People Nominate The Women Who Should Be Featured During Black History Month
People Nominate The Women Who Should Be Featured During Black History Month
[rebelmouse-image 18362069 is_animated_gif=I AM BLACK HISTORY
I was born 1996, an African American,
Bore the blood of my ancestors, in my veins inheriting,
The trait of beautiful mahogany brown skin,
And the blessing to flaunt the skin that I am in,
Passed down to me their passion for music, culture, and art,
Their love for dance and the love they share from the purest of hearts,
Today I honor them for my freedom their lives they gave,
As they continue to watch over us from their dearing grave,
When I grow up with drive and ambition,
Like Madame CJ Walker, I could change the world with my invention,
I could move the souls of people with my words of great meaning,
Like Martin Luther King Jr. who had a dream but I'm still dreaming,
I could make a status quo that'll stick with the world,
By any means necessary next to Malcom X, I would be the first girl,
Or I could start a movement like the bus boycott,
Started by Rosa Parks who wouldnt give up her spot,
Maybe I can start a group like the NAACP,
Fighting for the rights of the voices who aren't heard in society,
Possible isn't in my vocabulary because the possibilities are endless,
Due to my ancestors who showed me not to fight but proudly hold up a balled fist,
And to fight them verbally, not physically like the savages they expect you to,
Fight them mentally, morally about the the cries that aren't heard and the deaths that dont make it to the news,
To take a stand in this world and leave my legacy,
Because I AM the next generation, I AM BLACK HISTORY
~ FOREVERNATURALL
Daisy Bates
[rebelmouse-image 18362070 is_animated_gif=Daisy Bates is known for her role in supporting the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a journalist, newspaper publisher, civil rights activist, and social reformer. Daisy Bates (11/11/1914 - 11/4/1999) was raised in Huttig, Arkansas, by adoptive parents after her mother was murdered by three white men.
In 1952, Daisy became the Arkansas branch president of the NAACP. In 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional, Daisy and others worked to figure out how to integrate the Little Rock Schools. In the capital city of Arkansas, the Little Rock School Board agreed to comply with the high court's ruling. A plan of gradual integration was unanimously approved by the school board on May 24, 1955. The plan would be implemented during the fall of the 1957 school year.
Nine African-American students were chosen to actually be the first to integrate the previously all-white Little Rock Central High school; they became known as the Little Rock Nine. Daisy Bates was instrumental in supporting these nine students in their action.
But in September of 1957, Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus arranged for the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African American students from entering Central High School. In response to the action and protests of the action, President Eisenhower federalized the guard and sent in federal troops. On September 25, 1957, the nine students entered Central High amid angry protests.
The next month, Daisy and others were arrested for not turning over NAACP records. Though Daisy was no longer an officer of the NAACP, she was fined; her conviction was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mary McLeod Bethune
[rebelmouse-image 18362071 is_animated_gif=Known as the "First Lady of the Struggle," Mary McLeod Bethune (7/10/1875 - 5/18/1955) was a trailblazing African-American educator and civil rights leader. Mary strongly believed that education was the key to equal rights and founded the groundbreaking Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, now known as the Bethune-Cookman College, in 1904.
Passionate about both women's rights and civil rights, Mary served as president of the National Association of Colored Women and founded the National Council of Negro Women.
In an era when blacks were generally banned from positions of authority, Mary was president of a university, opened a hospital, was CEO of a company, advised four U.S. presidents, and was chosen to attend the founding convention of the United Nations.
Hallie Quinn Brown
[rebelmouse-image 18362072 is_animated_gif=Hallie Brown's parents were former slaves who married about 1840. Her father, who bought his freedom and that of family members, was the son of a Scottish plantation owner and her African American overseer; her mother was the granddaughter of a white planter who had fought in the Revolutionary War, and she was freed by this grandfather.
Hallie Brown's birth date is uncertain. It is given as early as 1845 and as late as 1855. Hallie Brown (3/10/1845, 1850, or 1855? - 9/16/1949) grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Chatham, Ontario.
She graduated from Wilberforce University in Ohio and taught in schools in Mississippi and South Carolina. In 1885 she became dean of Allen University in South Carolina and studied at the Chautauqua Lecture School. She taught public school in Dayton, Ohio, for four years, and then was appointed lady principal (dean of women) of Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, working with Booker T. Washington.
From 1893 to 1903, Hallie Brown served as professor of elocution at Wilberforce University, though on a limited basis as she lectured and organized, traveling frequently. She helped promote the Colored Woman's League which became part of the National Association of Colored Women. In Great Britain, where she spoke to popular acclaim on African American life, she made several appearances before Queen Victoria, including tea with the Queen in July 1889.
Hallie Brown also spoke for temperance groups. She took up the cause of woman suffrage and spoke on the topic of full citizenship for women as well as civil rights for black Americans. She represented the United States at the International Congress of Women, meeting in London in 1899. In 1925 she protested segregation of the Washington (DC) Auditorium being used for the All-American Musical Festival of the International Council of Women, threatening that all black performers would boycott the event if segregated seating were not ended.
Two hundred black entertainers did boycott the event and black participants left in response to her speech.
Hallie Brown served as president of several organizations after she retired from teaching, including the Ohio Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and the National Association of Colored Women. She served as a representative of the Women's Parent Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church at the World Missionary Conference in Scotland in 1910. She helped raise funds for Wilberforce University and helped initiate the drive to raise funds to preserve Frederick Douglass' home in Washington, DC, a project undertaken with the help of Douglass' second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass.
In 1924 Hallie Brown supported the Republican Party, speaking for Warren Harding's nomination at the Republican Party convention where she took the opportunity to speak up for civil rights. She published a few books, mostly connected with public speaking or famous women and men.
Marjorie Lee Browne
[rebelmouse-image 18362073 is_animated_gif=Marjorie Lee Browne, an educator and mathematician, was one of first two (or three?) black women to receive a doctorate in mathematics in the United States, 1949. In 1960, Marjorie Lee Browne wrote a grant to IBM to bring a computer to a college campus---one of the first such college computers, and likely the first at any historically black college. She lived from September 9, 1914 to October 19, 1979.
Born Marjorie Lee in Memphis, Tennessee, the future mathematician was a skilled tennis player and singer as well as showing early signs of mathematics talent. Her father, Lawrence Johnson Lee, was a railway postal clerk, and her mother died when Browne was two years old. She was raised by her father and a stepmother, Lottie Taylor Lee (or Mary Taylor Lee) who taught school.
She was educated at local public schools, then graduated from LeMoyne High School, a Methodist school for African Americans, in 1931. She went to Howard University for college, graduating cum laude in 1935 in mathematics. She then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, earning an M.S. in mathematics in 1939. In 1949, Marjorie Lee Browne at the University of Michigan and Evelyn Boyd Granville (ten years younger) at Yale University became the first two African American women to earn Ph.D.'s in mathematics.
Browne's Ph.D. dissertation was in topology, a branch of mathematics related to geometry.
She taught in New Orleans for a year at Gilbert Academy, then taught in Texas at Wiley College, a historically black liberal arts college, from 1942 to 1945. She became a mathematics professor at North Carolina Central University, teaching there from 1950 to 1975.
She was the first chair of the math department, beginning in 1951. NCCU was the first public liberal arts school of higher education in the United States for African Americans.
She was rejected early in her career by major universities and taught in the South. She focused on preparing secondary school teachers to teach the "new math." She also worked to include women and people of color in careers in math and science. She often helped provide financial assistance to make it possible for students from poorer families to complete their education.
She began her math career before the explosion of efforts to expand those studying math and science in the wake of Russia's launching of the Sputnik satellite. She resisted the direction of math towards such practical applications as the space program, and instead worked with mathematics as pure numbers and concepts.
From 1952 to 1953, she studied combinatorial topology on a Ford Foundation fellowship at Cambridge University.
In 1957, she taught at the Summer Institute for Secondary School Science and Mathematics Teachers, under a National Science Foundation grant through NCCU. She was a National Science Foundation Faculty Fellow, University of California, studying computing and numerical analysis.
