...there are squirrels in my head...

In Montgomery, Alabama, 42 year old seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.

"In the South, public buses were still segregated. This meant that the first four rows of the buses were reserved only for whites. The "colored" sections were at the very back of the bus. The sections were marked by moveable signs that the driver was free to move at any time to accommodate more or less white people. If whites boarded the bus and there was no room, blacks were forced to move, stand or leave the bus. They were not allowed to sit directly across the aisle from a white person. Blacks were forced to board the bus from the back to avoid walking past a white person on the front of the bus. At times, a black person would pay the driver and walk to the back of the bus, but the bus would depart before they could get to the door, leaving them standing on the roadside." - http://www.rosaparksfacts.com

This wasn't the first time Rosa had run into such trouble. In 1943, she was forced off a bus for sitting in the wrong section of a bus. She was an activist, a member of NAACP, a registered voter, a high school graduate, and a defender of the "Scottsboro Boys," a group of black men falsely accused of raping two white women.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa boarded a bus and sat in the first row behind the section reserved for white people. When the bus became fuller and there were 3 white people standing, the bus driver demanded 4 black passengers relinquish their seats.

Rosa refused, choosing instead to simply move over.

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move. Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it." - Rosa Parks

She was arrested, though she had not broken the law.

"It is important to note here that in 1900, the city of Montgomery, Alabama had passed a city ordinance that allowed drivers to segregate their passengers by race. If necessary, they could assign specific seats. The law, however, stated that no passengers were to be forced to give up a seat or stand should the bus become too crowded." - http://www.rosaparksfacts.com



Rosa was not the first person to refuse to give up her seat. Her actions, though, sparked a bus boycott, and she became an international symbol of resistance to racial segregation.

"You must be the change you want to see in the world." - Gandhi

Thank you, Miss Rosa.
(And thanks for the reminder, hughcasey!)

Rosa Parks Facts

My mother sent me an email today about Irena Sendler.

Haven't heard of her? Not a surprise. Indeed, it wasn't until four high school students in Kansas decided, in 1999, to enter the National History Day program that Irena's story rose from obscurity to worldwide notice.

Born in Otwock, Poland in 1910, Irena lost her father when she was 7. He was a doctor whose patients were mostly poor Jews, and he died of typhus contracted from his patients. Reportedly the only doctor willing to treat these people, his dying words to his daughter were: "If you see someone drowning, you must jump in and try to save them, even if you don't know how to swim." Irena took this to heart, which caused her to be suspended from Warsaw University for three years in the 1930's when she protested the segregation of Jewish students in the classroom by crossing over and sitting on the 'wrong' side of the room.

Irena took a job with the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, eventually rising to the position of senior administrator. Having a position of power within an organization that ran soup kitchens and provided financial assistance to the needy throughout Warsaw put her in a unique position to help Jewish families when, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland. She and her helpers risked death by creating over 3,000 forged documents creating Christian identies for Jewish families so they could receive medical and financial assistance.

As we know, things only continued to get worse in Poland. In 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was created, putting roughly 400,000-450,000 people within an 18 block radius of the city. Contagious diseases such as typhus helped keep the population at roughly the same number no matter how many newcomers were added to the sealed community.

The Zegota (Council to Aid Jews) was formed in December 1942. Because Irena was allowed access via her job with the welfare department to access the ghetto, she was nominated to head up the child's division of this new secret organization. She accepted the position, and for the next year she and about a dozen helpers rescued 2500 children from the Warsaw ghetto, smuggling them into private homes, orphanages, and a convent outside the ghetto walls. Kids were snuck out in toolboxes, body bags, sacks, sewers, and more. The children were adopted by other families with the promise and understanding that, when possible, the kids would be returned to their families after the war.

Sadly, heartbreakingly, in many cases this was not possible as there were so few survivors. Most of the parents died at the Treblinka death camp.

Irena kept careful track of all the childrens' names - true as well as adopted/false names - in coded lists that she hid within jars and buried in a neighbor's backyard.

