Celebrating the birthday of Rosa Parks, First Lady of Civil Rights

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In celebration of Black History Month, we are paying homage to Civil Rights Activist, Rosa Parks. Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) is named "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled. Her act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation.

From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American U.S. Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US.

After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years, she suffered from dementia. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman and third non-U.S. government official to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.

"I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free...so other people would be also free." -Rosa Parks

Celebrating the Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.

On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year he and SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and speak against the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam".

In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is located in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., southwest of the National Mall. The national memorial is America's 395th unit in the National Park Service. The statue of King was done by sculptor Lei Yixin, a prominent Chinese sculptor.

Happy Birthday Ida B. Wells

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Today we celebrate 153 years of Ida B. Wells.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931), more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, Georgist, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi to James Wells and Elizabeth "Izzy Bell" Warrenton. This occurred just before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. While visiting her grandmother in the Mississippi Valley in 1878, Ida, then aged 16, received word that Holly Springs had suffered a yellow fever epidemic. Both her parents and her 10-month-old brother, Stanley, died in that event, leaving her and her five siblings orphaned.

Wells kept track of her life through diaries. She documented lynching in the United States, showing that it was often used as a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites, rather than being based on criminal acts by blacks, as was usually claimed by white mobs. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician and traveled internationally on lecture tours.

In 1895, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett. She was one of the first married American women to keep her own last name as well as taking her husband's. The couple had four children: Charles, Herman, Ida, and Alfreda. Throughout her life, Wells was militant in her demands for equality and justice for African-Americans and insisted that the African-American community win justice through its own efforts. Since her death, interest in her life and legacy has grown. She died at the age of 68 in Chicago, Illinois on March 25, 1931.