Repost: Black History Month: Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was one of the most important, impassioned leaders of the civil rights movement, from its earliest incarnations in the 1950s until well into the 1980s. Yet his is a name that is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Bayard Rustin's involvement was a behind-the-scenes involvement, though no less important than any of the other names usually associated with the fight for civil rights. In addition, the fact that Bayard Rustin was also a gay man, and had been a member of the American Communist party probably insured his name would seldom be mentioned.

He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912, to Florence Rustin, one of eight children of Julia and Janifer Rustin. Florence's child had been born out of wedlock; the father was Archie Hopkins. Julia and Janifer decided to raise young Bayard as their son--he did not know that his 'sister' Florence was his mother until he was in his early teens.

Julia Rustin was a member of the Society of Friends--the Quakers--and even though she attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the denomination of her husband, she raised her children on the tenets of the Quaker faith: the equality of all human beings before God, the necessity for nonviolence, the importance of dealing with everyone with love and respect.

After attending Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College, Bayard moved to New York City in 1937, where he would live the rest of his life. He enrolled in City College of New York, though he never received a degree. It was at City College that Rustin began to organize for the Young Communist League of City College; the communists' progressive stance on the issue of racial injustice appealed to him. with the Party's about-face in the issue of segregation in the American military, he became disillusioned with communism and broke with the Young Communist League.

He soon found himself following the words of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and, at that time, heavily involved in the civil rights of African Americans. Bayard Rustin soon found himself heading the youth wing of a march on Washington that Randolph envisioned, but the march was cancelled when FDR issued Executive Order No. 8802, forbidding racial discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries.

Rustin was angered by Randolph's decision to cancel the projected march, and he transferred his efforts at organization to the peace movement, first in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and then in the American Friends Service Committee, the Socialist Party, and the War Resisters League.

As a member of a government-recognized peace church--Rustin belonged to the Fifteenth Street Friends Meeting-- he was entitled to do alternative service rather than serve in the military. But Rustin was unable to accept what he considered the 'easy way out,' given that many young men who did not belong to any recognized peace church were given harsh sentences for refusing to serve in the armed forces.

In 1944, Rustin was found guilty of violating the Selective Service Act and was sentenced to three years in a federal prison. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, where he set about to resist the pervasive segregation that was the norm in US prisons at that time. Faced with vicious racism from some of the white guards and prisoners, Rustin faced frequent cruelty with courage and completely nonviolent resistance.

After his release from prison, Rustin once more joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which staged a journey through four Southern and border states in 1947 to test the application of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that discrimination in seating in interstate transportation was illegal.

Rustin's resistance to North Carolina's Jim Crow law against integration in transportation earned him twenty-eight days' hard labor on a chain gang, where he met with the usual racist taunts and tortures from his fellow white prisoners, as well as the guards.

From 1947 to 1952, Rustin traveled to India and then to Africa under the aegis of FOR to explore and understand more fully the concept of nonviolent demonstration, working within the Indian and Ghanaian independence movements.

In 1953, back in the US and lecturing for the American Association of University Women in Pasadena, Rustin was arrested for public indecency. It was the first time that Rustin's homosexuality had come into public attention, and at that time homosexual behavior in all states was a criminal offense.

Although the gay rights movement in the United States was still many years away, Rustin's conviction and his relatively open attitude about his homosexuality set the stage for him to become an elder gay icon, as well as an African American icon, in the years to come. Civil Right and gay rights became of a piece with his belief in the inherent dignity of Afro-Americans and other oppressed people.

A consequence of his arrest was that Rustin was released from his position at the FOR.

During this time, what he considered the lowest point of his life, Bayard Rustin began a twelve-year stint as executive secretary of the War Resisters League. He contributed greatly to a compilation of pacifist strategy--entitled Speak Truth To Power--published in The Progressive in 1959.

In 1956 Rustin was asked to provide Dr. Martin Luther King with some practical advice on how to apply Gandhian principles of nonviolence to the boycott of public transportation then taking shape in Montgomery, Alabama. On leave from the War Resisters League, Rustin spent time in Montgomery and Birmingham advising King, who had not yet completely embraced principles of nonviolence in his struggle.

By 1957, Rustin was playing a significant role in the birth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and in the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington that took place in May of 1957 to urge President Eisenhower to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that US schools be desegregated.

The high point of Bayard Rustin's political career, obviously, was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which took place on August 28, 1963; where Martin Luther King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech. By all accounts Bayard Rustin was the March's chief architect.

