconstitutional, and Engel v. Vitale (1962), which determined that it was unconstitutional for the government to require or promote school prayer.

Another critical decision that emerged from the Warren Court was in the case of Baker vs. Carr, a controversial and difficult vote that found that courts could intervene in the redistricting of legislatures across the United States. The case was brought by a Tennessee man who maintained that, because of the increase in population in his urban district, his district should have more representatives to better reflect the larger number of people.

While historically courts had viewed redistricting issues as political and not judicial decisions, the Warren Court reversed this trend, advocating for a “one man, one vote” rule – this led to a flurry of redistricting throughout the 1960s and beyond as legislatures tried to catch up with population changes. It also meant that more populated urban centers would have more political power than sparsely populated rural areas. Warren later stated that this was the most important case he was involved with (he cited Brown v. Board as the second-most important).

Two crime-related cases, Gideon V. Wainwright (1963) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), found, respectively, that state courts must provide attorneys to indigent defendants and that suspects must be informed of their legal rights when taken into custody – the “you have a right to remain silent” warning that we all know from TV. The Gideon case was groundbreaking because, before that decision, in many states poor defendants were only provided counsel for capital offenses – so in countless cases indigent people charged with non-capital offenses were tried, convicted and sent to jail with no legal advice.

The fact that Warren was a proponent of criminal suspects’ rights is all the more surprising given his history as a tough prosecutor and the fact that his own father had been murdered. But although Justice Warren’s belief in individual rights was unwavering, it hadn’t always been that way.

During World War II, as the Attorney General of California and organizer of its wartime civil defense, Warren supported the legality of the internment of Japanese Americans. Given his position, he could have been a powerful voice on the side of civil rights. Later in life he expressed his remorse: “I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens. Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken,” he said.

Warren had indeed become more liberal as he got older. He later explained that being on the Supreme Court changed him:

No man can sit on the Court over 16 years and remain parochial, for he must look out over all the United States...I do not see how a man could be on the Court and not change his views substantially over a period of years.

Warren continued to be an advocate for individual rights and the primacy of the bill of rights throughout the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Not a fan of Nixon (he had failed to endorse Nixon when Nixon first ran for Congress in 1946, and there had been animosity between them ever since), Warren announced his intention to retire after Robert F. Kennedy was killed; he assumed Nixon would become president.

Until his death in 1974, Warren continued to be an advocate for individual rights and the primacy of the bill of rights, whether the issue at hand was a small-time criminal defendant or President Nixon’s refusal to release the Watergate tapes:

You sit up there, and you see the whole gamut of human nature. Even if the case being argued involves only a little fellow and $50, it involves justice. That’s what is important.

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"The real threat[s] are the unrobed Klan in the halls of government" - Stetson Kennedy

Last year, America lost a courageous advocate of human rights. Stetson Kennedy, who in the 1940s had risked his life to expose the extensive reach of the Ku Klux Klan, died at 94.    Stetson Kennedy was a passionate folklorist and Florida native who loved learning about Southern American culture. When he was a teenager, he went door to door working for his father, the owner of a furniture store, collecting payments from customers. During those rounds, he saw firsthand some of the hardships faced by African Americans in his state. As a student at the University of Florida, he was recruited to join the Florida Writers' Project (sponsored by the Work Progress Administration). He researched, wrote, and edited works of Florida folklore and oral history. One of his colleagues at the Florida Writers' Project was Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.  In his work for the WPA, Kennedy witnessed the near-slavery conditions endured by turpentine factory workers, as well as the systemic problems of rural poverty across Florida. And he repeatedly heard horrific stories about racially motivated crimes against African Americans.  When the war came, Kennedy could not serve due to a bad back, but he found a different way to serve the country.  He would target what he called "homegrown racial terrorists" rather than the racial terrorists abroad. His number one target was the Klu Klux Klan. Kennedy went to Georgia where he worked with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to infiltrate the Klan. He gathered information about their secret codes, and amassed evidence of legal and law enforcement collusion with the Klan and other shocking details that were unknown to many outside the South. He acted as one of the members, getting to know many of them personally, all the while taking notes on their activities.  He shared his findings with journalists, including some at the Washington Post, and in a cunning move, he persuaded the producers of the "Superman" radio show to weave his findings into a storyline where Superman fought the "Clan." The ultra-secret codes of the Klan were publicized nationwide, which put a lot of fear into Klan members who wondered how the show got that information. More importantly, emphasizing the Klan as an enemy of American values embodied by the incredibly popular Superman helped to ostracize the Klan in the eyes of the public. Incredibly, the Klan had been operating as a charitable organization in the state of Georgia. After Kennedy's exposes were published in several newspapers, Georgia pulled the Klan's national corporate charter and charitable status; the IRS subsequently sued for back taxes.   In 1954, Kennedy's book I Rode With the Klan was published. Following its release, several Klan members were arrested and the Klan was again the focus of national scrutiny, which helped put its numbers into decline. Kennedy warned, however, that as enlightening as his expose of the Klan was, the most dangerous members were the ones with political or law enforcement power, the ones never caught wearing the white sheets.

