unusualmusic_lj_archive | Entries tagged with women of colour

Another link dump with the rest of Black Herstory series by Dairy of an Anxious Black Woman

Nikki Giovanni: Poetess, Black Activist, Professor at Virginia Tech

Katherine Dunham: Anthropologist, Dancer, Choreographer

Margaret Garner: A Runaway Slave who, when pursued by slave cathcers, tried to kill her family to avoid their return to slavery

African Queens

Drana, Delia, Celia:Some slave women worth remembering

Billie Holiday:Singer of the blues

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield:The First Black Opera Singer

Marie-Joseph Angelique:Canadian Slavery and the burning of Old Montreal

Daughters of the Dust

Claudia Jones: Trinidadian-born Marxist and Feminist

Lorna Simpson: Photographer

Black Feminist legacies: From the Past to the Now, From here, to abroad

Who speaks for Sally Hemmings?

Audre Lourde:Feminist, Queer, Poetess, Black Activist

And Diary of an Anxious Black Woman has TONS of goodies planned. But, first, let me introduce you to the great stuff she did for Black history month. Too often, black women are not as well highlighted as black men in the historical record. Therefore, she wrote 29 days of bloggy goodness, including suggesting various books to make further research easier. Yeah!
(At the end of March, I'll provide the appropriate link dump there as well. It promises to be great, she'll be highlighting a more diverse range of women there as well.)

Ida B. Wells: Civil Rights Activist

Harriet Tubman:Revolutionary

The First Black Woman Millionaire: Mary Ellen Pleasant (yes, you read that right.)

Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights Activist

Anarcha: Black Women and the History of Gynecology

Nanny of the Maroons: Jamaica's first and only National Heroine

Saartjie Baartman: The Hottentot Venus

Sukie: Resistance on the Auction Block

The Woman who started the Haitian Revolution

Octavia Butler:Grand Dame of SciFi

Sojourner Truth:One of the original Feminists at Seneca Falls

Fredi Washingston: Actress and Entertainer, as well as founder of the Negro Actors Guild, and newspaper columnist

June Jordan:Poet, Feminist,Queer, Radical etc.

Mama Afrika

Edmonia Lewis: The First Documented American Woman Sculptor

Shirley Chisholm's Speech proclaiming her candidacy for the US Presidency on Jan. 25, 1972. Funny how what she was talking about 30 years ago is STILL applicable to our situation today. Would that our current crop of politicians had the nerve to speak truth to power in this manner.

From here:www.4president.org

Kickass biography here

January 25, 1972

BROOKLYN ANNOUNCEMENT
Shirley Chisholm at podium waving and smiling, clapping crowd.

I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. (Clapping.)

I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud.” Clapping.
I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” Clapping.

I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests.” (Clapping. cheers).

I stand here now without endorsements from many big name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop. I do not intend to offer to you the tired and glib clichés, which for too long have been an accepted part of our political life. I am the candidate of the people of America. And my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.

I have always earnestly believed in the great potential of America. Our constitutional democracy will soon celebrate its 200th anniversary, effective testimony, to the longevity to our cherished constitution and its unique bill of rights, which continues to give to the world an inspirational message of freedom and liberty.

We Americans are a dynamic people…”(This portion is missing from footage).

Fellow Americans, we have looked in vain to the Nixon administration for the courage, the spirit, the character and the words to lift us. To bring out the best in us, to rekindle in each of us our faith in the American dream. Yet all we have received in return is just another smooth exercise in political manipulation, deceit and deception, callousness and indifference to our individual problems and a disgusting playing of devices politics. Pinning the young against the old, labor against management, north against south, black against white. (Clapping.) The abiding concern of this administration has been one of political expediency, rather than the needs of man’s nature.

The president has broken his promises to us, and has therefore lost his claim to our trust and confidence in him. I cannot believe that this administration would ever have been elected four years ago, if we had known then what we know today. But we are entering a new era, in which we must, as Americans, must demand stature and size in our leadership — leadership, which is fresh, leadership, which is open, and leadership, which is receptive to the problems of all Americans.