From 1965 to 1966, she studied differential topology at Columbia University on a fellowship.
Marian Wright Edelman
[rebelmouse-image 18362074 is_animated_gif=Marian Wright Edelman (6/6/1939 - ) was born in and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, one of 5 children.
Her father, Arthur Wright, was a Baptist preacher who taught his children that Christianity required service in this world and who was influenced by A. Phillip Randolph. Her father died when Marian was only f14, urging in his last words to her, "Don't let anything get in the way of your education."
Marian went on to study at Spelman College, abroad on a Merrill scholarship, and she traveled to the Soviet Union with a Lisle fellowship. When she returned to Spelman in 1959, she became involved in the civil rights movement, inspiring her to drop her plans to enter the foreign service, and instead to study law. She studied law at Yale and worked as a student on a project to register African American voters in Mississippi.
In 1963, after graduating from Yale Law School, Marian worked first in New York for the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund, and then in Mississippi for the same organization.
There, she became the first African American woman to practice law. During her time in Mississippi, she worked on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement, and she also helped get a Head Start program established in her community.
During a tour by Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark of Mississippi's poverty-ridden Delta slums, Marian met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy, and the next year she moved to Washington, D.C., to marry him and to work for social justice in the center of America's political scene. They had 3 sons.
In Washington, Marian continued her work, helping to get the Poor People's Campaign organized. She also began to focus more on issues relating to child development and children in poverty.
Marian established the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) in 1973 as a voice for poor, minority and handicapped children. She served as a public speaker on behalf of these children, and also as a lobbyist in Congress, as well as president and administrative head of the organization. The agency served not only as an advocacy organization, but as a research center, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need. To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds.
Marian also published her ideas in several books. The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours was a surprising success.
In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was elected President, Hillary Clinton's involvement with the CDF meant that there was significantly more attention given to the organization. But Marion did not pull her punches in criticizing the Clinton administration's legislative agenda - such as its "welfare reform" initiatives - when she believed these would be disadvantageous to the nation's neediest children.
As part of the efforts of Marian and the CDF on behalf of children, she has also advocated pregnancy prevention, child care funding, health care funding, prenatal care, parental responsibility for education in values, reducing the violent images presented to children, and selective gun control in the wake of school shootings.
Charlotte Forten Grimké
[rebelmouse-image 18362075 is_animated_gif=Charlotte Forten (8/17/1837 or 1838 -- 7/23/1914) was born into a prominent African American family in Philadelphia. Her father, Robert, was the son of James Forten (1766-1842), a businessman and antislavery activist who was a leader in Philadelphia's free black community.
Charlotte was taught at home until her father sent her to Salem, Massachusetts, where the schools were integrated. She lived there with the family of Charles Lenox Remond, also abolitionists. She met many of the famous abolitionists of the time there, and also literary figures. James Greenleaf Whittier, one of those, was to become important in her life. She also joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society there and began writing poems and keeping a diary.
After graduation, she took a job teaching at the all-white Epes Grammar School, the first black teacher there; she was the first African American teacher hired by Massachusetts public schools and may have been the first African American in the nation hired by any school to teach white students.
She became ill, probably with tuberculosis, and returned to live with her family in Philadelphia for three years.
She went back and forth between Salem and Philadelphia, teaching and then nurturing her fragile health.
In 1862, she heard of an opportunity for teaching former slaves, freed by the Union forces on islands off South Carolina's coast and technically "war contraband." Whittier urged her to go teach there, and she set off for a position at Saint Helena Island in the Port Royal Islands with a recommendation from him. At first, she was not accepted by the black students there, due to considerable class and culture differences, but gradually became more successful relating to her charges. In 1864, she contracted smallpox and then heard that her father had died of typhoid. She returned to Philadelphia to heal.
Back in Philadelphia, she began to write of her experiences. She sent her essays to Whittier, who got them published as "Life on Sea Islands."
In 1865, Forten, her health better, took a position working in Massachusetts with the Freedman's Union Commission. In 1869, she published her English translation of the French novel Madam Therese. By 1870, she listed herself in the Philadelphia census as "authoress." In 1871, she moved to South Carolina, teaching at Shaw Memorial School, also founded for education of the recently-freed slaves. She left that position later that year, and in 1871 -- 1872, she was in Washington, DC, teaching and serving as assistant principal at Sumner High School. She left that position to work as a clerk.
In Washington, Charlotte Forten joined the 15th Street Presbyterian Church, a prominent church for the black community in DC. There, in the late 1870s, she met the Rev. Francis James Grimké. On December 9, 1878, 26-year-old Francis married 41-year-old Charlotte.
Francis officiated at the 1884 wedding of Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts Douglass, a marriage that was considered scandalous in both black and white circles.
Charlotte continued publishing poetry and essays. In 1896, Charlotte helped to found the National Association of Colored Women.
Fannie Lou Hamer
[rebelmouse-image 18362076 is_animated_gif="Nobody's free until everybody's free."
Many people recognize this quote, but don't know who said it. Known for her civil rights activism, Fannie Lou Hamer (10/6/1917 - 3/14/1977) was called "the spirit of the civil rights movement."
Born a sharecropper, she worked from the age of six as a timekeeper on a cotton plantation. In 1962, Fannie Lou volunteered to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) registering black voters in the South. She and the rest of her family lost their jobs for her involvement, and SNCC hired her as a field secretary. She was able to register to vote for the first time in her life in 1963, and then taught others what they'd need to know to pass the then-required literacy test. In her organizing work, she often led the activists in singing Christian hymns about freedom: "This Little Light of Mine" and others.
In 1963, after being charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to go along with a restaurant's "whites only" policy, Fannie Lou was beaten so badly in jail, and refused medical treatment, that she was permanently disabled.
She helped organize the 1964 "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi, a campaign sponsored by SNCC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the NAACP.
Because African Americans were excluded from the Mississippi Democratic Party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was formed, with Fannie Lou as a founding member and vice president. The MFDP sent an alternate delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, with 64 black and 4 white delegates. Fannie Lou testified to the convention's Credentials Committee about violence and discrimination faced by black voters trying to register to vote, and her testimony was televised nationally.
The MFDP refused a compromise offered to seat two of their delegates, and returned to further political organizing in Mississippi, and in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
From 1968 to 1971, Fannie Lou was a member of the Democratic National Committee for Mississippi. Her 1970 lawsuit, Hamer v. Sunflower County, demanded school desegregation. She ran unsuccessfully for the Mississippi state Senate in 1971, and successfully for delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1972.
She also lectured extensively and was known for a signature line she often used, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." She was known as a powerful speaker, and her singing voice lent another power to civil rights meetings.
Fannie Lou brought a Head Start program to her local community, formed a local Pig Bank cooperative (1968) with the help of the National Council of Negro Women, and later founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative (1969). She helped found the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, speaking for inclusion of racial issues in the feminist agenda.
In 1972 the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring her national and state activism, passing 116 to 0.
Suffering from breast cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, Fannie Lou Hamer died in Mississippi in 1977.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
[rebelmouse-image 18362077 is_animated_gif=Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (9/24/1825 - 2/20/1911), born to free black parents, orphaned by the age of three, and raised by an aunt and uncle. She studied Bible, literature, and public speaking at a school founded by her uncle, William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. At 14, she needed to work, but could only find jobs in domestic service and as a seamstress. She published her first volume of poetry in Baltimore about 1845, Forest Leaves or Autumn Leaves, but no copies are now known to exist.
Watkins moved from Maryland, a slave state, to Ohio, a free state in 1850, the year of the Fugitive Slave Act. In Ohio she taught domestic science as the first woman faculty member at Union Seminary, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) school which later was merged into Wilberforce University.
A new law in 1853 prohibited any free black persons from re-entering Maryland. In 1854, she moved to Pennsylvania for a teaching job in Little York.
The next year she moved to Philadelphia. During these years, she became involved in the anti-slavery movement and with the Underground Railroad.
Watkins lectured frequently on abolitionism in New England, the Midwest, and California, and also published poetry in magazines and newspapers.