With small inroads in desegregation, baby steps actually, finally being made, Rustin came to believe that the time for militant action was over. Now that the legal foundation for segregation had been irrevocably shattered, came the larger, more difficult task of forging an alliance of dispossessed groups in American society into a progressive force.

Rustin saw this coalition encompassing African Americans and other minorities, trade unions, liberals, and religious groups. Rustin's plan of action did not go further was due to, in the opinion of several political analysts, the war in Vietnam. The enormous monetary, psychological, and spiritual cost of war had eroded any chance of further progressive movement.

Rustin's opposition to 'identity politics' also came under criticism by exponents of the Black Power movement. His criticism of affirmative action programs and black studies departments in American universities was not a popular viewpoint among his fellow African Americans. Rustin found himself isolated from the movement for a time.

Another viewpoint which did not endear Bayard Rustin to leftists or radical Black Power adherents was his consistent support of Israel. In the wake of the Holocaust, Rustin believed very strongly that the Jews needed their own state.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a delegate for Freedom house, monitoring elections and human rights abuses in places like Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland, and Zimbabwe. In all his efforts Rustin evinced a lifelong, unwavering conviction on behalf of the value of democratic principles.

It was Rustin's human rights expedition to Haiti in 1987 that drew the final curtain on his remarkable life. After his visit, under the aegis of Freedom House, to study prospects for democratic elections in Haiti, Rustin began to feel ill. His symptoms were initially misdiagnosed as intestinal parasites, but on August 21, 1987, Rustin was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital and diagnosed with a perforated appendix.

He died of cardiac arrest on August 24.

Although Bayard Rustin lived in the shadow of more charismatic civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, he can lay claim to having been an indispensable, although mostly unsung, force behind the movement toward equality for America's black citizens, and more largely for the rights of human beings around the world.

Throughout his life, Bayard Rustin's Quakerism was a unifying force, and a strong plank in his personal philosophy, incorporating beliefs that were of central importance to him: that there is God in every person, that all are entitled to a decent life, and that a life of service to others is the way to happiness and true fulfillment.

Repost: Black History Month: Ida B. Wells-Barnett

An uncompromising woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker.

Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, Ida's parents were able to support their seven children after the war because her mother and father were skilled workers—as a cook and carpenter. When Ida was fourteen, however, Yellow Fever killed her parents and youngest siblings, and Ida took it upon herself to keep the family together. She took a job as a teacher, working to continue her own education at nearby Rust College.

It was in Memphis, where Ida moved to live with aunt and younger sisters, that she first began to fight—literally—for racial and gender justice. In 1884 the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company asked Ida to give up her seat to a white man—she was ordered into the smoking, or "Jim Crow," car.—and she told the man …

“I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.”

Ida Wells was forcefully removed from the train as the white passengers applauded.

Back home in Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad and won her case in the local circuit courts. But the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.

Her suit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company gave rise to a new career as a journalist. Many newspapers wanted to hear the story of the 25-year-old schoolteacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.

In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper owned by Rev. R. Nightingale—the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as a schoolteacher.

In 1892 three of her friends—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—were  lynched because their grocery store, People's Grocery Company, had taken away customers from competing white business. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. Moss, McDowell and Stewart were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all of them.

Ida Wells  wrote in The Free Speech:

“The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Many people took Wells' advice and left town; others in the Black community organized a boycott of white-owned businesses to try and stem the threat, the terror, of lynchings. Ida's newspaper office was destroyed as a result of her stories of the murder of her three friends and she opted to leave Memphis for Chicago, where she continued her blistering attacks on Southern injustices, especially through investigation to expose the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.

In Chicago, she developed numerous African American women’s organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She was also a tireless worker for women's right to vote and marched in the 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers, Attorney F. L. Barnett, and announced she would retire to the privacy of her home.. She didn’t stay retired for long; she continued to write and to organize, and in 1906 she, along with W. E.B. DuBois and others, further the Niagara Movement—a civil rights organization that fought against racial segregation and disenfranchisement for African Americans—and she was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909.

As late as 1930, disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, making her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States.

A year later, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.

I wonder what she might have said about a woman running for president in 2008, about a Black man becoming president in 2008 and I like to think she was smiling and saying:

"I told you so."