( Read more... )

Via:Modern History Source book

Modern History Sourcebook:
Sojourner Truth:
"Ain't I a Woman?", December 1851

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain't I A Woman?
Delivered 1851
Women's Convention, Akron, Ohio

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 at 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 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 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? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' 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.

Its six pages, but you have GOT to read this. Its highly interesting.

From Warrior Women to Female Pharaohs: Careers for Women in Ancient Egypt
By Dr Joann Fletcher
Image for a female banquet guest
Detail of a female banquet guest ©

Whilst the concept of a career choice for women is a relatively modern phenomenon, the situation in ancient Egypt was rather different. For some three thousand years the women who lived on the banks of the Nile enjoyed a form of equality which has rarely been equalled.

Sexual equality

In order to understand their relatively enlightened attitudes toward sexual equality, it is important to realise that the Egyptians viewed their universe as a complete duality of male and female. Giving balance and order to all things was the female deity Maat, symbol of cosmic harmony by whose rules the pharaoh must govern.

The Egyptians recognised female violence in all its forms, their queens even portrayed crushing their enemies, executing prisoners or firing arrows at male opponents as well as the non-royal women who stab and overpower invading soldiers. Although such scenes are often disregarded as illustrating 'fictional' or ritual events, the literary and archaeological evidence is less easy to dismiss. Royal women undertake military campaigns whilst others are decorated for their active role in conflict. Women were regarded as sufficiently threatening to be listed as 'enemies of the state', and female graves containing weapons are found throughout the three millennia of Egyptian history.

'...the Greek historian Herodotus believed the Egyptians 'have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind'.'

Although by no means a race of Amazons, their ability to exercise varying degrees of power and self-determination was most unusual in the ancient world, which set such great store by male prowess, as if acknowledging the same in women would make them less able to fulfil their expected roles as wife and mother. Indeed, neighbouring countries were clearly shocked by the relative freedom of Egyptian women and, describing how they 'attended market and took part in trading whereas men sat and home and did the weaving', the Greek historian Herodotus believed the Egyptians 'have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind'.

And women are indeed portrayed in a very public way alongside men at every level of society, from co-ordinating ritual events to undertaking manual work. One woman steering a cargo ship even reprimands the man who brings her a meal with the words, 'Don't obstruct my face while I am putting to shore' (the ancient version of that familiar conversation 'get out of my way whilst I'm doing something important').

Egyptian women also enjoyed a surprising degree of financial independence, with surviving accounts and contracts showing that women received the same pay rations as men for undertaking the same job - something the UK has yet to achieve. As well as the royal women who controlled the treasury and owned their own estates and workshops, non-royal women as independent citizens could also own their own property, buy and sell it, make wills and even choose which of their children would inherit.