Her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, published in 1854 with a preface by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, sold more than 10,000 copies and was reissued and reprinted several times.
After the Civil War, Frances Harper visited the South and saw the appalling conditions, especially of black women, of Reconstruction. She lectured on the need for equal rights for "the Colored Race" and also on rights for women. She founded YMCA Sunday Schools, and she was a leader in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). She joined the American Equal Rights Association and the American Women's Suffrage Association, working with the branch of the women's movement that worked for both racial and women's equality.
In 1893, a group of women gathered in connection with the World's Fair as the World's Congress of Representative Women. Harper joined with others including Fannie Barrier Williams to charge those organizing the gathering with excluding African American women.
Harper's address at the Columbian Exposition was on "Women's Political Future."
Realizing the virtual exclusion of black women from the suffrage movement, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper joined with others to form the National Association of Colored Women. She became the first vice-president of the organization.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman
[rebelmouse-image 18362078 is_animated_gif=Anna Arnold Hedgeman (7/5/1899 - 1/17/1990) lifetime of accomplishments included many firsts:
- First black woman to graduate from Hamline University (1922) - the university now has a scholarship named for her
- First black woman to serve on a New York City mayoral cabinet (1954-1958)
- First black person to hold a Federal Security Agency position
Anna Arnold Hedgeman was also the only woman on the executive committee that organized Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous March on Washington in 1963. Patrik Henry Bass called her "instrumental in organizing the march" and "the conscience of the march". When Anna Arnold Hedgeman realized there were going to be no female speakers at the event, she protested the minimal recognition of women who were civil rights heroes. She succeeded in persuading the committee that this oversight was a mistake, which led eventually to Daisy Bates being invited to speak that day at the Lincoln Memorial.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman served temporarily as the first executive vice-president of NOW. Aileen Hernandez, who had been serving on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was elected executive vice-president in absentia when the first NOW officers were selected in 1966. Anna Arnold Hedgeman served as temporary executive vice-president until Aileen Hernandez officially stepped down from the EEOC and took the NOW position in March 1967.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman was the first chair of NOW's Task Force on Women in Poverty. In her 1967 task force report, she called for a meaningful expansion of economic opportunities for women and said there were no jobs or opportunities for women "at the bottom of the heap" to move into. Her suggestions included job training, job creation, regional and city planning, attention to high school dropouts and an end to the ignoring of women and girls in federal job and poverty-related programs.
In addition to NOW, Anna Arnold Hedgeman was involved with organizations including the YWCA, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the National Council of Churches' Commission on Religion and Race and the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. She ran for Congress and president of the New York City Council, drawing attention to social issues even when she lost the elections.
Mae Jemison
[rebelmouse-image 18362079 is_animated_gif=Dr. Mae C. Jemison (10/17/1956 - ) is a chemical engineer, scientist, physician, teacher, NASA astronaut, and actor. Over the course of her career, she has worked in engineering and medical research, and was invited to be part of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode, becoming the first NASA astronaut to also serve in the fictional Starfleet.
In addition to her extensive background in science, Mae is well-versed in African and African-American studies. As well as English, Mae speaks fluent Russian, Japanese, and Swahili and is trained in dance and choreography.
Mae attended Stanford University, where she earned a BS in Chemical Engineering. In 1981, she received a Doctor of Medicine degree from Cornell University. While enrolled at Cornell Medical School, Dr. Jemison traveled to Cuba, Kenya and Thailand, providing primary medical care to the people living in these nations.
After graduating from Cornell, Dr. Jemison served in the Peace Corps, where she supervised the pharmacy, laboratory, medical staff as well as provided medical care, wrote self-care manuals, developed and implemented guidelines for health and safety issues.
Also working in conjunction with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) she helped with research for various vaccines.
Dr. Jemison returned to the U.S., and worked with CIGNA Health Plans of California as a general practitioner. She enrolled in graduate classes in engineering and applied to NASA for admission to the astronaut program.
She joined the corps in 1987 and successfully completed her astronaut training, becoming the fifth black astronaut and the first black female astronaut in NASA history. She was the science mission specialist on STS-47, a cooperative mission between the U.S. and Japan. Dr. Jemison was a co-investigator on the bone cell research experiment flown on the mission.
Mae left NASA in 1993. She is currently a professor at Cornell University and is a proponent of science education in the schools, particularly encouraging minority students to pursue STEM careers. She founded the Jemison Group to research and develop technology for daily life, and is heavily involved in the 100 Year Starship Project. She also created BioSentient Corp, a company aimed at developing portable technology to monitor the nervous system, with an eye toward treating a variety of related disorders and illnesses.
Florynce Kennedy
[rebelmouse-image 18362080 is_animated_gif=Florynce Rae "Flo" Kennedy (2/11/1916 - 12/21/2000) was an American lawyer, feminist, civil rights advocate, lecturer and activist.
In 1944 she began classes at Columbia University School of General Studies, majoring in pre-law and graduated in 1949. However, when she applied to the university's law school, she was refused admission. In her autobiography Kennedy wrote: "The Associate Dean, Willis Reese, told me I had been rejected not because I was a Black but because I was a woman. So I wrote him a letter saying that whatever the reason was, it felt the same to me, and some of my more cynical friends thought I had been discriminated against because I was Black."
Kennedy met with the dean and threatened to sue the school. They admitted her. She was the only black person among eight women in her class. In a 1946 sociology class at Columbia University Kennedy wrote a paper that analogized the discourses of race and sex. "Kennedy hoped that comparing 'women' and 'Negroes' would hasten the formation of alliances".
Kennedy graduated from Columbia Law School in 1951.
By 1954 she had opened her own office, doing matrimonial work, and some assigned criminal cases. She was a member of the Young Democrats. In 1956, she formed a legal partnership with the lawyer who had represented Billie Holiday in regards to drug charges. Kennedy then came to represent Holiday's estate, and also that of Charlie Parker.
Kennedy used Intersectionality as her approach to activism.
"My main message is that we have a pathologically, institutionally racist, sexist, classist society. And that niggerizing techniques that are used don't only damage black people, but they also damage women, gay people, ex-prison inmates, prostitutes, children, old people, handicapped people, native Americans. And that if we can begin to analyze the pathology of oppression... we would learn a lot about how to deal with it." Kennedy kept revisiting the same aim: "urging women to examine the sources of their oppression". She spoke of day to day acts of resistance that we can all take. Kennedy summed up her protest strategy as "Making white people nervous".
Elizabeth Key
[rebelmouse-image 18362081 is_animated_gif=In 1656, Elizabeth Key made history when she sued for her and her son John's freedom in Virginia and won. Elizabeth was the daughter of an Englishman, Thomas Key, and an unnamed African slave. on July 21, 1656, the court found that Elizabeth Key and her son John were in fact free persons.
She married her lawyer, and John's father William Grinstead. Elizabeth had a second son by Grinstead, named William Grinstead II. Grinstead died in 1661, after only five years of marriage. Elizabeth then married another English settler named John Parse or Pearce. When he died, he left 500 acres to Elizabeth and her sons, which allowed them to live out their lives in peace.
There are many descendants of Elizabeth and William Grinstead, including a number of famous people.
Wangari Maathai
[rebelmouse-image 18362082 is_animated_gif=Wangari Muta Maathai (1/1/1940 - 9/25/2011) Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt movement in Kenya in 1977, which has planted more than 10 million trees to prevent soil erosion and provide firewood for cooking fires. A 1989 United Nations report noted that only 9 trees were being replanted in Africa for every 100 that were cut down, causing serious problems with deforestation: soil runoff, water pollution, difficulty finding firewood, lack of animal nutrition, etc.
The program has been carried out primarily by women in the villages of Kenya, who through protecting their environment and through the paid employment for planting the trees are able to better care for their children and their children's future.
Born in 1940 in Nyeri, Wangari Maathai was able to pursue higher education, a rarity for girls in rural areas of Kenya. Studying in the United States, she earned her biology degree from Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas and a master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh.