Just This Week South Carolina Closed Its HIV Ghettos in State Prisons

HIV and AIDS have been around for thirty-plus years now, and yet there’s till that ‘fear’ of those who have ‘it’; there are still people who think you can get ‘it’ from living together, sharing a soda, using the same bathroom; there are still some people who think anyone with HIV or AIDS needs to be separated from the rest of ‘us’ so we don’t get ‘it’.

South Carolina was one of those places, until this week.

South Carolina subjects all its prisoners to mandatory HIV testing as soon as they enter the system and, until this week, anyone testing positive was sent to solitary confinement and then sent to serve their prison term in HIV Ghettos.

Yes, that’s what they did here in South Carolina, until this week.

And they also—shades of WWII Concentration Camps—forced all HIV+ prisoners into wearing badges so that everyone knows they live in the HIV Ghetto. I’m guessing the Pink Triangle wasn’t available; or, failing that, a Scarlet H.

And, again, until this week, if you were imprisoned in South Carolina, and if you tested positive for HIV, and then were segregated, you had fewer opportunities for rehabilitation which meant your prison term was longer than those who tested negative.

In addition, if you are an HIV+ prisoner in South Carolina, until this week you would have been confined in a maximum security prison that houses South Carolina's death row—even if you were a minimum-security prisoner serving time for some trivial offense.

Until this week, the state of South Carolina barred all prisoners with HIV, including the 40 HIV-positive women in its custody, from eating in the same dining hall with other prisoners. All prisoners with HIV were excluded from all jobs in prison food service, and all HIV+ prisoners were excluded from work release programs; this is especially harmful for those prisoners hoping to be rehabilitated and then released, as the work release program significantly improves a prisoner's chances of a successful re-entry to the community.

Until this week, HIV+ prisoners were not even allowed to sit together during church services with other prisoners.

But that ended; all of that is going to change. This week, the South Carolina Department of Corrections has announced that it is abolishing its policy of HIV segregation marking an end to the HIV Ghettos in US prisons.

Now, if only we could educate the public, and if only if won’t take another thirty years.

via ACLU

Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was one of the most important, impassioned leaders of the civil rights movement, from it's earliest incarnations in the 1950s until well into the 1980s. Yet his is a name that is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Bayard Rustin's involvement was a behind-the-scenes involvement, though no less important than any of the other names usually associated with the fight for civil rights. In addition, the fact that Bayard Rustin was also a gay man, and had been a member of the American Communist party probably insured his name would seldom be mentioned.

He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912, to Florence Rustin, one of eight children of Julia and Janifer Rustin. Florence's child had been born out of wedlock; the father was Archie Hopkins. Julia and Janifer decided to raise young Bayard as their son--he did not know that his 'sister' Florence was his mother until he was in his early teens.

Julia Rustin was a member of the Society of Friends--the Quakers--and even though she attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the denomination of her husband, she raised her children on the tenets of the Quaker faith: the equality of all human beings before God, the necessity for nonviolence, the importance of dealing with everyone with love and respect.

After attending Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College, Bayard moved to New York City in 1937, where he would live the rest of his life. He enrolled in City College of New York, though he never received a degree. It was at City College that Rustin began to organize for the Young Communist League of City College; the communists' progressive stance on the issue of racial injustice appealed to him. with the Party's about-face in the issue of segregation in the American military, he became disillusioned with communism and broke with the Young Communist League.

He soon found himself following the words of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and, at that time, heavily involved in the civil rights of African Americans. Bayard Rustin soon found himself heading the youth wing of a march on Washington that Randolph envisioned, but the march was cancelled when FDR issued Executive Order No. 8802, forbidding racial discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries.

Rustin was angered by Randolph's decision to cancel the projected march, and he transferred his efforts at organization to the peace movement, first in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and then in the American Friends Service Committee, the Socialist Party, and the War Resisters League.

As a member of a government-recognized peace church--Rustin belonged to the Fifteenth Street Friends Meeting-- he was entitled to do alternative service rather than serve in the military. But Rustin was unable to accept what he considered the 'easy way out,' given that many young men who did not belong to any recognized peace church were given harsh sentences for refusing to serve in the armed forces.

In 1944, Rustin was found guilty of violating the Selective Service Act and was sentenced to three years in a federal prison. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, where he set about to resist the pervasive segregation that was the norm in US prisons at that time. Faced with vicious racism from some of the white guards and prisoners, Rustin faced frequent cruelty with courage and completely nonviolent resistance.