READ REST HERE

Indigenous feminism without apology BY ANDREA SMITH
We often hear the mantra in indigenous communities that Native women aren’t feminists. Supposedly, feminism is not needed because Native women were treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native woman who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being “white.”
However, when I started interviewing Native women organizers as part of a research project, I was surprised by how many community-based activists were describing themselves as “feminists without apology.” They were arguing that feminism is actually an indigenous concept that has been co-opted by white women.
The fact that Native societies were egalitarian 500 years ago is not stopping women from being hit or abused now. For instance, in my years of anti-violence organizing, I would hear, “We can’t worry about domestic violence; we must worry about survival issues first.” But since Native women are the women most likely to be killed by domestic violence, they are clearly not surviving. So when we talk about survival of our nations, who are we including?
These Native feminists are challenging not only patriarchy within Native communities, but also white supremacy and colonialism within mainstream white feminism. That is, they’re challenging why it is that white women get to define what feminism is.
DECENTERING WHITE FEMINISM
The feminist movement is generally periodized into the so-called first, second and third waves of feminism. In the United States, the first wave is characterized by the suffragette movement; the second wave is characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women, abortion rights politics, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendments. Suddenly, during the third wave of feminism, women of colour make an appearance to transform feminism into a multicultural movement.
This periodization situates white middle-class women as the central historical agents to which women of colour attach themselves. However, if we were to recognize the agency of indigenous women in an account of feminist history, we might begin with 1492 when Native women collectively resisted colonization. This would allow us to see that there are multiple feminist histories emerging from multiple communities of colour which intersect at points and diverge in others. This would not negate the contributions made by white feminists, but would de-center them from our historicizing and analysis.
Indigenous feminism thus centers anti-colonial practice within its organizing. This is critical today when you have mainstream feminist groups supporting, for example, the US bombing of Afghanistan with the claim that this bombing will free women from the Taliban (apparently bombing women somehow liberates them).
CHALLENGING THE STATE
Indigenous feminists are also challenging how we conceptualize indigenous sovereignty — it is not an add-on to the heteronormative and patriarchal nationstate. Rather it challenges the nationstate system itself.
Charles Colson, prominent Christian Right activist and founder of Prison Fellowship, explains quite clearly the relationship between heteronormativity and the nation-state. In his view, samesex marriage leads directly to terrorism; the attack on the “natural moral order” of the heterosexual family “is like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who use America’s decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide bombers.”
Similarly, the Christian Right World magazine opined that feminism contributed to the Abu Ghraib scandal by promoting women in the military. When women do not know their assigned role in the gender hierarchy, they become disoriented and abuse prisoners.
Implicit in this is analysis the understanding that heteropatriarchy is essential for the building of US empire. Patriarchy is the logic that naturalizes social hierarchy. Just as men are supposed to naturally dominate women on the basis of biology, so too should the social elites of a society naturally rule everyone else through a nation-state form of governance that is constructed through domination, violence, and control.
As Ann Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to argue that the goal of Christian Right politics is to create a theocracy in the US. Rather, Christian Right politics work through the private family (which is coded as white, patriarchal, and middle-class) to create a “Christian America.” She notes that the investment in the private family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of social connection.

For example, more investment in the suburban private family means less funding for urban areas and Native reservations. The resulting social decay is then construed to be caused by deviance from the Christian family ideal rather than political and economic forces. As former head of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed states: “The only true solution to crime is to restore the family,” and “Family break-up causes poverty.”

Read rest here

Indigenous Feminism without apology

WOMEN OF COLOR AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE:
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN

Reproductive justice, at the most basic, is a woman’s right to control her own body and life. Contraception,
maternity, forced/coerced contraception and sterilization, emergency contraception, family planning, abortion, and reproductive health (including issues of HIV/AIDS and other STIs) are all important parts of the broad topic of reproductive rights. For many women, especially African American women, abortion is not the key issue in the fight for reproductive rights. Instead, issues of maternal mortality, violence against women, lack of affordable prenatal care, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and the effects of poverty on reproductive health take center stage.

Violence Against Women
Black women have been active in the movements against rape and domestic violence from the beginning; however,their specific cultural concerns have often been left out of the discourse on violence against women. We know that African American females experience intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than that of white females, and about 2.5 times that rate of women of other races (1). However, they are less likely than white women to use social services, battered women's programs, or go to the hospital because of domestic violence. This may have to do with lack of access to services in areas with high minority populations.

Maternal Mortality
In a 1999 report, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put the average death rate for African American mothers at 19.6 per 100,000 live births, about the same as the rate in Nicaragua or Vietnam, and four times the rate of white
women in the US (2). While socioeconomic status may influence these rates by denying women access to proper medical treatment, we should also take into account the racism that exists within the healthcare system and medical
testing.

Teenage Pregnancy
Teenage pregnancy and poverty are very closely related. Class plays more of a determining role in teen pregnancy
rates than does race, and this disproportionately affects African American female teens because of the high poverty
rates among African American women. For example, one in four African American children is born to a teenage
mother (3).

Contraception
Throughout history, females within minority populations have been subjected to forced or coerced sterilization.
In recent years, several states have considered legislating forced contraception by making Depo Provera and
Norplant, a long-acting contraceptive implant that was approved for usage in 1990, mandatory for young inner-city
women on welfare, usually women of color (4).