When she returned to Kenya, Wangari Maathai worked in veterinary medicine research at the University of Nairobi, and eventually, despite the skepticism and even opposition of the male students and faculty, was able to earn a Ph.D. there. She worked her way up through the academic ranks, becoming head of the veterinary medicine faculty, a first for a woman at any department at that university.
Wangari Maathai's husband ran for Parliament in the 1970s, and Wangari Maathai became involved in organizing work for poor people and eventually this became a national grass-roots organization, providing work and improving the environment at the same time. The project has made significant headway against Kenya's deforestation.
Wangari Maathai continued her work with the Green Belt Movement, and working for environmental and women's causes. She also served as national chairperson for the National Council of Women of Kenya.
In 1997 Wangari Maathai ran for the presidency of Kenya, though the party withdrew her candidacy a few days before the election without letting her know; she was defeated for a seat in Parliament in the same election.
In 1998, Wangari Maathai gained worldwide attention when the Kenyan President backed development of a luxury housing project and building began by clearing hundreds of acres of Kenya forest.
In 1991, Wangari Maathai was arrested and imprisoned; an Amnesty International letter-writing campaign helped free her. In 1999 she suffered head injuries when attacked while planting trees in the Karura Public Forest in Nairobi, part of a protest against continuing deforestation.
She was arrested numerous times by the government of Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi.
In January, 2002, Wangari Maathai accepted a position as Visiting Fellow at Yale University's Global Institute for Sustainable Forestry.
And in December, 2002, Wangari Maathai was elected to Parliament, as Mwai Kibaki defeated Maathai's long-time political nemesis, Daniel arap Moi, for 24 years the President of Kenya. Kibaki named Maathai as Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife in January, 2003.
Wangari Maathai died in Nairobi in 2011 of cancer.
Nichelle Nichols
[rebelmouse-image 18362083 is_animated_gif=Nichelle Nichols, born Grace Dell Nichols (12/28/1932 - ) is an American actress, singer, voice artist, and NASA ambassador. She sang with Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton before turning to acting.
Her most famous role is in the popular Star Trek television series (1966--1969), as well as the succeeding motion pictures, where she played communications officer Lieutenant, then Commander, Nyota Uhura aboard the USS Enterprise. Nichols' role was groundbreaking as one of the first African American female characters on American television not portrayed as a servant. She also worked to recruit diverse astronauts to NASA, including women and ethnic minorities. From the late 1970's until the late 1980's, NASA employed Nichelle to recruit new astronaut candidates. Many of her new recruits were women or members of racial and ethnic minorities, including Guion Bluford (the first African-American astronaut), Sally Ride (the first female American astronaut), Judith Resnik (one of the original set of female astronauts, and Ronald McNair (the second African-American astronaut who perished during the launch of the Challenger on January 28, 1986).
Maria W. Stewart
[rebelmouse-image 18362084 is_animated_gif=Maria W. Stewart (1803(?) - 12/17/1879) began supporting herself at 15 by working as a servant. In 1826 she married James W. Stewart.
With her marriage, Maria became part of Boston's small free black middle class. She became involved in some of the institutions founded by that black community, including the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which worked for immediate abolition of slavery.
James died in 1829, but the inheritance he left was taken from Maria through long legal action by the white executors of her husband's will, and she was left with nothing.
Maria was inspired by the African American abolitionist, David Walker. When he died six months after her husband, she went through a religious conversion. She became convinced God was calling her to become a "warrior for God and for freedom and for the cause of oppressed Africa." Maria connected with abolitionist publisher William Lloyd Garrison when he advertised for writings by black women. She came to his paper's office with several essays on religion, racism and slavery. In 1831 Garrison published her first essay, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality.
She also began public speaking at a time when Biblical injunctions against women teaching were interpreted to prohibit women speaking in public, especially to audiences that included men. Frances Wright had created a public scandal by speaking in public in 1828.
For her first address, in 1832, Maria spoke before a women-only audience at the African American Female Intelligence Society, an institution founded by the free black community of Boston. She used the Bible to defend her right to speak, and spoke on both religion and justice, advocating activism for equality. The text of the talk was published in Garrison's newspaper on April 28, 1832.
On September 21, 1832, Maria delivered a second lecture, this time to an audience that included men. She spoke at Franklin Hall, the site of the New England Anti-Slavery Society meetings. In her speech, she questioned whether free blacks were much more free than slaves, given the lack of opportunity and equality. She also questioned the move to send free blacks back to Africa.
Garrison published more of her writings and the text of her speeches in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. In 1832, Garrison published more of her writings as Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria Stewart.
On February 27, 1833, Maria delivered her third public lecture, "African Rights and Liberty."
Her fourth and final Boston lecture was a "Farewell Address" on September 21, 1833. She addressed the negative reaction her public speaking provoked, expressing both her dismay at having little effect, and her sense of divine call to speak publicly. Then she moved to New York.
In 1835, Garrison published a pamphlet with her four speeches plus some essays and poems titled Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. These inspired other women to begin public speaking.
In New York, Stewart remained an activist, attending the 1837 Women's Anti-slavery Convention. A strong advocate for literacy and educational opportunities for African Americans and women, she supported herself teaching in public schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, becoming an assistant to the principal of the Williamsburg School. She was also active in a black women's literary group.
Mary Church Terrell
[rebelmouse-image 18362085 is_animated_gif=Mary Church Terrell (9/23/1863 - 7/24/1954) was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the same year President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Her mother was a hair salon operator. They lived in a mostly-white neighborhood and young Mary was protected from most experiences of racism, although her father was shot during the Memphis race riots of 1866. It was not until she was five, hearing stories from her grandmother about slavery, that she became conscious of African American history.
Her parents divorced and her mother had custody. In 1873, the family sent her north to Yellow Springs and then Oberlin for school. Terrell split her summers between visiting her father in Memphis and her mother in New York City. Terrell graduated from Oberlin College, one of the few integrated colleges in the country, in 1884. She had taken the "gentleman's course" rather than the easier, shorter women's program.
Mary moved back to Memphis to live with her father, but her father opposed her working. When he remarried, Mary accepted a teaching position in Xenia, Ohio, and then another in Washington, DC. After completing her masters degree at Oberlin while living in Washington, she spent two years traveling in Europe with her father. In 1890, she returned to teach at the Washington, DC school.
She renewed her friendship with her supervisor at the school, Robert Heberton Terrell. They married in 1891. Mary left her employment upon marriage. Robert Terrell was admitted to the bar in 1883 in Washington and, from 1911 to 1925, taught law at Howard University. He served as a judge of the District of Columbia Municipal Court from 1902 to 1925. The first three children Mary bore died shortly after birth. Her daughter, Phyllis, was born in 1898. In the meantime, Mary had become very active in social reform and volunteer work, including working with black women's organizations and for women's suffrage in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Susan B. Anthony and she became friends. Mary also worked for kindergartens and child care, especially for children of working mothers.
Excluded from full participation in planning with other women for activities at the 1893 World's Fair, Mary threw her efforts into building up black women's organizations that would work to end both gender and racial discrimination.
She helped engineer the merger of black women's clubs to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. She was its first president, serving in that capacity until 1901, when she was appointed honorary president for life.
During the 1890s, Mary's increasing skill in and recognition for public speaking led her to take up lecturing as a profession. She became a friend of and worked with W.E.B. DuBois, and he invited her to become one of the charter members when the NAACP was founded.
Mary also served on the Washington, DC school board, from 1895 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1911, the first African American woman to serve on that body. In 1910, she helped found the College Alumni Club.
In the 1920s, Mary worked with the Republican National Committee on behalf of women and African Americans.
Widowed when her husband died in 1925, Mary continued her lecturing, volunteer work, and activism.
In 1940 she published her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World. In her last years, she picketed and worked in the campaign to end discrimination in Washington, DC.
A'Lelia Walker
[rebelmouse-image 18362086 is_animated_gif=A'Lelia Walker (6/6/1885 - 8/16/1931) born Lelia McWilliams in Mississippi moved with her mother, Madam C. J. Walker, to Saint Louis when A'Lelia was two years old. A'Lelia was well-educated though her mother was illiterate; her mother saw to it that A'Lelia attended college, at Knoxville College in Tennessee.
