On September 25, 1957, Jefferson Thomas, a high school track star was among nine black students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. It was the nation’s first major battle over school segregation after the rendering of the 1954 landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education. , has died. He was 68.
According to a statement from Carlotta Walls LaNier, Mr. Thomas died on Sunday September 5, 2010 at the age of 68 in Ohio of pancreatic cancer. Mrs. LaNier also enrolled at Central High School in 1957 and is president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation.
The integration fight was a first real test of the federal government’s resolve to enforce a 1954 Supreme Court order outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools. Gov. Orval Faubus sent National Guard troops to block Thomas and eight other students from entering Central High.
In an extraordinary move, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the renowned 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to escort the nine students to school and uphold the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision a few years earlier ordering the desegregation of schools. On Sept. 25, 1957, the nine students, under the protection of the U.S. military, marched up the steps of Little Rock Central High School and into the history books. It was the first time that a U.S. President had ordered the military to enforce a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Jefferson Thomas with Minnijean Brown (left) and Thelma Mothershed at the federal courthouse.
The next year, Faubus closed all Little Rock high schools to avoid integration. When Little Rock high schools reopened for the 1959-60 school year, Thomas and LaNier returned to Little Rock Central High School and both of them graduated in May 1960.
Thomas and the other members of the nine hold more than one hundred awards for their work in championing Civil Rights. For more than fifty years, all nine of them have worked to advance the principles of excellence in education for young people, especially students of color, and in 1999 they created the Little Rock Nine Foundation, a non-profit organization, to further their cause.
Each of the Little Rock Nine received Congressional Gold Medals shortly after the 40th anniversary of their enrollment. President Clinton, an Arkansas native presented the medals in 1999 to Thomas, LaNier, Melba Patillo Beals, Minnijean Trickey Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Terrence Roberts and Thelma Mothershed Wair.
In 2008, then President-elect Obama sent Thomas and other members of the Little Rock Nine special invitations to his inauguration as the nation’s first black president. During his campaign, he had said the Little Rock Nine’s courage in desegregating Central High helped make the opportunities in his life possible.
Thomas played a number of sports and was on the track team at Dunbar Junior High, but others had little to do with him once he entered Central, the state’s largest high school.
“I had played with some of the white kids from the neighborhood,” Thomas said. “I went up to Central High School after school and we played basketball and touch football together. I knew some of the kids.
“Eventually, I ran into them … and they were not at all happy to see me,” Thomas added. “One of them said, ‘Well I don’t mind playing basketball or football with you or anything. You guys are good at sports. Everybody knows that, but you’re just not smart enough to sit next to me in the classroom.”‘
Beals said Monday that Thomas was nicknamed “Roadrunner, because he was so fast. You could sometimes avoid danger by running fast.”
She said by phone from her home in California that Thomas always seemed to bring a light moment to the crisis.
Jefferson Thomas
“He was funny, he had a most extraordinary sense of humor. He did sustain an enormous amount of damage and pain during the Little Rock crisis, but no matter what, he always had something refreshing and funny to say,” she said. “It could be the most horrible day and he would say ‘Yes, but how are you dressed and are you smiling?”‘
Thomas also brought a bit of levity to the 2007 commemoration marking the 50th anniversary of the integration fight — letting the audience know how angry LaNier was with him when he stood up and cheered at a Central High Tigers pep rally.
Thomas thought the white students were carrying the school flag and yelling the school cheer. He said LaNier glared at him and later set him straight: It was the Confederate flag and the students were singing “Dixie.”
Jefferson Thomas 2007
After graduation, Thomas served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and later became an accounting clerk with the Department of Defense.
Following the 2008 election, Thomas said in an interview that he supported Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Ohio primary and he also liked former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who made a bid for the Republican nomination.
“It would have been a hard decision for me to make if Huckabee was running against Obama,” Thomas added.
Still, he said, he was overjoyed with Obama’s victory.
“This was really the nonviolent revolution,” Thomas said. “We went and cast our ballots and the ballots were counted this time. I’m thinking now we’ve got to do something. I don’t know what. But there are a lot of things Obama ran on, what he’s saying he wants to do.”