HIV/AIDS
In 2002, the AIDS diagnosis rate among African Americans was almost 11 times the rate among whites. More
specifically, African-American women had a 23 times greater diagnoses rate than white women (5). Consequently,
AIDS is currently the leading cause of death for African American women age 24-36 (6). Unfortunately, safe sex
efforts to help curb the spread of AIDS are often rejected by (usually male) African American community leaders
because these efforts are seen as “sexually suggestive or culturally inappropriate” (6).
Reproductive justice, at the most basic, is a woman’s right to control her own body and life. Contraception,
maternity, forced/coerced contraception and sterilization, emergency contraception, family planning, abortion, and
reproductive health (including issues of HIV/AIDS and other STIs) are all important parts of the broad topic of
reproductive rights.
For many women, especially African American women, abortion is not the key issue in the fight for reproductive
rights. Instead, issues of maternal mortality, violence against women, lack of affordable prenatal care, teenage
pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and the effects of poverty on reproductive health take center stage

Rest here

ACRJ’s Reproductive Justice Agenda (RJA) places reproductive justice
at the center of the most critical social and economic justice
issues facing our communities, such as ending violence against
women, workers rights, environmental justice, queer rights,
immigrant rights, and educational justice, which have major
implications for Asian women. For example, under conditions of
reproductive justice, we will live in homes free from sexual and
physical violence; we will live and work without fear of sexual
harassment; we will have safe work and home environments protected
from corporate exploitation and environmental toxins; we
will be free from hatred due to sexual identity; we will be valued
for all the forms of work we do; we will earn equitable and livable
wages; we will eat healthy and affordable food; and we will have
comprehensive health care for ourselves and our families.
Moreover, the government and private institutions will support
our decisions whether or not to have a child and we will receive
the necessary support for our choices. In addition we will receive
an education that honors and teaches the contributions of
women, people of color, working class communities, and queer
and transgendered communities.
As illustrated in the RJA, women’s bodies, reproduction and sexuality
are often used as the excuse and the target for unequal
treatment in the attempt to control our communities. We believe
that by challenging patriarchal social relations and addressing the
intersection of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and
class oppression within a women-of-color context, we will be able
to build the collective social, economic, and political power of all
women and girls to make decisions that protect and contribute to
our reproductive health and overall well-being.

From the Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice:Entire Paper here

For more see:Sistersong

Taking things into their own hands...

Banda sisters

In one of India's poorest regions, hundreds of pink-clad female vigilantes are challenging male violence and corruption. Raekha Prasad meets the Gulabi Gang

Friday February 15, 2008
The Guardian

Under a scorching summer sun, a swarm of 400 furious women engulfed the scruffy electricity office of Banda district in north India. They were all dressed identically in fluorescent pink saris. For more than a fortnight they and their families had had no electricity, plunged into darkness at dusk and stewed in sweat at dawn. But they had all been sent bills demanding payment for power they had never received.

It was at noon one day last May that the group, brandishing sticks, first surrounded and then charged into the office, punching the air and shouting slogans of solidarity. They wanted to confront the officer in charge but met instead his cowering juniors, at whom they bawled to telephone the boss. When the man refused to come to the office, the women became incensed. They snatched the office key, roughed up the terrified staff and, after herding them outside, locked the door and ran away, vowing to return the key only when they had electricity again.

Article continues
There are few places on earth where life is as short and brutal as in Bundelkhand, the desolate region straddling the southern tip of Uttar Pradesh where Banda lies. Farming is the principal livelihood; wages are as little as 60p a day for men and half that for women. Bonded and child labour are rife. Corruption is routine. Its reputation in India is that of a place where people still die of hunger.

But what has made Bundelkhand infamous is banditry. Scores born out of feudalism and caste violence are settled by bullets. It was here that Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen of India, used to lead her gang of robbers in vicious acts of retribution on rich, upper-caste villagers. Products of this cruel environment, the hundreds of pink-clad women knew that their electricity supply had been disconnected by corrupt officials to extract bribes from them to get the power switched back on. With no functioning law to fall back on, they knew also that the only way to get a power supply was to take matters into their own hands. Within an hour of their absconding with the key, the electricity was restored.