As her mother's beauty and hair care business grew, A'Lelia worked with her mother in the business. A'Lelia took charge of the mail order part of the business, working out of Pittsburgh.
In 1908, mother and daughter set up a beauty school in Pittsburgh to train women in the Walker method of hair processing. The operation was called Lelia College. Madam Walker moved the business headquarters to Indianapolis in 1900. A'Lelia Walker set up a second Lelia College in 1913, this one in New York.
After Madam Walker's death, A'Lelia Walker ran the business, becoming president in 1919. She renamed herself about the time of her mother's death. She built the large Walker Building in Indianapolis in 1928.
During the Harlem Renaissance, A'Lelia Walker hosted many parties that brought together artists, writers, and intellectuals. She held the parties in her New York townhouse apartment, called the Dark Tower, and at her country villa, Lewaro, originally owned by her mother.
Langston Hughes dubbed A'Lelia Walker the "joy goddess" of the Harlem Renaissance for her parties and patronage.
The parties ended with the beginning of the Great Depression, and A'Lelia Walker sold the Dark Tower in 1930.
The six-foot-tall A'Lelia Walker was married three times and had an adopted daughter, Mae.
A'Lelia Walker died in 1931. The eulogy at her funeral was delivered by the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. Mary McLeod Bethune also spoke at the funeral. Langston Hughes wrote a poem for the occasion, "To A'Lelia."
Maggie Lena Walker
[rebelmouse-image 18362087 is_animated_gif=Maggie Lena Walker (7/15/1867 - 12/15/1934) was the daughter of Elizabeth Draper, who had been enslaved in her early years. Draper worked as a cook's assistant in the home of the noted Civil War spy Elizabeth Van Lew. Maggie Walker's father was Eccles Cuthbert, an Irish journalist and Northern abolitionist.
Maggie attended school in Richmond, Virginia's segregated schools. Maggie graduated from Colored Normal School in 1883. A protest by the ten African American students over being forced to graduate in a church led to a compromise allowing them to graduate at their school.
It was not Maggie's first involvement in something beyond the ordinary for a young girl. In high school, she joined a fraternal organization in Richmond, the Independent Order of St. Luke Society (IOSLS). This organization provided health insurance and burial benefits for members and was involved in self-help and racial pride activities. Maggie Walker helped form a juvenile division of the Society.
Maggie married Armstead Walker, jr., after meeting him at church. She gave up her job, as expected for teachers at the time. While raising their children, she put more efforts into volunteer work with the IOSLS. She was elected Secretary in 1899, at a time the Society was on the brink of failing. Instead, Maggie Walker took on a major membership drive, lecturing not only in and around Richmond but around the country. She built it up to more than 100,000 members in more than 20 states.
In 1903, Maggie Walker saw an opportunity for the Society and formed a bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, and served as president of the bank until 1932. This made her the first (known) woman bank president in the United States.
She also led the Society to more self-help programs and philanthropic efforts, founded an African American newspaper in 1902 for which she wrote a column for many years, and lectured extensively on race and women's issues.
In 1905, the Walkers moved into a large home in Richmond, which after her death became a national historic site maintained by the National Parks Service. In 1907, a fall at her home caused permanent nerve damage. She had trouble walking the rest of her life, leading to the nickname, the Lame Lioness.
In the 1910s and 1920s, Maggie served on a number of organizational boards, including the executive committee of the National Association of Colored Women and more than 10 years on the board of the NAACP.
In 1921, Maggie ran as a Republican for state Superintendent of Public Instruction. By 1928, between her old injury and diabetes, she was wheelchair-bound.
In 1931, with the Depression, Maggie helped merge her bank with several other African American banks, into the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. With her ill health, she retired as bank president and became board chair of the merged bank.
Ida B Wells-Barnett
[rebelmouse-image 18362088 is_animated_gif=Ida B. Wells-Barnett (7/16/1862 - 3/25/1931) was an anti-lynching activist, a journalist, a lecturer, and an activist for racial justice.
Born into slavery, Ida went to work as a teacher to support her family after her parents died in an epidemic.
In 1880, after seeing her brothers placed as apprentices, she moved with her two younger sisters to live with a relative in Memphis. There, she obtained a teaching position at a black school, and began taking classes at Fisk University in Nashville during summers. Ida also began writing for the Negro Press Association. She became editor of a weekly, Evening Star, and then of Living Way, writing under the pen name Iola. Her articles were reprinted in other black newspapers around the country.
In 1884, while riding in the ladies' train car on a trip to Nashville, Ida was forcibly removed from that car and forced into a colored-only car, even though she had a first class ticket. She sued the railroad and won a settlement of $500. But in 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict and Ida had to pay court costs of $200.
She wrote on racial justice for Memphis newspapers as a reporter and newspaper owner.
Lynching in that time had become one common means by which African Americans were intimidated. Nationally, in about 200 lynchings each year, about two-thirds of the victims were black men, but the percentage was much higher in the South.
Ida wrote against lynching in general. In particular, the white community became incensed when she published an editorial denouncing the myth that black men raped white women and her allusion to the idea that white women might consent to a relationship with black men was particularly offensive to the white community. She was forced to leave town when a mob attacked her offices in retaliation for writing against an 1892 lynching.
Ida was out of town when a mob invaded her paper's offices and destroyed the presses, responding to a call in a white-owned paper. Ida heard that her life was threatened if she returned, so she went to New York.
Ida continued writing newspaper articles at New York Age, where she exchanged the subscription list of Memphis Free Speech for a part ownership in the paper. She also wrote pamphlets and spoke widely against lynching.
In 1893, Ida went to Great Britain, returning again in 1894. There, she spoke about lynching in America, found significant support for anti-lynching efforts, and saw the organization of the British Anti-Lynching Society.
She moved to Chicago, where she worked with Frederick Douglass and local lawyer and editor Frederick Barnett on an 81-page booklet about the exclusion of black participants from most of the events around the Columbian Exposition. Ida married Barnett and became involved in local racial justice reporting and organizing. She also wrote for his newspaper, the Chicago Conservator.
In 1895 Ida published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States 1892 - 1893 - 1894. She documented that lynchings were not, indeed, caused by black men raping white women.
From 1898-1902, Ida served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council. In 1898, she was part of a delegation to President William McKinley to seek justice after the lynching in South Carolina of a black postman.
In 1900, she spoke for women's suffrage and worked with another Chicago woman, Jane Addams, to defeat an attempt to segregate Chicago's public school system.
In 1901, the Barnetts bought the first house east of State Street to be owned by a black family. Despite harassment and threats, they continued to live in the neighborhood.
Ida was a founding member of the NAACP in 1909, but withdrew her membership, criticizing the organization for not being militant enough. In her writing and lectures, she often criticized middle-class blacks including ministers for not being active enough in helping the poor in the black community.
In 1910, Ida helped found and became president of the Negro Fellowship League, which established a settlement house in Chicago to serve the many African Americans newly arrived from the South. She worked for the city as a probation officer from 1913-1916, donating most of her salary to the organization. But with competition from other groups, the election of an unfriendly city administration, and Ida's poor health, the League closed its doors in 1920.
In 1913, Ida organized the Alpha Suffrage League, an organization of African American women supporting women's suffrage. She was active in protesting the strategy of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the largest pro-suffrage group, on participation of African Americans and how they treated racial issues. The NAWSA generally made participation of African Americans invisible - even while claiming that no African American women had applied for membership - so as to try to win votes for suffrage in the South. By forming the Alpha Suffrage League, Ida made clear that the exclusion was deliberate, and that African American women and men did support woman suffrage, even knowing that other laws and practices that barred African American men from voting would also affect women.
A major suffrage demonstration in Washington, DC, timed to align with the presidential inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, asked that African American supporters march at the back of the line. Many African American suffragists, like Mary Church Terrell, agreed, for strategic reasons after initial attempts to change the minds of the leadership -- but not Ida. She inserted herself into the march with the Illinois delegation, after the march started, and the delegation welcomed her. The leadership of the march simply ignored her action.
