Renowned civil rights and womens rights leader Angela Davis spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta on March 24, 2009 for the keynote address of Emory Universitys Womens History Month. Davis’ long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment in 1970.
Anita Hill speech at Simmons College on April 11, 2008, “The Power of Our Presence: African American Women Building Communities, Families, Ourselves,” focused both on the past by examining the racist and misogynist 1965 Moynihan report, and on the present by noting milestones achieved by black women since the report’s release.
Looking to the future, Hill urged the audience to take advantage of opportunities outside the community: in the workforce and in areas like education, politics, and law. She cited five ways, or “pledges,” for Black women to further their presence in leadership roles, including: moving beyond Brown v. Board of Education to change access and curriculum; integrating society, starting with the workplace; creating a safe-haven in the home and community; and saving the community’s soul by emphasizing religion and generating positive images of African American culture.
Professor Anita Hill
“We have to become the political leaders we deserve,” said Hill as the fifth and final pledge. “If we are serious about having a conversation about race and gender, we must have elected officials in leadership roles that are willing to talk about it.
“The burn of identity,” Hill said, both as a women and as an African American, “can be overwhelming but nothing for Simmons women.”
“Our hopes speak to all Americans,” said Hill. She urged the crowd to strive to leave the next generation inclusive, not just tolerant. “We are the American Dream,” she concluded.
BAKER: “…I think the basic “why” of S.C.L.C. has to do with what has taken place in the ’54 decision and the Montgomery bus boycott. But before you can evaluate the bus boycott, you have to understand how it came about. And it didn’t come out of a vacuum.
There were two people in Montgomery who had functioned with the N.A.A.C.P. over the years and they were Mrs. Rosa Parks and E.D.Nixon. Where did E. D. Nixon get his fire? He got his fire and his sense of social action from being a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the struggle that it had waged through the years.
So when the Montgomery bus boycott ended successfully here you had a social phenomenon that had not taken place in the history of those of us who were around at that time, where hundreds of people and even thousands of people, ordinary people, had taken a position that put them in a very uncomfortable—at least made life less comfortable for them—when they decided to walk rather than to ride the buses.
And this was a mass action and a mass action that anybody who looked at the social scene would have to appreciate and wonder.
Those of us who believed that mass and only through mass action are we going to eliminate certain things, would have to think in terms of how does this get carried on.
So, whatever the reasons, or however the historical accidents of history or whatever else that precipitated Martin as the president—that’s quite a story I’m not going into because you didn’t come here for that—but whatever those factors were, he was there as the spokesman for the boycott. And out of the boycott he became a worldwide known individual articulating the strivings and the hopes and so forth of the people who were involved in the boycott.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan It was a bad week for dictators, and a good one for international justice. Two brutal, U.S.-backed dictators who ruled decades ago were convicted for crimes they committed while in power. Hissene Habre took control of the northern African nation of Chad in 1982, and unleashed a reign of terror against his own people, killi […]
We continue our conversation with Dave Zirin, author of the book "Brazil's Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy," and Jules Boykoff, author of "Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics." In early August, more than 10,000 athletes across the world will convene in Rio de Janeiro's […]
Extended interview with Setsuko Thurlow, who survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing, about the bombing of 1945 and her push to eliminate nuclear weapons. On August 6, 1945, Thurlow was at school in Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on a civilian population. She has been an anti-nuclear activist for decades. Watch Part 1
Holocaust survivor and peace activist Hedy Epstein has died at the age of 91. Epstein was born in Germany and left in 1939 on a Kindertransport to England. Her parents died in Auschwitz. She later returned to Germany to work as a research analyst for the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials. She was involved in civil rights and antiwar movements throughou […]
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan Thursday, Jan. 28, was a cold morning in Durham, North Carolina. Wildin David Guillen Acosta went outside to head to school, but never made it. He was thrown to the ground and arrested by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE ). He has been in detention ever since. Wildin, now 19 years old, fled his home […]
Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of a U.S. president or vice president, is in Poland and Germany to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and address rising antisemitism around the world.
"One Governor should not have the power to dictate the facts of U.S. history," Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said of GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' move to ban the Advanced Placement course.
Weeks of rainfall in California won't end a severe drought, but it will provide public water agencies serving 27 million people with much more water than the suppliers had been previously told.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries insists the looming debt ceiling crisis will be resolved without his party submitting to demands by Republicans who want to tie government spending cuts to a debt limit hike.
The seven states that rely on the river for water are not expected to reach a deal on cuts. It appears the Biden administration will have to impose reductions.
As the city awaits video of the fatal encounter with Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, a law enforcement official described the footage as “absolutely appalling.”
Mr. Nichols was pulled over by the Memphis police on the evening of Jan. 7 and died three days later. Five officers were charged with murder on Thursday.
The social forces are pervasive but subtle in Lukas Dhont's Close — no overt bullying or homophobia, just internalized pressures on still-developing psyches.
FDA advisers debate the agency's controversial proposal to start handling the COVID vaccines like the flu shots — updating them annually to target the most likely strain to be dominant each winter.
House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists. The House Majority Leader has said that his expenses on a 2000 trip were paid by a nonprofit organization, and that the financial arrangements for it were proper.
Five months after President Bush launched his drive to overhaul Social Security, the difficult, if not impossible, task of drafting legislation begins Tuesday when the Senate Finance Committee holds the first hearing on options to secure Social Security's future.
Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee has been studying the electorate, and the party's problem with voters of faith is both worse and better than he feared.
Years ago, the federal government spent $117 million on an experimental "clean coal" power plant in Alaska designed to generate electricity with a minimum of air pollution -- but the project never got up and running.