Historic Groundbreakers

The idea for this topic came from our lovely FG. She asked if we had such a thread, so when I couldn't find one I decided to create one.

The theme of the thread is to share IMAGES, VIDEOS, QUOTES, & ARTICLES/STORIES, etc. about historically significant (and often heroic) people whose actions had a notable impact on society.

Please keep in mind when posting:

-Please put the person's name in the title of your post.

-This thread is not limited to people of specific race, gender, ethnicity, country, etc, or to their significance (RIGHTS, MEDICAL or SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES, SPORTS, EDUCATION, etc.).

-This is a POSITIVE thread. Keep your negativity to yourself; it has no business in this thread. If you can't respect the thread or its posters, stay out.

-This is NOT a Debate or Discussion thread. I just put it here for lack of a better place to post it. Like in BB's Image thread, no dialogue, comments, opinions, etc.

-If you choose to respond to someone's post, do so either via POSITIVE EMOTICONS or by posting additional IMAGES, VIDEO, or INFO about the person in the post.

 

Kathrine Switzer



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Rosa Parks




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Martin Luther King, Jr.




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Tony Hansberry II

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“I love medicine and surgery and believe you can do all
things you set your mind to. Push yourself and have
persistence. If you have a passion for it – it’s probably for
you,”

— Tony Hansberry II

 

Jane Addams

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(Laura) Jane Addams (September 6, 1860-May 21, 1935) won worldwide recognition in the first third of the twentieth century as a pioneer social worker in America, as a feminist, and as an internationalist.

She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous miller and local political leader who served for sixteen years as a state senator and fought as an officer in the Civil War; he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln whose letters to him began «My Dear Double D-'ed Addams». Because of a congenital spinal defect, Jane was not physically vigorous when young nor truly robust even later in life, but her spinal difficulty was remedied by surgery.

In 1881 Jane Addams was graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor's degree only after the school became accredited the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be. At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London's East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being «to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago»1.

Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from troubled people. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull-House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, a labor museum.

As her reputation grew, Miss Addams was drawn into larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed to Chicago's Board of Education and subsequently made chairman of the School Management Committee; in 1908 she participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and in the next year became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In her own area of Chicago she led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, and sanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910 she received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman by Yale University.

Jane Addams was an ardent feminist by philosophy. In those days before women's suffrage she believed that women should make their voices heard in legislation and therefore should have the right to vote, but more comprehensively, she thought that women should generate aspirations and search out opportunities to realize them.

For her own aspiration to rid the world of war, Jane Addams created opportunities or seized those offered to her to advance the cause. In 1906 she gave a course of lectures at the University of Wisconsin summer session which she published the next year as a book, Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke for peace in 1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of the Peace Palace at The Hague and in the next two years, as a lecturer sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, spoke against America's entry into the First World War. In January, 1915, she accepted the chairmanship of the Women's Peace Party, an American organization, and four months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened at The Hague largely upon the initiative of Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist leader of many and varied talents. When this congress later founded the organization called the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Jane Addams served as president until 1929, as presiding officer of its six international conferences in those years, and as honorary president for the remainder of her life.

Publicly opposed to America's entry into the war, Miss Addams was attacked in the press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she found an outlet for her humanitarian impulses as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women and children of the enemy nations, the story of which she told in her book Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).

After sustaining a heart attack in 1926, Miss Addams never fully regained her health. Indeed, she was being admitted to a Baltimore hospital on the very day, December 10, 1931, that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo. She died in 1935 three days after an operation revealed unsuspected cancer. The funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull-House.

 

Little Rock Nine

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Clara Barton

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Clarissa Harlowe Barton, Clara, as she wished to be called, is one of the most honored women in American history. She began teaching school at a time when most teachers were men and she was among the first women to gain employment in the federal government. Barton risked her life to bring supplies and support to soldiers in the field during the Civil War. At age 60, she founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and led it for the next 23 years. Her understanding of the needs of people in distress and the ways in which she could provide help to them guided her throughout her life. By the force of her personal example, she opened paths to the new field of volunteer service. Her intense devotion to serving others resulted in enough achievements to fill several ordinary lifetimes.

http://www.redcross.org/about-us/history/clara-barton

 

Susan B. Anthony

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http://www.biography.com/people/susan-b-anthony-194905

Born on February 15, 1820, Susan B. Anthony was raised in a Quaker household and went on to work as a teacher before becoming a leading figure in the abolitionist and women's voting rights movement. She partnered with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and would eventually lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association. A dedicated writer and lecturer, Anthony died on March 13 1906.