Also in 1913, Ida was part of a delegation to see President Wilson to urge non-discrimination in federal jobs. She was elected as chair of the Chicago Equal Rights League in 1915, and in 1918 organized legal aid for victims of the Chicago race riots of 1918.
In 1915, she was part of the successful election campaign that led to Oscar Stanton De Priest becoming the first African American alderman in the city.
She was also part of founding the first kindergarten for black children in Chicago.
In 1924, Ida failed in a bid to win election as president of the National Association of Colored Women, defeated by Mary McLeod Bethune. In 1930, she failed in a bid to be elected to the Illinois State Senate as an independent.
Although anti-lynching was her main focus, and she did achieve considerable visibility of the problem, she never achieved her goal of federal anti-lynching legislation. Her lasting success was in the area of organizing black women.
People Who've Survived A Home Invasion Share Their Experiences
Reddit user ahmedatrees2003 asked: 'People who were in a real home invasion situation, what was it like and what did you do?'
There is little people fear more than their home being broken into.
Particularly when they're inside it.
Unlikely as the prospect sounds, there are a staggering 1.65 million home invasions in the US per year.
And in many of those cases, people were unlucky enough to have been home when these invasions took place.
Those who lived to tell the tale, however, might consider themselves lucky.
"People who were in a real home invasion situation, what was it like and what did you do?"
He Didn't Know Who He Was Dealing With...
Dude came knocking on the front door and my mom and I ignored it."
"I was about 10 and my mom didn’t want to answer the door to a stranger."
"He knocked a while then went around the back and hopped the gate to try the back door."
"My mom got her gun and opened the back door with it visible, right before he tried to smash the glass."
"He took off running and was arrested on B&E charges the next day after he broke into someone else’s apartment and couldn’t run."- SilverSunrises
It's Always Lunch Money That Gets Stolen First...
"Was in 7th grade home alone after a half day when suddenly there was very hard knocking on my back door."
"I knew immediately something was off because we never have visitors and my father did not knock like that, and froze up in my room."
"I peak out of my room (right in front of back door) and suddenly it's quiet so I go back to my room."
"AS SOON as I close my door I hear glass shatter."
"Turned off my computer and TV and dove under my bed."
"For the next 40 minutes I hear him thrashing around my living room and parents room, then hear them leave."
"During this I'm on call with the cops who think I'm PRANK CALLING THEM and take 70 minutes to finally come over."
"The station is 3 streets away from my house."
"They come and investigate only to find out it was our next door neighbor that broke in and was actually looking for drug money, as it turns out the previous person to live here did at-home haircuts and sold weed on the side."
"The neighbor was arrested and his family moved out a week later."
"THE ONLY THING THIS GUY TOOK WAS MY LUNCH MONEY I LEFT ON A COUNTER OUTSIDE FOR THE NEXT DAY."- level 1Ogletreb
whatever you say bully GIFGiphyThey Actually Apoligized...
"Four guys knocked on my buddies door at 11pm."
"He lived with a bunch of other guys so this wasn’t anything new."
"They burst in and held a gun to his neck and demanded the drugs."
"He stammered that there weren’t any drugs but they could take what they wanted."
"One guy held him there with the gun as the others searched the house."
"Since they didn’t find anything they realized they had the wrong house and left."
"As they were leaving the last guy said ‘sorry, this wasn’t my idea'."- discostud1515
A Gun Needs No Explanation
"My in-laws were home when a young guy broke into their house."
"They don’t speak English very well so my FIL, in the clearest English he could muster loudly said, 'Get me my gun!''
"At that point the intruder left in a hurry."- TheManInTheShack
Could Have Used The Teethmarks As Evidence...
"I was at my friend’s place when it happened to him."
"We were both teenagers then."
"The guy thought everyone was sleeping and he got startled when he saw us, he bit my friend (his arm required stitches from the bite) and ran away."
"No idea who the guy was or what he wanted, never happened again and we never saw the guy again."- Melancholic84·
He Should Have Chosen Which House More Carefully...
"Tackled the guy."
"The hardest I’ve ever hit someone, and I’m a pretty big guy with a football background."
"But he didn’t see me coming."
"It felt very much like a do or die moment so I didn’t hold anything back."
"Broke a few of his bones, messed up his face, and got him sentenced to 6 years."- The_SunDancer
Still Had To Replace That TV...
"Not me, but my aunt."
"She was at home alone in her backyard making food, and when she walked into the living room, she saw a couple of men in the middle of carrying out the tv."
"It seems that they didn’t think anyone was at home; they got surprised, dropped the tv, and ran out after she started screaming."- RitaSaluki
Feline Intuition
"I was in bed asleep at 7am when I heard a loud bang."
"I thought nothing of it because of the large cat tree I have downstairs that's always getting knocked over, so I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep."
"Not long after my elderly cat comes running into my bedroom, jumps up on the bed and tries to hide under the blankets."
"This immediately woke me up because that old fat cat hadn't ran nor jumped on our bed for years."
"As I came two I see two men coming up my stairs."
"At that point it felt like time stopped and somehow ran incredibly fast at the same time."
"I jumped out of bed and started screaming 'GET THE F*CK OUT OF MY HOUSE!' and I remembered thinking while chasing these guys through my house and screaming again and again at the top of my lungs that my voice sounds exactly like my brother and I wondered how strange that was.""I tackled one of them on my front lawn, but he struggled free and got away."
"I saw the get away car and tried to keep repeating the license number, but it faded away in my mind as I was repeating it."
'I remember vividly being so mad at myself that I couldn't remember 7 numbers, and how stupid I was for not grabbing my phone! "
"Looking back on the situation there are so many things that happened that I never noticed, like how I fractured my arm slamming into the wall at the bottom of my stairs, and that I cut my feet up on the splintered wood of my front door."
"The adrenaline rush of a true fight or flight situation is something so strange it's almost impossible to accurately describe."
"The sense of time, not being aware of pain and injuries for hours, and the hyper focus on some details but the complete loss of others."
"Luckily I wasn't seriously hurt and nothing was stolen, but I installed cameras all over my house the very next day."- robot_boat_loan
camera surveillance GIF by MOST EXPENSIVESTGiphySometimes Size Does Matter...
"Girlfriend and I were sleeping in bed, some dummy broke into our apartment, ran real quick when he saw how big my naked a** was."- Croceyes2
FIVE DAYS?!?!
"Blocked the doors when it became clear that someone was trying to break in."
"My husband and I were staying with a friend and her husband; her step son and elderly mother in law were also in the house."
"Someone had heard the old lady had jewelry and decided to try their luck."
"We heard this later through the town grapevine."
"Said person then escalated to trying to kick his way in through the windows (they were leaded)."
"My husband called the police while my friend tried to keep the gap and child calm and her husband and I screamed a lot and sort of flailed at the protruding feet with pokers from the old fireplace."
"On realizing there were more of us than there were of him, he ran off."
"Good thing too; the police never showed."
"They called 5 days later to see 'if we still needed their assistance'."
"Bloody useless."
"In comparison 6 months later I arrived at work to discover the door and cash drawer had been jimmied and the £50 float nicked and they were over and taking fingerprints inside the hour."
"I wonder why trust in the police is so low."
"Total mystery."- Haunting-blade
It's a hard call to decide which is worse, being in the house while it's being burgled, and potentially saving your valuables, or being out and losing them.
Either way, it's a terrible situation no one deserves to be in.
Making the notion of buying a security system and bolts for your doors seem better with every passing second.
There are very few people who haven't found themselves frustrated with their parents at one point in their life.
Whether it be for something they said, did or didn't say or do, sometimes we've found ourselves needing to vent to a friend, or scream into a pillow to let out our frustrations.
For most people, this anger is short-lived, as deep down they still love their parents and will always find a way to forgive them.
Some people, however, have a harder time forgiving their parents for certain actions, and even take the drastic step of cutting them out of their lives entirely.