Jefferson Thomas Sr. is survived by his wife, Mary; a son Jefferson Jr.; and stepchildren, Frank and Marilyn.
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First Obama, now Deonte Bridges. While others like Ludacris, Lil Wayne and TI were spitting rhymes, committing crimes, and yes doing time, Deonte Bridges was hitting the books at Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School.
Recognized as the first male Valedictorian in a decade, Deonte’s dedication to his education is beginning to pay off.
Soaring high and sometimes emotional about his accomplishment through difficult if not almost impossible times, Deonte Bridges moved the audience with his Valedictorian speech before fellow graduates, faculty, staff and parents at Booker T. Washington High School’s graduation ceremony on May 28, 2010, at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center.
Take a listen to his speech and spread this inspiration to others.
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When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
Less than a month after Arizona’s so-called “Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” made racial profiling the law of the land, Governor Jan Brewer signed a new law that targets Latinos and other minorities, not on the streets but in the classroom. HB 2281 bans ethnic studies in the state’s public and charter schools, an attempt to dissolve the Mexican American Studies Department in the Tuscon Unified School District (TUSD), and a move that puts African American studies, Pan-Asian studies, and Native American studies in the crosshairs. Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a former lawyer who is running for state attorney general, has been waging war against the ethnic studies department for years, describing it as “promoting ethnic chauvinism.”
“It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it,” Horne said this week, even as media outlets reported that Arizona schools are being directed by his office to purge English teachers who speak with an accent.
Sean Arce, Director of the Mexican American Studies Department in Tuscon told AlterNet that the new law is all part of a political agenda that is creating a “toxic environment in Arizona, specifically geared at Latinos.”
“I think [supporters of the law] have really been emboldened by the other anti-Latino, anti-immigrant legislation,” he says, “and, also, I believe Tom Horne is using this as an anti-Latino platform to get elected to the attorney general’s office.”
Arizona’s law, which was partly written by Superintendent Horne, makes it illegal for a school district to provide any classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” and which “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” Arce and his ethnic studies colleagues argue that this is a complete distortion of their program — a program Arce vows will not going away anytime soon.
“We’re going to continue to do what we have been doing, because we know that those four major provisions in the bill are absurd,” he says. “For example, promoting the overthrow of the American government — that’s ridiculous, we don’t do any of those things.” (Indeed, as noted by Politico this week, “neither the governor nor the bill’s supporters have identified examples where a Chicano studies class has advocated the ‘overthrow’ of the federal government.”)
Instead, Arce says, the 12-year-old program has bolstered academic achievement by Latino students, lowered the dropout rate, and enhanced the college matriculation rate.
“Unfortunately, some fear an educated Latino population,” Arce says, because it “translates to a more participatory demographic; a more involved, informed demographic. That translates to possible votes — and a possible shift if power relations that exist here in the state of Arizona.”
Rather than shut down all ethnic studies courses immediately, HB 2281 directs either the Arizona Board of Education or the office of the superintendent to first conduct an investigation to determine whether the curriculum is in violation of the law. “It is a process that the state has to go through,” says Arce. Given the political climate, however, he and his allies are wasting no time. A lawsuit against the measure is in the works “on behalf of parents, students, teaching staff and the community,” he says. In the meantime, students have taken to the streets to raise their voices in opposition to the new law. On Wednesday, 15 people, including four minors, were arrested protesting in front of state offices. “That doesn’t happen very much,” says Arce. “You don’t see kids fighting for their education.”
Some 1,500 students are currently enrolled in the TUSD’s ethnic studies program, which also extends to elementary and middle school students, as partly integrated into their curriculum.
“Don’t Propagandize Kids”
Upon taking office in 2003, Superintendent Tom Horne lamented that “the progressive movement has de-emphasized the teaching of substance,” stressing the need to bolster the teaching of American history. “Our high school students must learn about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Revolutionary War, the ideas on which this country was founded, and the Greco-Roman basis of western civilization,” he said in his inauguration speech, an idea he repeated in a 2007 speech before the conservative Heritage Foundation.