Kennedy wrote several books, including the classic work of Floridian culture Palmetto Country and the darkly sarcastic Jim Crow Guide to the USA. Kennedy was highlighted in the popular 2005 book Freakonomics, and subsequently came under fire when a fellow author accused him of misrepresenting the extent of his work to infiltrate the Klan. He was accused, among other things, of exaggerating his narrative and conflating a couple of different collaborators into simplified characters.

But defenders, including the head of American Folklore Studies at the Library of Congress, maintain that Kennedy wrote in the melodramatic style of his time, and produced substantial amounts of documentation detailing his work. 

That work helped focus national attention on a secretive organization that had been terrorizing minorities for decades. 

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"I voted in the interest of the American people this morning when [I] voted against this resolution": Wayne Morse

In 1964, the US Congress was debating the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a resolution that gave President Johnson the power to take military action against North Vietnam. Despite the fact that the resolution was unconstitutional (the Constitution states that only congress has the power to make and declare war), it passed by an overwhelming margin.

Only two senators voted against it. One of those senators was Wayne Morse.

Though he is now thought of as a proud son of Oregon, Wayne Lyman Morse was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1900. His parents were farmers, and like many farmers in the early decades of the twentieth century, they were Progressives. Wisconsin's governor, Robert La Follette, Sr., was a leader of the Progressive movement. Morse would go on to become a legendary Progressive who presciently warned against many government acts, like the ceding of public lands to oil companies, Congressional acts that gave a president the power to wage war under false pretenses, and giving power to corporations over workers, that would foresee many of the great political controversies of the twenty-first century.

The Progressive movement rose out of the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the United States in the early twentieth century. As factories, railroads, and other industries greatly increased the wealth of corporations, corporate leaders used that wealth to influence politicians.

Progressives advocated for the rights of the common man (the farmer, factory worker, office worker, etc.) above the rights of the corporation. Morse's father encouraged his children to debate political, religious, and agricultural issues. Morse's parents, like many Progressives, strongly believed in the importance of a good education.

In his grade school years, Morse made a daily 22-mile round-trip commute by horseback to travel to a school his parents had enrolled him in because it was better than the local school. After high school, Morse went to the University of Wisconsin, where he earned degrees in economics and speech. He went to law school at the University of Minnesota, and was offered a teaching position at the University of Oregon School of Law in 1929. Less than a year later, at 31, he was named dean of the school. In 1932, Morse earned a Doctorate in Law from Columbia University.

While still serving as dean at the University of Oregon, Morse began to build a reputation as a consummate labor arbitrator. Employers and unions both valued his services. During World War II, Morse served on the National War Labor Board, a group that oversaw negotiations between employers and workers; the board helped ensure that labor issues were resolved with limited impact on manufacturing that was critical to the war effort. It was during the war that Morse, a Republican, first ran for the Senate. He won election in 1944, defeating the incumbent. In the Senate, Morse fought for workers' rights, civil rights, education, and human rights. While a strong supporter of law enforcement, Morse was against the death penalty, stating that only God should be allowed to take a man's life. Morse also weighed in against the interests of big corporations.

Morse left the party in 1952 because he did not support Eisenhower's pick of Richard Nixon as vice president. The senator from Oregon became an Independent, and brought a folding chair to the Senate in the 1952 session to emphasize his position in the aisle between the two parties. In 1953, Morse set a record for what is now the second-longest filibuster in the Senate's history (at the time, it was the longest filibuster performed by an individual senator). The issue was tidelands oil legislation. Texas, whose state legislature was heavily influenced by the oil industry, was petitioning for ownership of the Gulf of Mexico's submerged tidal lands. Morse believed the tidelands should remain under U.S. control, but despite his 22-hour, 26-minute filibuster, the bill passed, and some of the nation's most valuable reserves of oil and gas were given to the oil companies.