It is just one victory in a list of successes achieved by the Gulabi Gang since it formed two years ago. Gulabi means pink, and refers to the electric shade of the uniform worn by the 500-plus members, who hail from Banda's arid villages. The women have become folk heroes, winning public support for a series of Robin Hood-style operations. Their most daring exploit was to hijack trucks laden with food meant for the poor that was being taken to be sold for profit at the market by corrupt officials.

The targets of the Gulabi Gang's vigilantism are corrupt officials and violent husbands. The gang has stopped child marriages, forced police officers to register cases of domestic violence - by slapping them - and got roads built by dragging the official responsible from his desk on to the dust track in question.

( Read more... )

(Listen to the speech)Statement on Impeachment July 25, 1975: "A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th-century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th-century paper shredder."

Biography

Biography and Speeches in Dead Tree format

Courtesy of

skywardprodigal who led me to

spiralsheep who posted on this extraordinary lady: Thanks so much for the info!

here's the Wikipedia article:

Sophia Dunleep Singh

Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh (b. Elveden Hall, 8 August 1876; d. Hilden Hall, Tylers Green, 22 August 1948) was a prominent suffragette in the United Kingdom. She is best remembered for her leading role in the Women's Tax Resistance League, but she also participated in other women's suffrage groups including the Women's Social and Political Union.
Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh and his first wife Bamba Müller, and Sophia combined Indian, European and African ancestry with an upbringing among the British aristocracy. Duleep Singh had been the last Maharaja of Punjab and was exiled from India by the British at the age of fifteen, while Müller was of mixed German and Ethiopian descent. Sophia's four brothers included Frederick Duleep Singh, while among her four sisters was the suffragette Catherine Duleep Singh. Sophia inherited substantial private wealth from her father upon his death in 1893, and in 1898 her godmother, Queen Victoria, granted Sophia a grace and favour apartment in Faraday House, Hampton Court.
Sophia marched at the head of the Black Friday deputation to parliament in 1910, alongside Emmeline Pankhurst, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Dorinda Neligan. Sophia obtained particular prominence through the Women's Tax Resistance League, appearing in court several times due to her refusal to pay taxes, and remarking, "When the women of England are enfranchised I shall pay my taxes willingly. If I am not a person for the purposes of representation, why should I be a fit person for taxation?"
Sophia's public life was mostly spent campaigning for women's rights, although she also supported the interests of lascars. (Indian sailors)

Extra info here from a link in

spiralsheep 's post : Princess Sophia Alexandria Duleep Singh: The Scotman Article.

Link to spiralsheep's post to see her pic and a bit more info

With thanks to

delux_vivens who started the orginal thread that this tidbit of info appeared on and

skywardprodigal for reminding me of it just now.

I haven't really done anything at all for Black History Month, have I?
Try this on for size:

Ganked from The Igbo Women's Revolt

In November, 1929, thousands of Igbo women from the Bende District of Nigeria, the nearby Umuahia, Ngwa, and other places in southern Nigeria traveled to Oloko to protest against the Warrant Chiefs, who they accused of restricting the role of women in the government; this incident become known as the Igbo Women's War of 1929 (or "Ogu Ndem," Women's War, in Igbo). It was organized and led by rural women of Owerri and Calabar Provinces. During the events, many Warrant Chiefs were forced to resign and sixteen Native Courts were attacked, most of which were destroyed or burned down.[1]

Events and causes

The Women's revolt of 1929 was sparked by a dispute between a woman named Nwanyeruwa and a man, Mark Emereuwa, who was helping to make a census of the people living in the town controlled by the Warrant, Okugo. Nwanyeruwa was of Ngwa ancestry, and had been married in the town of Oloko. In Oloko, census was related to taxation, and women in the area were worried about who would tax them, especially during the period of hyperinflation in the late 1920s.