In his speeches and articles, Horne likes to boast that he participated in Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963, citing his favorite line from MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech: that children should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
“That has been a fundamental principal for me my entire life, and ethnic studies teach the opposite,” Horne wrote in 2008, repeating the same anecdote to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Horne believes that ethnic studies is emblematic of a “race obsessed,” “downer philosophy” that teaches students that they are oppressed.
On CNN Horne had the misfortune of appearing alongside the fast-talking scholar Micheal Eric Dyson, who countered that “Martin Luther King Jr. cannot not be used to justify xenophobic and racist passions that are dressed up as desires to reform the curriculum.”
“I would say that the xenophobia and racism is on your side,” Horne responded. See the video above.
When asked by Cooper whether he meant to say that there is “no racism in this country,” Horne replied, “That’s not the predominant atmosphere in America.”
And yet, in many quarters of the country, Arizona is becoming something of a pariah state for its newly reactionary treatment of Latinos. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon estimated this week that a collective boycott of the state could cost Arizona $90 million.
Even amid such continuing national outrage over the anti-immigrant SB 1070, however, Horne insists that Arizona students are being fed a false narrative of racial victimization. “Don’t propagandize kids that they’re oppressed and that they have no future and that they should be angry at their country,” he said. “Teach them that this is the land of opportunity, where if they work hard they can achieve their dreams.”
Horne seems blissfully unaware — or else indifferent — to the contradiction between his insistence that all children should be treated as individuals, regardless of race, and the new laws that are being passed specifically targeting Latinos.
If this can happen to Latinos it can happen to Mexican American Studies Department in the Tuscon Unified School District (TUSD), it can happen to African American studies, Pan-Asian studies, Native American studies, etc any where in the USA. Will you speak out before there is no one else to speak?
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If you’ve recently taken a trip down the beverage aisle in your supermarket, you may have noticed something funky going on with Gatorade. It’s not only that there are plenty of bottles of the sports drink on the shelves, but under the auspices of parent company PepsiCo (PEP), the bottles themselves — labeled merely with the letter “G” — appear to have fallen victim to a questionable and confusing rebranding effort.
Unfortunately, PepsiCo is starting to make rebranding missteps a habit. Last year, it unveiled a rebranding of the Tropicana orange juice brand. The new concept was so hated by consumers that PepsiCo scrapped the redesign and went back to the old packaging. However, the Tropicana failure was a success in one aspect: it deflected attention away from the questionable redesign of Gatorade, which thus far, PepsiCo has refused to abandon.
Instead, the company is charging forward with the campaign, creating new ads and adding to an ever-expanding list of options on the shelves (Let’s see, do I need a Perform 01 or a Recover 03?).
The sports-drink’s woes began a few years ago. As younger, hipper competitors hit the market, Gatorade battled an increasingly stodgy image. Some consumers shifted to products like Glaceau’s VitaminWater brand, while specialty “pro” sports drinks, such as Hammer Nutrition, stole the attentions of some hard-core athletes.
“Inevitably, some of those (Gatorade) consumers have migrated away to other beverages, partly driven by fickle tastes and partly because of the recession,” says John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, a publication tracking the non-alcoholic beverage industry.
After sales volume slipped 1% in 2008, Gatorade began its rebranding efforts. In 2009, it redesigned the drink with “G” as its new symbol. The result? Sales dropped even further. According to Sicher, sales by volume slumped 13% last year. Yet rather than abandoning the new design, as PepsiCo did with Tropicana, it decided to continue to push the new Gatorade look.
As a result, a visit to the supermarket today presents the consumer with several choices for buying Gatorade. Not only must they choose a flavor, but they need to decide which variety they want: Prime 01, Perform 02, Recover 03, each of which is designed for drinking before, during or after an athletic event. The options will become even more expansive once Gatorade rolls out yet another G variety called the “G Series Pro,” a line targeting college and pro athletes that will be available at specialty stores such as GNC and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
In order to explain all of this to consumers, the company released a commercial called “Gatorade Has Evolved.”