In 1955, future president and then-Democratic Senate leader Lyndon Johnson convinced Morse to join the Democrats; despite his changing affiliations, the people of Oregon re-elected Morse to the Senate in 1956. In 1960, Morse ran for president. Several supporters had planned to put his name on the ballot even if he didn't agree to run. His opponents included Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy; Kennedy outspent him in Oregon and Morse did not win a single primary before he dropped out of the race.

On August 2, 1964, the U.S. was involved in a naval skirmish with North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. The skirmish involved a U.S. destroyer and three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The National Security Administration alleged that a second Gulf of Tonkin battle occurred two days later, but later reports (including one by the NSA) contradicted this. At President Johnson's request, Congress made a Joint Resolution, called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing military action against North Vietnam.

Morse had received a tip from an informant he would not name that the second incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was misrepresented by the government in order to escalate the war. He vigorously fought against the resolution, stating that it would allow the president powers not granted him by the Constitution:

I'll have the American people remember what this resolution really is. It's a resolution which seeks to give the president of the United States the power to make war, without a declaration of war.

Morse also balked at the idea that Congress must fall into lock-step behind the president:

Since when do we have to back our president, or should we, when the president is proposing an unconstitutional act?

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed. It gave Johnson the green light to escalate the War in Vietnam. Morse was one of only two senators who voted against it. (The other was Alaska senator Ernest Gruening.) After the vote, Morse defended his decision:

History will record that Senator Gruening and I voted in the interest of the American people this morning when we voted against this resolution.

Of course, the Vietnam War went on to claim thousands more American and Vietnamese lives, and America eventually withdrew. Many years after his death, Morse was proven right regarding his suspicions of the Tonkin incident; the NSA eventually admitted that the incident had been misreported and based on what they knew was bad intelligence.

Morse continued to speak out against what he felt were unconstitutional acts and a lack of transparency committed by the Johnson Administration as the war escalated. The FBI investigated Morse because of his opposition. His stance eventually cost him his Senate seat; war supporter Bob Packwood (who would resign decades later from the Senate because of sexual harassment allegations against him) defeated Morse in the 1968 election.

Morse was in the midst of a campaign to regain his seat when he died of kidney failure in 1974.

Wayne Morse was a true independent who had described his political philosophy as "principle above politics." He did not vote predictably and unthinkingly along party lines and he disagreed with fellow Democrats and fellow Republicans when his conscience and his legal prowess told him he had to. Politically, this left him with few friends and many enemies.

Wayne Morse is not a household name. Even in Oregon, it was not until recently that he began to attain more widespread recognition. In 2006, Eugene's new U.S. Courthouse was named for Morse; that same year, the Oregon University School of Law named a commons after him. The Wayne Morse Historical Park Corporation, with the city of Eugene, operates Morse's home as a historical site.

The Wayne Morse Historical Park Corporation also established the Wayne L. Morse Integrity in Politics Award. The award is given to individuals who "exhibit an extraordinary level of integrity and independence, a commitment to justice, and a willingness to take a principled stand even at great political cost."

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"I Grew Up Surrounded by Strong Women": LaDonna Harris

LaDonna Tabbyite Harris’s Comanche surname means “the sun’s rays coming through the clouds.” It’s an apt description of Harris’s determination to shed light on and help overcome the socio-economic struggles of her fellow American Indians.

The daughter of a Comanche woman and an Irish-American man who left her mother when she was young, Harris, who was raised on Indian land in Temple, Oklahoma, saw firsthand the challenges faced by Indians as a minority community with limited economic opportunities. 

But LaDonna had strong family ties and benefited from the presence of several positive female role models, especially her maternal grandmother, whose position as a leader in the community inspired LaDonna to take on a similar role when she became an adult. 

After high school, Harris married fellow Oklahoman Fred Harris, who also came from modest beginnings, and when he was elected to the US Senate, LaDonna took advantage of increased press access to educate the public about Indian life. She sometimes noted how little Americans seemed to know about Indians; she often had to give what she called her “Indian 101” primer to help educate non-Indians. She emphasized the diversity of tribes and traditions, and the largely untapped talents and promise of this minority group that had been decimated both in the early days of colonization and in the wars that waged on the Western frontier through the 1880s.