After his release from prison, Rustin once more joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which staged a journey through four Southern and border states in 1947 to test the application of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that discrimination in seating in interstate transportation was illegal.

Rustin's resistance to North Carolina's Jim Crow law against integration in transportation earned him twenty-eight days' hard labor on a chain gang, where he met with the usual racist taunts and tortures from his fellow white prisoners, as well as the guards.

From 1947 to 1952, Rustin traveled to India and then to Africa under the aegis of FOR to explore and understand more fully the concept of nonviolent demonstration, working within the Indian and Ghanaian independence movements.

In 1953, back in the US and lecturing for the American Association of University Women in Pasadena, Rustin was arrested for public indecency. It was the first time that Rustin's homosexuality had come into public attention, and at that time homosexual behavior in all states was a criminal offense.

Although the gay rights movement in the United States was still many years away, Rustin's conviction and his relatively open attitude about his homosexuality set the stage for him to become an elder gay icon, as well as an African American icon, in the years to come. Civil Right and gay rights became of a piece with his belief in the inherent dignity of Afro-Americans and other oppressed people.

A consequence of his arrest, was that Rustin was released from his position at the FOR.

During this time, what he considered the lowest point of his life, Bayard Rustin began a twelve-year stint as executive secretary of the War Resisters League. He contributed greatly to a compilation of pacifist strategy--entitled Speak Truth To Power--published in The Progressive in 1959.

In 1956 Rustin was asked to provide Dr. Martin Luther King with some practical advice on how to apply Gandhian principles of nonviolence to the boycott of public transportation then taking shape in Montgomery, Alabama. On leave from the War Resisters League, Rustin spent time in Montgomery and Birmingham advising King, who had not yet completely embraced principles of nonviolence in his struggle.

By 1957, Rustin was playing a large role in the birth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and in the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington that took place in May of 1957 to urge President Eisenhower to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that US schools be desegregated.

The high point of Bayard Rustin's political career, obviously, was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which took place on August 28, 1963; where Martin Luther King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech. By all accounts Bayard Rustin was the March's chief architect.

With small inroads in desegregation, baby steps actually, finally being made, Rustin came to believe that the time for militant action was over. Now that the legal foundation for segregation had been irrevocably shattered, came the larger, more difficult task of forging an alliance of dispossessed groups in American society into a progressive force.

Rustin saw this coalition encompassing African Americans and other minorities, trade unions, liberals, and religious groups. Rustin's plan of action did not go further was due to, in the opinion of several political analysts, the war in Vietnam. The enormous monetary, psychological, and spiritual cost of war had eroded any chance of further progressive movement.

Rustin's opposition to 'identity politics' also came under criticism by exponents of the Black Power movement. His criticism of affirmative action programs and black studies departments in American universities was not a popular viewpoint among his fellow African Americans. Rustin found himself isolated from the movement for a time.

Another viewpoint which did not endear Bayard Rustin to leftists or radical Black Power adherents was his consistent support of Israel. In the wake of the Holocaust, Rustin believed very strongly that the Jews needed their own state.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a delegate for Freedom house, monitoring elections and human rights abuses in places like Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland, and Zimbabwe. In all his efforts Rustin evinced a lifelong, unwavering conviction in behalf of the value of democratic principles.

It was Rustin's human rights expedition to Haiti in 1987 that drew the final curtain on his remarkable life. After his visit, under the aegis of Freedom House, to study prospects for democratic elections in Haiti, Rustin began to feel ill. His symptoms were initially misdiagnosed as intestinal parasites, but on August 21, 1987, Rustin was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital and diagnosed with a perforated appendix.

He died of cardiac arrest on August 24.

Although Bayard Rustin lived in the shadow of more charismatic civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, he can lay claim to having been an indispensable, although mostly unsung, force behind the movement toward equality for America's black citizens, and more largely for the rights of human beings around the world.

Throughout his life, Bayard Rustin's Quakerism was a unifying force, and a strong plank in his personal philosophy, incorporating beliefs that were of central importance to him: that there is God in every person, that all are entitled to a decent life, and that a life of service to others is the way to happiness and true fulfillment.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

An uncompromising woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker.

Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, Ida's parents were able to support their seven children after the war because her mother and father were skilled workers--as cook and carpenter. When Ida was fourteen, however, Yellow Fever killed her parents and youngest siblings, and Ida took it upon herself to keep the family together. She began a a job as a teacher, working to continue her own education at nearby Rust College.