On the morning of November 18, Emeruwa arrived at Nwanyereuwa's house, and approached Nwanyereuwa, since her husband Ojim had already died. He told the widow to "count her goats, sheep and people." Since Nwanyereuwa understood this to mean, "How many of these things do you have so we can tax you based on them", she was angry. She replied by saying "Was your widowed mother counted?," meaning "that women don't pay tax in traditional Igbo society."[2] The two exchanged angry words, and Nwanyeruwa went to the town square to discuss the incident with other women who happened to be holding a meeting to discuss the issue of taxation of women. Believing they would be taxed, based on Nwanyeruwa's account, the Oloko women invited women (by sending leaves of palm-oil trees) from other areas in the Bende District, as well as from Umuahia, Ngwa and elsewhere. They soon gathered nearly 10,000 women who protested at the office of Warrant Chief Okugo, demanding his resignation and calling for a trial.

Read more :The Igbo Women's Revolt

http://racing.bloodhorse.com/viewstory.asp?id=43022

Harris' Long Climb to the Top
by Jason Shandler
Date Posted: 1/7/2008 5:00:52 PM
Last Updated: 1/15/2008 4:18:48 PM

Sylvia Harris
Photo: Four Footed Fotos

A new weekly feature found only on BloodHorseNOW.com, "The Inside Track" is dedicated to the people in Thoroughbred racing that may not always make the headlines, but nevertheless are vitally important to the sport. Please enjoy this special free preview.

Other Inside Track features currently available on BloodHorseNOW.com:
The Quiet Man
Fighting For a Happy Ending
A Racetrack Original

On Dec. 1, a longshot wired the field in the final race on a cold day at Hawthorne Park, but it wasn’t seven-and-a-half length winner Wildwood Pegasus. The longshot was jockey Sylvia Harris, who overcame two decades of hardship to capture her first career victory at the age of 40 and became a part of horse racing history.

Aside from scoring her initial victory at an age when many riders are retiring, Harris also made headlines by becoming one of only a handful of female African-American jockeys in the United States to win a Thoroughbred race.

"It was the best," Harris said a few days after the race. "It was almost as if time stood still; like I was in a time warp. I started to cry. I leaned over and kissed the horse. It was a dream come true, a dream that took 30 years to fulfill. I’m 40 now and my prayers were finally answered.

"I worked with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and learned that we are not promised one minute, so take advantage of every one that you have. I will savor that moment forever."

If Harris’ comments seem a little cheesy or a bit over-the-top, you won’t think so after learning about the obstacles she overcame to complete her lifelong dream, including mental illness and homelessness, for a brief time.

Harris’ story began in Sonoma County, Calif., where her love of horses developed during visits with her father to Golden Gate Fields and Bay Meadows. Harris says she knew then that she wanted to be a jockey.

"I remember leaning over the fence and watching them run," Harris recalled. "I was enthralled."

Life had other plans for Harris, however. Discouraged by her parents from pursuing a career in horse racing, she forgot about becoming a jockey and instead went to college. After two years of school she had the first of her three children and was forced to support a family as a single mother.

( Read more... )

http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/Muslim_Leaders.htm

Oh boy. Don't I have a pile of research to do. Linked by Saladin, a commenter on The Angry black Woman's thread on the death of Benazhair Bhutto. http://theangryblackwoman.wordpress.com/2007/12/27/again-why-im-angry/#comment-27092

A poster on

islam_feminism likened Ms. Bhutto this early historical woman leader. Her story is recounted in "Herstory: Women who changed the World" by Deborah Ohrn and Gloria Steinem

Info below from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razia_Sultan

Razia al-Din (1205-1240) (Persian / Urdu: رضیہ سلطانہ), throne name Jalâlat ud-Dîn Raziyâ (Persian / Urdu: جلالۃ الدین رضیہ), usually referred to in history as Razia Sultan or Razia Sultana, was the Sultana of Delhi in India from 1236 to 1240. She was of Turkish Seljuks ancestry and like some other Muslim princesses of the time, she was trained to lead armies and administer kingdoms if necessary.[1]

She succeeded her father Iltutmish to the Sultanate of Delhi in 1236. Iltutmish became the first sultan to appoint a woman as his successor when he designated his daughter Razia as his heir apparent. (According to one source, Iltumish's eldest son had initially been groomed as his successor, but had died prematurely.) But the Muslim nobility had no intention of acceding to Iltutmish's disregard of tradition in appointing a woman as heir, and after the sultan died on April 29, 1236, Razia's brother, Ruknuddin Feroze Shah, was elevated to the throne instead.