In Washington in the late 1960s, Harris worked to improve ties between tribes, reasoning that, like African-Americans in the civil rights movement, Indians could benefit from pooling resources and helping each other. Harris founded Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity. This was the first intertribal organization in Oklahoma and the group emphasized efforts to end segregation and promote economic development, education and training.  Harris’s work gained her increasing attention both in the American Indian community and nationwide; she became a nationally known consultant on American Indian issues.

Harris served on many presidential commissions, including the U.S. Commission on Mental Health and the National Council on Indian Opportunity (NCIO). Harris was frustrated by NCIO’s lack of progress, and left that commission to found Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO), which she still presides over today.

In 1975, Harris and her family moved from Washington, D.C. to New Mexico, where Harris’s work with the AIO continued. In 1980, Harris was the first American Indian woman to run for the vice presidency (on the Citizens Party ticket with Barry Commoner). Her political career was not successful, but her activist work has continued apace: in addition to her work leading AIO, she helped found Common Cause, The National Women’s Political Caucus, the National Indian Business Association, and the National Urban Coalition. Harris also became involved with the causes of indigenous people worldwide, which led her to serve on the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and to become increasingly involved with world peace movements.

In recent decades, Harris has also focused on bringing economic opportunity, in the form of the telecommunciations, natural resource and infrastructure-related industries, to New Mexico, Oklahoma, and other areas where American Indians reside.

In 2009, Indian Country Today interviewed Harris at the American Indian Inaugural Ball (an event she, not surprisingly, was one of the first to organize in 1969). When asked her opinion on the new administration and their knowledge of Indian issues, Harris was positive and ready to get to work, stating what she has always believed about her fellow Indians: “There’s so much we have to contribute because of our cultural background.”  

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Ida B. Wells-Barnett: "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them."

You’re sitting in a non-smoking train car when somebody tells you that you must get up and go stand in the smoking car. Why? Because a white person wants your seat. Even though you paid for it.

You resist. You’ve had it with second-class treatment, so you maintain your seat until you are physically removed by three men who gang up on you.

When you’re removed from the car, people clap to see you’ve been put in your place.

I’m not talking about the Amtrak version of Rosa Parks. I’m talking about someone who fought the system seven decades before Rosa Parks did: Ida B. Wells.

Ida B. Wells had a hard life. She was born in Mississippi in the middle of the Civil War, an enslaved child of two enslaved people, Jim and Elizabeth Wells. Jim and Elizabeth became passionate pro-education and pro-justice activists during Reconstruction, and set an incredible example for their daughter and their seven other children. When she was just 16, Ida lost both her parents and one of her siblings in a yellow fever epidemic. She had been visiting her grandmother out in the country and even though she was urged by doctors to stay away until the epidemic passed, she went home to care for her now-orphaned brothers and sisters. At 16, with no money and few resources, she took on the task of raising her seven surviving siblings.

Wells found a position as a teacher and scraped together, with the help of an aunt, a living for her family. They moved to Memphis to be with the aunt, and Wells continued her education during school breaks.

The train incident happened in 1884, and it propelled Wells into a career of writing and political activism. She sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Company and won, although the decision was reversed by the Tennessee Supreme Court. From that moment she began methodically studying the plight of African Americans both in her state of Tennessee and across the south. As an educator she decried the poor conditions of African American schools and the lack of equality not only in education but in legal protection, health care, and other areas.

Wells parlayed her new writing role into an editorship at the Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper. Eventually she became a full-time writer and activist, in part because her strong views about education did not sit well with her employers.

As the post-Reconstruction era allowed the continued rise of white supremacist groups like the KKK, increasing numbers of African Americans were brutally murdered, most often for crimes they hadn’t committed. When three friends of Wells were lynched by a white mob in 1892 (their crime was defending their store — which competed with a white store for business — when a mob tried to burn it down), Wells began an anti-lynching crusade that she would champion for decades.

Wells left Memphis after her friends were killed and her own life was threatened, and she encouraged many other African Americans to do the same. She settled in Chicago and eventually married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer. Wells-Barnett still spent much of her time traveling domestically and abroad to speak out on the topic of lynching. One of her most famous works, a pamphlet she titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, was the springboard for a multi-year speaking campaign.

Wells did not shrink from the horrible realities of lynching, and she would not let her audience avoid it either. She studied hundreds of lynchings across the country with the discipline of an investigative journalist. She argued that 10,000 African Americans were lynched since Empancipation, and that many of them were killed because of baseless, fabricated, or minor criminal charges. She went on to claim that the real reason whites lynched African Americans was fear of economic competition and a need to reinforce white claims of black inferiority.