"What did *that* parent do that ended your relationship with them?"
Lies and Theft.
"My mother often said, 'your sorry daddy never cared enough about you to pay child support', but I found out later, he had money order receipts."
"He was a career Navy man so he'd have been forced to pay."
"She stole two of my paychecks when I was a single mother, signing them over to herself in her sweeping left handwriting, I'm right-handed."
"The final thing that made her my EX-mom was when she let two drug addicted so-called caregivers steal liquid morphine which was meant for her dying fourth husband."
"He died in miserable pain at home without relief."
"She disowned my adult sister, who confronted her about it."
"Mom always said, 'I can stand anything except a liar or a thief', but she was both."- Grattytood
Ignorance And Abuse
"A few years later she got cancer, I let her back into my life, I invited her to my wedding, where she spent the entire day talking about how it was a shame I couldn’t lose more weight in time and insulting every aspect of the wedding quietly to my now-MIL who had helped with everything."
"I sat her down a few days later (she was staying at my house as the wedding was far from her home) and asked for the comments about my weight to stop."
"I used all the language I learned in therapy, explaining how it made me feel, trying to not be accusatory but instead cooperative."
"She started scream crying and ran out of the room."
"I left to stay with my in laws."
"I haven’t seen her since."
"She won’t be meeting the baby I’m pregnant with and when she dies, I won’t be attending the funeral."- jonathantavares
Health And Safety At Risk
"Well the last straw was when my father convinced my grandparents to get me kicked out of their house while I was finishing up university by telling them that the hookah I was partaking in every few weeks was an illegal drug."
"During finals which was pretty fun."
"Oh and the part where he told me he hoped I died by getting in a motorcycle crash."
"Followed by weeks of incessant voice-mails of him drunkenly threatening me wanting to meet up for a fight."
"There was also that time he beat the sh*t out of me when I stood up for my mom during one of his drunken rages at a camping trip."
"Oh and who can forget that one time he left me a voice-mail telling me 'this is your fault' and then shooting his gun into the air making it seem he had just offed himself."
"But it was just a manipulation tactic."
"That was a fun one."
"Nothing like some childhood trauma to make someone grow up quickly."
"For anyone wondering, yes, I did use this as a role model of what not to be as I got older.'
"I haven't spoken with pretty much any of my family except my mother for the last decade."
"I'm in a loving relationship now getting married this year and do not plan on having any children."
"My dad's last name dies with me."- Walkman1080i
Actions Have Consequences
"Dad left us when I was super young, like 2."
"Mom remarried (another abusive a**hole) and dad would come around sporadically."
"When I was 12 I saw him once then he left and didn’t see him again for decades."
"About 13 years ago I stumbled upon him in the state prison system database across the country, made contact, he seemed to be changed."
"He was old, previously meth addicted, lots of chronic health sh*t."
"I bought him a prepaid cell to keep in touch."
"He went back to the streets but stayed clean."
"Eventually moved in with some random long lost family member."
"We kept in touch by phone, I helped him get some of his health sh*t figured out."
"We were cordial."
"I got pregnant unexpectedly, it was in the 5 year plan but not the right now plan but whatever, here we are, no reason not to do this thing other than lack of mental preparedness."
"So. I go through this pregnancy, it was horrible in every way, physically uncomfortable, illness, bed rest, all the sh*t."
"He called me one day and told me he was going to go to the beach to celebrate his 20 year anniversary of moving to the coast."
"He’d never let himself enjoy the beach before and today was that day."
"What I heard was that he was going to the beach to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of abandoning his child, me."
"And I had these kids in my belly that I sometimes didn’t want, didn’t plan for, but would’ve murdered for and I didn’t even know who they were, didn’t know if they were boys or girls, no names, no personalities, just feet in my ribs and pelvis constantly, and yet I would have died for them."
"And this motherf*cker is celebrating the day he left me.'
"I never called him again, my kids are almost 10."
"He’s called me plenty, I don’t answer."
"I reply in text at times, briefly."
"I’ve sent Christmas cards to the family member he stays with and to him with pictures and I’ve politely explained the above and he just doesn’t get it."- tobmom
Weren't There When They Were Needed The Most
"Long story short."
"My brother got shot and was in ICU for a month."
"My brother's condition went south and my parents were MIA."
"A decision needed to be made wether or not we pull the plug."
"That decision fell on me."
"At 24, I had to make that choice with no parents in sight and I decided to pull the plug."- Soul_Traitor
A Little Kindness Goes A Long Way
"Oddly, she showed me she was capable of being kind- however disingenuous."
"She just wasn’t capable of being kind to me."- Evening_Run_1595
No Interest In Staying Cordial
"After a childhood ripe with physical, emotional and psychological abuse followed by limited contact through my 20’s, I finally decided to confront my mother."
"She agreed to go to therapy with me."
"A couple days later she started asking questions about the cost to which I said I’d pay."
"A couple days after that she was asking about how often we had to go."
"A couple days after that she said she didn’t want to go because I’d 'expose her'.”
"I was then told that the abuse I endured was my fault because I had given up on being a good son."
"This all happened 4 years ago and I went no contact immediately after."
"My life has gotten better since then."- PewpyDewpdyPantz
Sent Family Down The Wrong Path
"My mom introduced my older brother to heroin."
"He passed away early last year from an overdose."
"I don’t think I can ever forgive her for taking the only family I’ve ever really cared about away from me."- bulbsaur_is_best
Cutting someone from your life is a drastic decision that should be considered very carefully.
Sometimes though, however difficult it may seem, it is not only the right decision, but the only decision.
Especially when your mental and physical well-being are at risk.
People Share Their Biggest Relationship Dealbreakers That May Seem Trivial To Most People
In any relationship, especially romantic ones, there are dealbreakers. A quality or action the other person does that irks you so much, you don't want to be with that person anymore.
They can be big things. Perhaps you're a homebody, but your partner wants to travel. Or you disagree on your stances about kids or pets.
However, other times, it can be more minor things; things that may not bother most people. For example, my dealbreaker for my last boyfriend was that he could never let commercials play out during a TV show or movie. Once the commercials started, he had to switch the channel and watch something else, even though he then risked missing the other show.
This isn't something that bothers everyone, and seems minor, but it is a dealbreaker for me.
Redditors have their own relationship dealbreakers that they know would seem trivial to most others, and they are ready to share.
It all started when Redditor imthejavafox asked:
"What's a dealbreaker for you in a relationship that might not be a big deal to others?"
Reset Please
"Stopping the microwave before zero and not clearing the time."
– Ilostmypassword43
"I completely get stopping the microwave before the beep, I do that too. But just push stop a second time to clear the display/bring the clock back up. Super simple fix!"
– QuelynD
That's Pretty Specific
"If someone tells me they don’t mind giving my grandmother a ride to Bingo but then hours later they’re nowhere to be found and eventually you get a call from the cops that they were caught doing meth behind a Burger King."
– 6byfour
"Yeah I hate that"
– Dirtylittletryhard
"If I had a nickel for every time...."
– Yourcriticismiswrong
"You'd have two nickels. Which isn't that many really, but it's odd it happened twice."
– NitrokoffTheGhost
Yeah, That's Gross
"Chewing with mouth open."
– RetractionPodcast
"I have misophonia and chewing sounds are so incredibly stressful to hear."
– treefrogbc
I'm In The Car!
"bad driving. if you're texting, driving like a maniac, or having a road rage hissy fit while i'm in the car, count me OUT son"
– botticellibabyy
"I actually made my now ex-boyfriend take driving lessons (he’s 40 btw) before I would get back in the car with him. He was an aggressive and fidgety driver."
– BronxBelle
Do It Together
"Incompatible hobbies. We don't need to have the same hobbies but, as an example, if they're the type of active people who act as if they may die if they breathe indoors air, then we are not compatible."
– sachiko468
Yeah, That's Weird
"My ex used to go up to strangers at the grocery store and ask their opinion on random items. So that."