 

Sojourner Truth

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Born in New York circa 1797, Sojourner Truth was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. Her best-known speech on racial inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?", was delivered extemporaneously in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention.

http://www.biography.com/people/sojourner-truth-9511284

Ain't I a Woman?
Sojourner Truth
May 28-29, 1851

"Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I could have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man- when I could get it- and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [Intellect, somebody whispers] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negro's rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure-full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say."​

 

E. Frederic Morrow








July 9, 1955, E. Frederic Morrow appointed administrative aide to President Eisenhower and in doing so, became the first Black to hold a White House staff executive position.




E. Frederic Morrow (1906-1994) was the first black person to hold an executive position at the White House and the first black corporate executive.

Born April 20, 1909, in Hackensack, New Jersey, Morrow was a minister’s son who graduated from Bowdoin College in 1930. Following graduation, he worked for the National Urban League and the NAACP as a field secretary before entering Army service during World War II. After the war, Morrow obtained a law degree from Rutgers University and worked for the public affairs division at the Columbia Broadcasting System. In 1952, Morrow served as an administrative aide and adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower on his campaign trail. He was an adviser on business affairs in the Commerce Department when the President appointed him Administrative Officer for Special Projects in 1955.

In this position, Morrow became the first African American to serve in an executive position on a president’s staff at the White House. Morrow was the sole black person on a staff dealing with racial tensions related to integration and faced difficult personal and professional struggles at the White House. Reporters joked that his biggest responsibility was assigning parking places to other White House staff members. Morrow took the sniping but moved on to become a well publicized Ike aide. He publicly urged the White House and the Republican Party to champion racial integration and equal rights all the way down to the district level and to respond to black pressure for first-class citizenship. He held that the party’s failure to do so was responsible for its “ignominious defeat” in the Congressional elections in 1958, and he called on its leadership to do some “soul-searching”. Never a quiet man, Morrow was an early advocate of GOP diversity, using most of his spare time to address gatherings demanding that the national party “pay attention to minorities and women”. The Brown v. the Board of Education ruling, the Montgomery bus boycott and the Little Rock crisis were the backdrop of Morrow’s White House years. On a staff with a civil rights policy that was at best cautious, Morrow was often angered and frustrated.

At a time when qualified blacks were excluded from high-level political positions, Morrow found relations within the president’s “official family” to be “correct in conduct, but cold”. Leaving the White House in 1960, Morrow found that his record and prominence were not enough for him to land a major corporate position. He once joked that “All I got was an offer as a soft drink salesman.” Morrow eventually became a vice president of the African-American Institute in New York. “It still shocks many captains of industry,” he said at the time, “when a Negro seeks a job on the executive level even though he dealt with them directly as part of his official White House assignment.” Later, he went on to become the first black vice president of Bank of America, then the world’s largest privately-owned bank. In charge of the bank’s international division, he monitored foreign loans and business development.

In 1963, he published his autobiography, Black Man in the White House, leaving a valuable account of his experience as a black man working in the president’s inner circle, including his disappointment with the indecision of Eisenhower’s civil rights policy. He retired as a senior vice president at Bank of America in 1975 and went on to work as an executive associate at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1994, at the age of 88, Morrow died of complications from a stroke.

 

Harriet Tubman

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"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

– Harriet Tubman

http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430

 

Bessie Coleman



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Bessie Coleman was the first black woman to earn a pilot's license. Because flying schools in the United States denied her entry, she taught herself French and moved to France, earning her license from France's well-known Caudron Brother's School of Aviation in just seven months. Coleman specialized in stunt flying and parachuting, earning a living barnstorming and performing aerial tricks. She remains a pioneer of women in the field of aviation.

Early Life:

Born on January 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, Bessie Coleman was one of 13 children to Susan and George Coleman, who both worked as sharcroppers.

At 12 years old, Coleman began attending the Missionary Baptist Church in Texas and, after graduating, embarked on a journey to Oklahoma to attend the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (Langston University), where she completed only one term due to financial constraints.

In 1915, at 23 years old, Coleman moved to Chicago, where she lived with her brothers and worked as a manicurist. Not long after her move to Chicago, she began listening to and reading stories of World War I pilots, which sparked her interest in aviation.

Breaking Barriers:

In 1922, a time of both gender and racial discrimination, Coleman broke barriers and became the world's first black woman to earn a pilot's license. Because flying schools in the United States denied her entry, she took it upon herself to learn French and move to France to achieve her goal. After only seven months, Coleman earned her license from France's well known Caudron Brother's School of Aviation.

Though she wanted to start a flying school for African Americans when she returned to the U.S., Coleman specialized in stunt flying and parachuting, and earned a living barnstorming and performing aerial tricks. In 1922, hers was the first public flight by an African- American woman in America.

Death:

Tragically, on April 30, 1926, Coleman was killed in an accident during a rehearsal for an aerial show. She was only 33 years old.

Coleman remains a pioneer of women in the field of aviation.