( Read more... )

http://www.counterpunch.org/ali12282007.html

Death Foreshadowed
A Pakistani Requiem

By WAJAHAT ALI

I. THE ASSASINATION

An assassin's bullets and suicide bomb ended the life of Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto; tragically, she followed in the footsteps of her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's Prime Minister [1973--1977], who was brutally hung by political rival and subsequent military dictator General Zia al Haq nearly thirty years ago. The tragic legacy of this family elucidates the political instability and schizophrenic personality of modern-day Pakistan: a complex, volatile and multifaceted nation whose diverse features have increasingly and frequently become accentuated by violence.

( Read more... )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Smith

Barbara Smith (born December 16, 1946) is an African-American, lesbian feminist^[1] who has played a significant role in building and sustaining Black Feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s she has been active as an innovative critic, teacher, lecturer, author, independent scholar, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities over the last twenty five years. Smith’s essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, and The Nation.

History and activism

In 1975 Smith reorganised the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization to establish the Combahee River Collective.

As a socialist Black feminist organization the collective emphasized the intersectionality of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of Blacks and other women of color. Additionally, the collective aggressively worked on revolutionary issues such as “reproductive rights, rape, prison reform, sterilization abuse, violence against women, health care, and racism within the white women’s movement,” explains Beverly Guy-Sheftall in her introduction to Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-Feminist Thought. After working for the National Observer in 1974, Smith committed herself to never again being “in the position of having to make [her] own writing conform to someone else’s standards or beliefs,” (Smith 1998).

( Read more... )

http://www.pulsejournal.com/school/content/shared/news/nation/stories/0207_CIVIL_RIGHTS_COLVIN.html

CLAUDETTE COLVIN

By JIM AUCHMUTEY
Cox News Service
Monday, February 07, 2005

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Claudette Colvin, her fingers draped over the handle of a cane, watched intently as an actress captured the deepest irony of her life in one simple statement.

"I'm as anonymous as Rosa Parks is famous," said the woman on stage. "I am a footnote to history."

Jamie Martin/AP Photo

(ENLARGE)

Claudette Colvin answers questions from students at Booker T. Washington Magnet School in Montgomery, Ala.

Colvin nodded slightly from her seat in the auditorium of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. She's 65 now, slowed by arthritis and diabetes. But when Colvin speaks, her voice rising excitedly, it's possible to hear the feisty spirit of the 15-year-old schoolgirl who refused to move from her seat on a segregated bus nine months before Parks took a similar stand and became an American icon.

Colvin, on the other hand, was largely forgotten. She dropped out of school and moved to New York, where she worked for years in obscurity as a night shift nurse's assistant.

Fred Gray, the lawyer who represented both women in 1955, says he begins speeches by asking whether anyone has heard of Colvin. Very few hands go up.

"If there had been no Claudette Colvin, there would have been no Rosa Parks," he tells audiences. "And if there had been no Rosa Parks, the world might never have been introduced to Martin Luther King Jr."

"History," Gray says, "has treated Claudette unfairly."

In Montgomery this past week, they tried to change that.

Troy State University, whose Montgomery campus includes the Parks museum, invited Colvin to be the special guest at a performance of a play about her and other women involved in the bus boycott that kicked the civil rights movement into overdrive 50 years ago. Awele Makeba, an actress and educator in Oakland, Calif., wrote the piece, "Rage Is Not a 1-Day Thing," after she discovered Colvin's story in a book about children in the movement.

On Thursday, she performed it for students at Colvin's old high school, Booker T. Washington. "They call me a troublemaker," Makeba said, slipping into character with a girlish drawl. Her subject, watching from the second row, seemed less like a rabble-rouser than a church organist, with her silver glasses, hoop earrings and softly curled perm.

Grandmotherly as she is, Colvin is fiercely proud of what she did. After her arrest, she relates, her minister said, "Claudette's going to bring the revolution in here."