In Memphis, where Ida moved to live with aunt and young sisters, that she first began to fight--literally--for racial and gender justice. In 1884 she was asked by the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company to give up her seat to a white man; she was ordered into the smoking, or "Jim Crow," car.

Despite the 1875 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color, in theaters, hotels, transports, and other public accommodations, many railroad companies defied the congressional mandate and racially segregated its passengers. It is also important to note that Ida B. Well's defiant act was took place before Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the deceptive doctrine of "separate but equal," which constitutionalized racial segregation.

Wells wrote in her autobiography:

I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.

Ida Wells was forcefully removed from the train and the other passengers--all whites--applauded. Back home in Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad, and won her case in the local circuit courts. But the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.

Her suit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company also gave rise to a new career as a journalist. Many newspapers wanted to hear the story of the 25-year-old school teacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.

In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight. The paper was also owned by Rev. R. Nightingale-- the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as a schoolteacher.

Then, in 1892 three of her friends--Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart--were lynched. . These men owned the People's Grocery Company, and their small grocery had taken away customers from competing white businesses. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. The three men were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all of them.

This atrocity galvanized Ida Wells, and she wrote in The Free Speech:

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.

Many people took Wells' advice and left town; others in the Black community organized a boycott of white-owned businesses to try and stem the threat, the terror, of lynchings. Ida's newspaper office was destroyed as a result of her stories of the murder of her three friends. Ida Wells could not return to Memphis, so she moved to Chicago, where she continued her blistering attacks on Southern injustices, especially through investigation to expose the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.

In Chicago, she developed numerous African American women and reform organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She was also a tireless worker for women's suffrage, and marched in the 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers, saying, "I was married in the city of Chicago to Attorney F. L. Barnett, and retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home." Ida B. Wells-Barnett did not stay retired long. She continued to write and to organize, and in 1906, she W. E.B. DuBois and others to further the Niagara Movement. She was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909.

As late as 1930, disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, making her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States.

A year later, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.

But what she might have said about a woman running for president in 2008, about a black man becoming president in 2008.

Somewhere, Ida B. Wells is smiling, and probably saying, "I told you so."

Thurgood Marshall

There are those who say that Thurgood Marshall was America's leading radical and I think he may have liked that title.

As a justice on the US Supreme Court, he led a civil rights revolution from the 1960s to the 1990s, Marshall is less well-known today than Martin Luther King Jr--who preached for a non-violent end to racism--and Malcolm X--who chose a more violent route to fight discrimination. Thurgood Marshall, worked with, and through, the court system to end the legacy of slavery and destroy the last fragment of the Jim Crow laws; Marshall had a profound and lasting effect on race relations.

Although Thurgood--born Thoroughgood--Marshall on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, was the great-grandson of a slave, he graduated valedictorian from Howard University Law School in 1933, and soon began to represent civil-rights activists, becoming counsel for the NAACP in 1938. Over the next 23 years he won 29 of the 32 major cases he undertook for that organization, several of which set constitutional precedents in matters such as voting rights and breaking down segregated transportation and education.

President Kennedy named him to the US Court of Appeals, a seat he finally took despite the resistance of Southern senators, and where he served from 1962 to 1965. President Johnson appointed him US solicitor general, and then to the US Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American to hold such an office, sitting on the court from 1967 until 1991, and consistently voting with the liberal block.

Marshall ended legal segregation in the United States. He won Supreme Court victories breaking the color line in housing, transportation and voting, all of which overturned the 'Separate-but-Equal' status quo of white America. Thurgood Marshall won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools. That decision ignited the 1960s civil rights movement, saw in increase in the numbers of black high school and college graduates, and gave rise to a black middle-class.

As the nation's first African-American Supreme Court justice, Marshall promoted affirmative action as a remedy for the nation's history of slavery and racial bias. Marshall made it clear that, while legal discrimination was over, much work needed to be done to see to it that chasm between what it meant to be white in America, and what it was to be black in America, would no longer be such an issue.

And though he worked on behalf of black Americans, Marshall also created new protections under law for women, children, prisoners, and the homeless. For Thurgood Marshall, true equality wouldn't come only from the great orators, nor would it rise up from the violence others proposed; only integration, true integration, would allow equal rights under the law to take hold. Once this was the norm in America, then blacks and whites, men, women, gay, straight, could rise or fall based on their own ability.

Thurgood Marshall died in 1993.