So aren’t more choices better? Not always. More options can create paralysis, prompting people to avoid choosing at all, as The Paradox of Choice author Barry Schwartz wrote.
Gatorade says it’s trying to explain the changes to consumers. “As with any new product launch, a key focus of our marketing efforts has been to educate athletes,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email. “The new TV spot is one example, but we also have comprehensive digital, grassroots and PR activities under way as well.” As for the commercial, Gatorade says that while it’s too early to track its impact on sales, there are indications it’s helping consumers understand the brand’s new message.
According to Beverage Digest, Gatorade sales by volume slipped 4% in the first quarter of 2010, which Sicher says indicates a slower rate of decline. PepsiCo executives have been more bullish, with Chief Executive Indra Nooyi noting during the company’s first-quarter conference call that Gatorade has seen a “tremendous volume improvement,” although she didn’t disclose details.
The true verdict likely won’t be in for several more months. In the meantime, Gatorade needs to step up and make it clear to consumers what “G” is all about. “The challenge for PepsiCo is going to be execution,” says Sicher. “They have to explain to consumers what these products are about and how to use them.” And,possibly, why sports drinks need to be so complicated.
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Funeral services for Dr. Dorothy I. Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW),will take place in Washington, D.C. beginning Tuesday, April 27 and end with funeral services at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday, April 29, according to former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, who is overseeing the arrangements. President Barack Obama will deliver the eulogy.
The 98 year old founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement died last Tuesday at Howard University Hospital. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Dr. Heights crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned for more than six decades, and as president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, she was the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership.
Although she never drew the media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time, Ms. Height was often described as the “glue” that held the family of black civil rights leaders together. She did much of her work out of the public spotlight, in quiet meetings and conversations, and she was widely connected at the top levels of power and influence in government and business.
As a civil rights activist, Ms. Height participated in protests in Harlem during the 1930s. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. And in the 1950s, she prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
In a statement issued by the White House, President Obama called Ms. Height “the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans.”
She “devoted her life to those struggling for equality . . . witnessing every march and milestone along the way,” Obama said.
In the turmoil of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, Ms. Height helped orchestrate strategy with movement leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph and John Lewis, who would later serve as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.
In August 1963, Ms. Height was on the platform with King when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women’s rights spoke that day at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month later, at King’s request, she went to Birmingham, Ala., to minister to the families of four black girls who had died in a church bombing linked to the racial strife that had engulfed the city.
“At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there,” Lewis said in 1997 when Ms. Height announced her retirement as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
As a champion of social justice, Ms. Height was best known during the early years of her career for her struggles to overcome racial prejudice.
She was also energetic in her efforts to overcome gender bias, and much of that work predated the women’s rights movement. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Ms. Height was among those invited to the White House to witness the ceremony. She returned to the White House in 1998 for a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of that legislation to hear Clinton urge passage of additional laws aimed at equalizing pay for men and women.
“Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African . . . that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of black people,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women, Ms. Height was instrumental in organizing and sponsoring programs that emphasized self-help and self-reliance.
Those included nutrition, child care, housing and career counseling. In response to a public TV program, “The Vanishing Black Family,” Ms. Height helped create and organize the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which has been held on the Mall and in cities across the country annually since 1985. The gatherings are intended to honor the traditions, strength and history of African American families while seeking solutions to such social problems as teen pregnancy and drug abuse.
“The reunion is as important today as some of our marches were in the past,” Ms. Height said in 1992.
In 1995, Ms. Height was among the few women to speak at the Million Man March on the Mall, which was led by Louis Farrakhan, the chief minister of the Nation of Islam. “I am here because you are here,” she declared. Two years later, at 85, she sat at the podium all day, in the whipping wind and rain, at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia.
Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond on March 24, 1912, and she grew up in Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended racially integrated schools. But she felt the lash of racial bigotry early in her life. A music teacher in her mostly white elementary school appointed her student director of the school chorus, but a new principal forbade her to take that position. At the next school assembly, the chorus refused to stand and sing until Ms. Height was reinstated as leader, and the principal relented.
The principal subsequently became one of her staunchest supporters, Ms. Height recalled in her 2003 memoir, “Open Wide the Freedom Gates.”