Wells was a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Always outspoken, she often clashed with other activists when she felt they were not militant enough.

Wells’s searing writing, her fearless campaign against lynching, and her political activism were extraordinary acts of bravery — especially in a time when people who looked like her could be killed for no reason at all.

[thewishedforcountry]

"All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life": Robert Smalls

In the early morning hours of a spring day in 1862, one of the Confederacy’s most important gunships, the Planter, was stolen from its Charleston port and surrendered to the United States Navy at Fort Sumter.

This amazing feat was orchestrated by a slave.

Robert Smalls had spent years working on the docks at the port of Charleston before his conscription into the Confederate Navy. He stole the Planter from his captain just days before it was scheduled to bring cannons to a Confederate fort under construction in Charleston harbor.

Smalls was welcomed with open arms by the Northern press and his fame gave him access to Abraham Lincoln, whom he lobbied — successfully — to allow blacks to fight for the union. Smalls served with the Union Navy until March 1863, when he became the first African-American captain of a military vessel in U.S. service.

Smalls participated in more than a dozen military actions throughout the war. In 1865 he returned to South Carolina with the Planter to witness the re-raising of the flag on Fort Sumter.

After the war, Smalls  triumphantly returned to Charleston and bought his former master’s house. Then he entered politics.

Smalls had a taste of politics during the war, when during a stay in Philadelphia he was forced out of an all-white streetcar. Outraged, he had led a public boycott of segregated transportation that had a lasting effect: by 1867, Philadelphia’s streetcars were integrated.

Back home in Beaufort, Smalls served in progressively powerful roles as a state representative, state senator, and a US congressman. He served four terms and fought for better education and voting rights protection for African Americans.

In the 1870s and 1880s, advancements in Civil Rights that were achieved during Reconstruction were betrayed by disinterested Northern whites, Southern whites who joined groups like the Klan and the Red Shirts, and a Democratic Party that eagerly wooed these voters to its ranks. As the window of opportunity closed on Southern blacks, Smalls fought hard to maintain a voice for his constituents in Washington. As blacks were murdered or threatened with murder when they went to vote, politicians like Smalls were wading against the tide.

From his capture of the Planter to his last day in office, Smalls’s goal was not to secure special attention or favors for his fellow African Americans, but merely their basic civil rights; that was all they required. As he described it, "all they need is an equal chance in the battle of life."

[thewishedforcountry]

"If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled": Elizabeth Blackwell

In 1847, a young woman who had been studying medicine privately for years decided to apply to medical schools across the United States. Elizabeth Blackwell was rejected by all but one of the schools she had applied to. She was only admitted to Geneva Medical College in New York State because the students, asked by the faculty to vote on her admission, voted yes -- because they thought it was a joke. 

Two years later, Blackwell graduated first in her class. She was the first female MD in the United States.

Blackwell was born in England to Quaker parents who believed men and women were equal. They had encouraged their daughters to become as educated as their sons. Blackwell had studied and taught private school for years before she applied to Geneva. She was an outcast when she arrived there, and had to fight to be allowed into the labs that were critical to every physician’s education. 

Blackwell believed that women had a right not only to participate equally in the medical profession, but also as patients, women had a right to be treated by female physicians. Blackwell moved back to Europe to study after graduation, and trained in Paris and England where she met another pioneering female medical professional, Florence Nightingale.

Back in New York, Blackwell continued to confront discrimination as she tried to establish herself as a physician. Because hospitals and landlords did not support a woman practicing medicine, she had to establish her own clinic (which she later developed into the New York Infirmary for Women and Children) and buy a house for her practice. Blackwell’s clinic served New York City’s poor immigrant populations. Blackwell eventually won the support of prominent male physicians and employed other pioneering female doctors who followed in her footsteps.

Blackwell became a prominent lecturer on the subject of hygiene and women’s health. She helped found the Women’s Central Association of Relief, which trained nurses to help wounded soldiers during the Civil War.  

In 1868, Blackwell and her sister established the Women’s Medical College at her clinic. She didn’t stop there - a year later, she moved to England and established the London School of Medicine for Women with some of her colleagues.

Blackwell continued to teach medicine until her retirement in 1907. She had once observed that being the first in her field had often been a painful struggle:

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel. 

Thanks to Blackwell, female physicians who came after her were not as ‘singularly and painfully alone’ - they had mentors and trailblazers who had led the way.