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Louise_Smith

MARY LOUISE SMITH

Mary Louise Smith (later Mary Louise Smith Ware) (b. 1937) is a civil rights protester. She is famous as one of the pre-Rosa Parks women who refused to give up their seat in the "whites only" section of Montgomery, Alabama city buses. She was just 18 years old when she was arrested.

The Montgomery Improvement Association rejected her as a potential plaintiff in a planned test case against segregation because her father was rumoured to be an alcoholic and it was believed this would undermine the effectiveness of the planned legal action.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Smith has lived there since her birth. She is the third of six children, four boys and two girls. Her parents both deceased, are Frank and Alberta Smith. Her mother died at the age of 42, when Mary was 15, leaving Janie, the oldest sister to become the surrogate mother of the family. Her father never remarried and worked two jobs to take care of his young family.

Mary and all her siblings attended and graduated from St. Jude Educational Institute. A devout Catholic, she is still a member of St.Jude Church where she was baptized.

At the age of 18, October 21, 1955, Mary returning home on the Montgomery, Alabama city line bus, was ordered to relinquish her seat to a white female passenger, which she refused to do. Her stand landed her in jail and she was charged with failure to obey segregation orders, some 40 days before the arrest of Rosa Parks on similar charges. Her father bailed her from jail and paid her fine, nine dollars. The incident was unknown except to family and neighbors.

Smith was a high-school dropout and housekeeper. She lived in a clapboard shack in the country with her father and siblings.

Her arrest was made known later at a mass meeting by a cousin. Attorney Fred Gray asked Smith and her father for her to become a plaintiff in a civil rights class action law suit to end segregated seating on city buses. Her father agreed, for he wanted justice for her unlawful arrest.

Smith did not learn until 1995, from a news reporter that she had been discussed as being a test case by black leaders. They could not find anything negative about Mary but she was not chosen because it was said her father was an alcoholic. This untrue allegation bothers her more than the exclusion and ignoring of her contributions by Montgomery and national black leaders for over 50 years.

When Rosa Parks died in October 2005, Smith, then 68, attended the memorial service for Parks in Montgomery, where she still lives. "I had to pay my tribute to her," Ware said. "She was our role model."

Smith continued to work for civil rights beyond the boycott and trial. She worked on voting rights campaigns and attended the March on Washington in 1963. Her sister Annie's son was a plaintiff in the lawsuit to desegregate the Y.M.C.A.

Today, Smith is active with her 12 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now divorced, Smith raised four children. Her most enjoyable hobby is reading and she is active in several of her church auxiliaries and senior citizen clubs.

http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=1346

IRENE MORGAN KIRKALDY

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, who died of Alzheimer's disease August 10 at her home in Gloucester, Virginia, quietly changed history in 1944 when she refused to give up her seat on a crowded Greyhound bus to a white couple. Her case resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate transportation and sparked the first Freedom Ride in 1947.

Mrs. Kirkaldy's defiance of the discriminatory Jim Crow laws of Virginia came 11 years before Rosa Parks's similar act in Montgomery, Alabama, galvanized the civil rights movement and made her a national icon. Without fanfare, Mrs. Kirkaldy's early case provided a winning strategy for fighting racial segregation in the courts.

( Read more... )

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So March is Women's Month (Part Two)
So March is Women's Month (Part 1)
Unbought, Unbossed
(no subject)
From the BBC: From Warrior Women to Female Pharoahs:Careers for Women in Ancient Eygpt.
Indigenous feminism without apology
Reproductive Justice from an African-American POV
Reproductive Justice: An Introduction
REBELLION...
Barbara Charline Jordan: Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder
Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh: British South Asian Feminist
The Igbo Women's Revolt
Who says life is over at forty?
Guide 2 Women Muslim Leaders
Razia Sultana: The first Indian Queen
Of interest, one journalist's look at Benzair Bhutto, her actions and her legacy.
Feminists of Colour Part 1: Barbara Smith
Before Rosa Parks...The Women Who Refused to Give Up Their Seats Part 3
Before Rosa Parks...The Women Who Refused to Give Up Their Seats Part 2
Before Rosa Parks... The Women Who Refused to Give Up Their Seats Part 1.

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