As a high school senior and the valedictorian, she won a national oratorical contest, and with it a $1,000 college scholarship. But the college of her choice, Barnard in New York, had already admitted its quota of black students — two. When Ms. Height applied, she was informed that she would have to wait at least a semester before she could enroll.
Instead, she went to New York University, where she graduated in three years and received a master’s degree in educational psychology in her fourth year.
As a young woman, Ms. Height made money through jobs such as ironing entertainer Eddie Cantor’s shirts and proofreading Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World. She went nightclubbing in Harlem with composer W.C. Handy.
Ms. Height began her professional career as a caseworker for the New York City welfare department. She got her start as a civil rights activist through the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and from the pastor’s son, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who later represented Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ms. Height later said that as an officer of the Harlem Christian Youth Council, “I was one of the multitude whose first experience as a civil rights activist was in walking and talking with merchants on 125th Street.”
After attending an international church youth conference in London in the summer of 1937, Ms. Height returned to New York with the conviction that she needed to operate from a broader base than that of a welfare caseworker. She found her opportunity that November at the Harlem branch of the YWCA during a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the Harlem YWCA, was impressed by Ms. Height’s poise and style in greeting the president’s wife, and she promptly offered her a job.
Quitting her job as a welfare caseworker, Ms. Height joined the staff of the Harlem YWCA. She remained a full-time YWCA staffer until 1975, serving the last 18 years simultaneously as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
As a child, she had once been turned away from the Pittsburgh YWCA swimming pool. As a YWCA staff member, she was instrumental in bringing about an interracial charter for Ys in 1946.
In the 1940s, Ms. Height came to Washington as chief of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA branch. She joined the staff of the national YWCA board in 1944, and, until 1975, she remained on that staff with a variety of responsibilities, including leadership training and interracial and ecumenical education.
In 1965, she organized and became the director of the YWCA’s Center for Racial Justice, and she held that position until retiring from the YWCA board in 1975. She was a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work in India, and she directed studies around the world on issues involving human rights.
Ms. Height became national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1947, and she held that position until 1957, when she became the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Over the next four decades, she established a national reputation as a graceful and insistent voice for civil rights and women’s rights. She was tall and stately and spoke in a tone that always commanded attention. She rarely had to raise her voice.
“If the times aren’t ripe, you have to ripen the times,” she liked to say. It was important, she said, to dress well. “I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down.”
Ms. Height never married. She is survived by one sister, Anthanette Height Aldridge of New York.
As the women’s rights movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, Ms. Height forged alliances with white feminist leaders, while disagreeing periodically on matters of tactics and racial emphasis. “African American women have advanced in every field that women have advanced, but the sad point is that those are the few and not the many,” she said.
Under her leadership, the National Council of Negro Women sponsored voter registration drives and organized an education foundation for student activists who interrupted their education to do civil rights work.
Another 1960s program, Wednesdays in Mississippi, was a favorite of Ms. Height’s. It consisted of weekly trips to Mississippi by interracial groups of women to assist at Freedom Schools and voter registration campaigns. This was often perilous work, especially during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when the hundreds of young civil rights volunteers who streamed into Mississippi were routinely harassed, sometimes beaten and, in a few cases, killed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the council helped organize and operate development projects in African countries. It ran a “pig bank” project in rural Mississippi in which pigs were given to poor, hungry families so they could raise them, with the understanding that two pigs from subsequent litters would be put back into the bank for another family.
Over the years, there were fundraising drives for a statue of Bethune and acquisition of a large and imposing headquarters building in downtown Washington to house the National Council and the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute. The building, with white oak woodwork, a marble staircase and fluted cast-iron columns, stands at 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the site of what was once a slave market. For years after stepping down as president of the National Council, Ms. Height made daily visits to her office there, using a walker or a wheelchair as she became infirm.
On her 92nd birthday, she received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest decoration Congress can bestow. But Ms. Height often urged her co-workers to “stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats, and day care and low wages. . . . We must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly.”
For a summary view on Dr. Heights, please click to view video below.
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