"He didn’t actually have questions, he just liked the attention"
– Mirrorflute88
Speak Like An Adult
"I found out recently that baby talk is a deal breaker for me. Dude speaks 3 languages and he said "peeez" instead of "please" too many times and it just made him unattractive to me."
– NuttyBoButty
"I had an ex (first longterm partner ever, dated over a year) who wanted me to babytalk them. First it was just wanting to put their head in my lap in public (mortifying), then wanting praise for everything they checked off in their bullet journal (okay), and then it was "can you pet my hair and talk to me like you're soothing a baby puppy?" And I was like. Yknow, actually, no. I think they run an MCU-themed affirmations blog now."
– graccha
Never On Time
"Consistent lateness. Everybody is late once in a while because life, but when you have those people who are constantly late for everything, and they leave you waiting for them over and over and over again? I just find it so incredibly disrespectful and it’s a huge deal breaker."
– Joygernaut
"Or when you are together with a person who's always late, and because of them you are now late from everything as well. All social gatherings, dinner dates, apppintnents, where ever you are going together. My ex got ready to leave but then started a few more "quick" projects to do, whilst I was in panic checking the time and begging him to come to the car already. Really bad match, I have some trauma for being late so I literally did have a panic attack if we were about to be late, but for him it wasn't a big deal and he never understood why I made a scene of it."
– Sentient_Dream
Low Key Nights Can Be Fun Too
"Being an annoying extrovert. If you have to be around groups of people every day and every weekend and like to go to the bar to drink every chance you get AND if you talk too much, we’re not going to work out. I’m an introvert and a homebody that likes to keep things low key and we should enjoy each other’s company without having to talk all the time to fill the air. Luckily, my spouse is an introvert like me so we mesh well."
– pwa09
"Haha same I'm like you ever heard of a video game????"
– ParadiceSC2
A Little Respect
"Not respecting boundaries. Like “don’t tickle me…I hate it!” Them, “but it’s so funny…lighten up!”"
– dodoatsandwiggets
"God I hate this. My brother just couldn’t understand the concept of me asking him to stop doing something for no other reason than I don’t like it/it bothers me. Like do you respect me? Why would you want someone you respect to endure something like that if there is no need..?"
– Tiggerhoods
My Horoscope Says...
"People who base their entire life and personality off zodiac signs"
– Sir_f*ckaru
Ewww!
"Not washing their hands after eating with their hands….Licking their fingers and wiping it off on their clothes thinking that’s "clean enough….""
"Yeah i really hate dirty hands"
– Extension-Badger-958
"I had met a cute guy, first date went great. Second date he asked me to the movies. We ordered popcorn (with butter) and he went to town on it, licking all the butter off his fingers. Then proceeded to put his hand on my thigh and trying to hold my hand. I’ve never gotten the ick and been so repulsed in such a short amount of time. It’s a bummer because otherwise he had a really clean cut/great hygiene but I just couldn’t move forward haha"
– zuis0804
My Pets Are My Family
"If they don't like animals, it's an absolute deal breaker."
– SageyPhantomhive
"I dated a guy that would say your f*cking cat when he would come over but he wasn't being funny. He hated my cat. I couldn't trust him around her. I ended it quickly with him."
– Icy-Supermarket-6932
On The Other Hand...
"Also the opposite... Refusing to post a single picture of us together. It doesn't have to be slathered all over socials, but that one really good picture of us on the mountain top? Why not post that?"
– horsewangjackson
"This one hits close to home. Dated and loved this girl for a year and she wouldn’t even let me post a pic of us dressed up nice to go to my friends wedding. Felt like she was hiding me from someone."
– lugubriouspandas
I have to agree with both of those!
Every love story, good or bad, has a lesson embedded in it.
And just like life in general, love always comes full circle.
We all end up back at the beginning.
My first relationship left enough scars for my therapist to send her her kids to college.
There is always a takeaway.
Too often, we ignore them.
If you haven't already, go back and dig a little deeper.
Redditor Frero_s wanted to discuss all the lessons they learned from the people they dated in the beginning, so they asked:
"What did you learn from your first relationship?"
My first love taught me to watch out for love.
Next to Godliness
snow white cleaning GIFGiphy"Compatibility with household cleanliness and organization habits is far more important than you think. Relationships where one partner cares a lot more about the household than the other will result in both parties resenting each other."
EdgyGoose
Firsts
“'When someone shows you who they are, believe them, the first time.' -Maya Angelou, several years after I learned that lesson the hard way, but I could never phrase it better."
"Going hand in hand with that, you can’t fix someone else, especially someone who’s given up on themselves. You can only put that kind of energy and effort into yourself and expect to see returns. That one took me a couple or three ill-advised relationships, truthfully."
Some_Specialist_5052
The One
"You're going to get your heart broken sometimes. That my friends is life."
MrDadBod
"I prefer to think that most relationships will end, but that doesn’t make them failures. You can learn things and grow as a person in many relationships, even ones that end poorly."
"You can make mistakes by staying in them too long, ending them too soon, treating your partner badly, or allowing yourself to be treated badly, but calling them failures is such a limited perspective. Most people that find 'the one' probably would have 'failed' in that relationship if they had no prior relationships to learn from."
whomeverwiz
Not Enough
"It's not enough to love someone; the way that love is expressed matters a lot. For a great relationship, you have to love your partner in the way they need to be loved."
NoodleWeird
"And this takes practice too! Patience at the beginning of a relationship is important. Don't just assume you know each other from the inside out in the beginning, and take time to understand where each person is coming from."
ChimkenFinger
"That's the principle of the Five Love Languages. Do and say the things of the love language your partner most connects to."
LucidWebMarketing
Let it Go
let it go GIFGiphy"That some people aren’t meant for you. Don’t wait for them to be somebody they aren’t and don’t try to change them to fit what you want them to be."
Elegant-Vehicle7314
The only change we can focus on is our own.
As a couple, it's about changing together.
Otherwise move on.
Lies
Three Little Pigs Wow GIF by LaffGiphy"Sometimes the words 'I love you' don’t actually mean much when the person saying them doesn’t believe in those words anymore."
GodofWar1234
Perfect
"Well, I didn't have my first relationship until I was 30 which ended up in marriage and eventually divorce. The biggest lesson I took from it was that waiting for that 'perfect' person was a complete waste of time. I had a very difficult time dating when I was younger. I put too much pressure on each date for it to be something special."
"The marriage taught me that I could actually be desirable and gave me confidence going forward. The divorce, on the other hand, made me a much more guarded and uncaring person. Turns out the uncaring part made it easier to go on dates (less anxiety) but harder for them to mean anything later on."
Boromn
Thank you, Katie...
"Make your own decisions about what you want out of life your instead of those that line up with what she wants out of her life."
"Almost followed a girl to Portland, OR, and took a job I didn't really want because I wanted to make 'us' work. So happy she cared enough about me to end things and tell me to find my own path. A wife, a successful military career, and a bunch of kids later, I'm eternally grateful things turned out the way they did. Thank you, Katie."
thethrillamanila
Want better for YOU!
"To never chase or beg anyone to stay."
DarlinggD
"My first gf broke up with me over text right after she had left my place, walked her home even though we were both upset at each other. She refused to talk about it in person and then got mad at me for not fighting to keep her. I think I dodged a bullet because I don't think any relationship will work if one party refuses to communicate, uses breaking up to try to manipulate, or breaks up over text. All 3 in this case."
LumberWand
Under Pressure
Fuck You Season 4 GIF by FriendsGiphy"Someone can be a really good friend, doesn’t mean they’ll be a good partner. Also not to give in to pressure from your partner on things you believe in."
Rebel_0518
See your worth
"Apparently I get too attached which is odd to me cause I’m just trying to care and I suppose it comes off in a weird way. I’m not gonna stop 'cause I know someone will see my worth and appreciate every second of it when they find me."
Odd_Imagination_6617
"Please don’t ever stop caring. There are enough emotionally detached people in the world; so much so that they’ll have you feeling like you’re the oddball."
Queasy_Thought_6532
Big lessons here.
Relationships take way more than love.
Learn it young.