In 1943, the perhaps inevitable happened: Irena was arrested by the Gestapo. Questioned and tortured, she had her feet and legs broken so badly that she would need crutches and/or a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She never betrayed her co-conspirators, nor did she give the Germans information about the children.

She was sentenced to death.

However, the Zegota bribed her would-be-executioner, who allowed her to escape. Irena went into hiding for the rest of the war, still continuing to try to help the Jews when and if she could.

After the war was over, Irena used her secret lists to try to reunite children with their families. She was persecuted by the Communists when Poland fell under Soviet rule and put into jail. After her release, she continued on as a social worker, largely forgotten by history, with the exception of being honoured by Yad Vashem as a 'Righteous Gentile' in 1965, which was confirmed by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1983.

...And then four teenagers in Kentucky found mention of her in a news article and decided to make her the focus of their research project.

Part of their effort involved the writing of a play, "Life in a Jar," (Check the website for info about when and where to catch the production.) as well as trips to Poland to interview Irena, who had this to say:

"I was stunned and fascinated; very, very suprised; interested." In one of Irena's first letters to the girls, she wrote, "My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me.... I can't find the words to thank you, my dear girls.... Before the day you have written the play "Life in a Jar" -- nobody in my own country and in the whole world cared about my person and my work during the war ..."

It is because of the work done by these high school students that the world was made aware of the remarkable work and bravery of this remarkable woman.


"Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal."

"After the Second World War it seemed that humanity understood something, and that nothing like that would happen again. Humanity has understood nothing. Religious, tribal, national wars continue. The world continues to be in a sea of blood. The world can be better, if there's love, tolerance, and humility."

http://www.irenasendler.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler
http://www.auschwitz.dk/Sendler.htm
http://richards-creations.net/Pages/8/_Irena-s_Children.html
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler

(Thank you, Mom, for telling me about this incredible woman!)

I would like to introduce you to a rather remarkable woman.

Her name is Meena.



Meena was born in Afghanistan in 1956. Today, we think of Afghanistan and the Middle East and we think of repression and terrorism. We think of the Taliban. That isn't the way life has always been, though sometimes that's hard to believe. Meena grew up in a country swept by a desire for change. She, like so many other young women, went to university; and it was during her years at college that she became an activist, as she learned to dream of a world where poverty and corrupt politics could be overcome.
( Read more... )

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/pharangula/1899544.html

Click and read the links inside the post.

This is perhaps equally as horrible as forced sterilization.

Never heard of that bit of history? It happened all over the world. Including the US.

The United States was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics. The heads of the program were avid believers in eugenics and frequently argued for their program. They were devastated when it was shut down due to ethical problems. The principal targets of the American program were the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, but also targeted under many state laws were the deaf, the blind, people with epilepsy, and the physically deformed. Native Americans, as well as Afro-American women,[16] were sterilized against their will in many states, often without their knowledge, while they were in a hospital for other reasons (e.g. childbirth).

(Thank you, 0ccam, for the first link!)

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/328621.html

This is the story of Interesującą Kobietę, a woman that history says didn't exist.

(ETA: Yes, the post starts off talking about Harry Potter role-playing. Keep reading.)

A few days ago, my mother posted an entry in her LJ about suffragist leader Alice Paul.

The entry is, frankly, shocking, and hard to believe.

In a nutshell, her participation and leadership in protests resulted in her and a score of other women being incarcerated and treated in ways that one would assume could not happen in America. The abuse these women received in jail, after being arrested for nonviolent protests, included filthy living conditions, being fed worm-ridden food, and being violently attacked by the prison guards in an incident that came to be known as The Night of Terror, when 40 guards were instructed to these 33 already-jailed protesters a particularly violent lesson.

It's a horrible bit of history to learn.

It's terrifying to read that Alice's decision to go on a hunger strike resulted in tube-feedings of liquid and maggot-ridden food; that our then-President, Woodrow Wilson, pushed to have her declared insane, in an effort to discredit her. This is documented in HBO's movie "Iron Jawed Angels." The doctor asked to declare Alice insane responded, Alice Paul was strongand brave. That didn't make her crazy, and to say, "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."

...Shared because I think it's important. Terrifying, but important.