In 1992 – White South Africans voted for constitutional reforms that would give legal equality to blacks.
– Apartheid was formally ended in 1994 but … well you know
Monthly Archives: March 2024
El Centro de la Raza
Women’s History Month
Los 12 principios de El Centro de la Raza
Our Mission
As an organization grounded in the Latino community of Washington State, it is the mission of El Centro de la Raza (The Center for People of All Races) to build the Beloved Community through unifying all racial and economic sectors; to organize, empower, and defend the basic human rights of our most vulnerable and marginalized populations; and to bring critical consciousness, justice, dignity, and equity to all the peoples of the world.
Our Vision
We envision a world free of oppression based on poverty, racism, sexism, sexual orientation, and discrimination of any kind that limits equal access to the resources that ensure a healthy and productive life in peace, love and harmony for all peoples and our future generations.
Our 12 Principles
The following are the twelve Principles that El Centro de la Raza “Familia” adopted in the fall of 1976, four years into our existence. It was a defining moment in our organization’s history for it clarified what we were determined to become as a new and innovative organization born out of the violent worldwide struggle to create a better world.
In essence these twelve principles become our “constitution” and have been critical in guiding us through the agony and ecstasy of our 37 years. They were adopted during a weekend statewide conference of students, farmworkers, academics, women, unemployed and organizers from Chicano/Latino, Black, Indian, Asian and White communities.
A special “Gracias” is reserved for the leadership of the exiled Chilean community for their extraordinary clarity and political maturity reflected in these principles:
1. To share, disburse, and distribute our services, resources, knowledge and skills to our participants, community, visitors and broader human family with all due dignity for their individuality needs and condition. To do so creatively with warmth, cultural sensitivity, fairness, enthusiasm, compassion, honesty and optimism in all areas of work.
2. To struggle to eliminate institutionalized racial, sexual, age and economic forms of discrimination which hamper the human potential in our society.
3. To support the majority of people in this country; i.e., all workers — including, but not limited to farm workers, factory workers, service workers and office workers in their struggle for collective bargaining rights, safety, benefits and just wages and salaries.
4. To promote the recapture of the culture, language and respect for the Chicano/ Mexicano/Latino community as a priority in all of our work, without falling into ethnocentrism; to strengthen and help the struggle to recapture the cultures of our sister communities.
5. To promote strong and positive working relationships with other minority communities in all areas of work, service, political and social activities.
6. To provide a collective, healthy, safe and friendly workplace for members of our community and all participants in our sphere of influence.
7. To struggle against all forms of racism, sexism, individualism, ageism, and violence in our work and our community center.
8. To struggle for the creation of programs and services which a society must provide for the development of our community and its people.
9. To struggle for a clean, safe, and nuclear waste-free environment for our people and future generations. To work for a rational use of natural resources in the interests of the preservation of Mother Earth and the peaceful development of humankind.
10. To support the rights of self-determination of Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos, as well as our brothers and sisters in developing countries around the world. To promote the development of foreign policy by our government which puts into practice principles of sovereignty, justice, democracy, self- determination, international respect, and above all, peace with dignity.
11. To strengthen the family as an elementary formation of society which contributes to the development of society as a whole. To help each other and our community fulfill roles as parents, spouses, sisters, brothers, and children, based on the absolute equality of men and women. To respect and recognize the rights of children as full and privileged members of our society. To strengthen the extended family relations. To develop programs which fulfill our obligation as family members of the larger society to bring up the future generations with clear vision that leads us to recover our fighting spirit. To struggle to ensure that family life is nourished and respected. To protect the rights of women and children to live their lives free from any form of abuse: physical, psychological, or sexual.
12. To struggle for a dignified human existence for all people in our society; for health care, housing, and full employment in equal educational opportunity, democratic processes in political and social affairs, and an equitable economic system that eliminates the great differences in income which are the cause of poverty and deprivation.
Source: elcentrodelaraza.org
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1883 “Ladies Home Journal” begins publishing in the US
Sep 15, 1963: Four black schoolgirls killed in Birmingham ~ Women’s and Black History Month
On this day in 1963, a bomb explodes during Sunday morning services in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls.
With its large African-American congregation, the 16th Street Baptist Church served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who once called Birmingham a “symbol of hardcore resistance to integration.” Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, made preserving racial segregation one of the central goals of his administration, and Birmingham had one of the most violent and lawless chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
The church bombing was the third in Birmingham in 11 days after a federal order came down to integrate Alabama’s school system. Fifteen sticks of dynamite were planted in the church basement, underneath what turned out to be the girls’ restroom. The bomb detonated at 10:19 a.m., killing Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins–all 14 years old–and 11-year-old Denise McNair. Immediately after the blast, church members wandered dazed and bloodied, covered with white powder and broken stained glass, before starting to dig in the rubble to search for survivors. More than 20 other members of the congregation were injured in the blast.
When thousands of angry black protesters assembled at the crime scene, Wallace sent hundreds of police and state troopers to the area to break up the crowd. Two young black men were killed that night, one by police and another by racist thugs. Meanwhile, public outrage over the bombing continued to grow, drawing international attention to Birmingham. At a funeral for three of the girls (one’s family preferred a separate, private service), King addressed more than 8,000 mourners.
A well-known Klan member, Robert Chambliss, was charged with murder and with buying 122 sticks of dynamite. In October 1963, Chambliss was cleared of the murder charge and received a six-month jail sentence and a $100 fine for the dynamite. Although a subsequent FBI investigation identified three other men–Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Cash and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr.–as having helped Chambliss commit the crime, it was later revealed that FBI chairman J. Edgar Hoover blocked their prosecution and shut down the investigation without filing charges in 1968. After Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, Chambliss was convicted in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison.
Efforts to prosecute the other three men believed responsible for the bombing continued for decades. Though Cash died in 1994, Cherry and Blanton were arrested and charged with four counts of murder in 2000. Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Cherry’s trial was delayed after judges ruled he was mentally incompetent to stand trial. This decision was later reversed. On May 22, 2002, Cherry was convicted and sentenced to life, bringing a long-awaited victory to the friends and families of the four young victims.
history.com
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44 Women Who Have Run for President
Women Presidential Candidates
Women Who Ran for President
Who were the early women candidates for president? Hillary Clinton in her 2008 run for the Democratic nomination for US President came the closest so far that any woman has come to winning the nomination of a major political party in the United States. But Clinton is not the first woman to run for United States President, and not even the first to run for a major party’s nomination. Here’s a list of the female presidential candidates, arranged chronologically by each woman’s first campaign for the office. The list is current through the 2012 election; women running in 2016 will be added after that election’s over.
Who was the first woman to run for president?
What woman ran for US president first? And which women have run since?
Victoria Woodhull
Equal Rights Party: 1872
Humanitarian Party: 1892
Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president in the United States. Frederick Douglass was nominated as Vice President, but there’s no record that he accepted. Woodhull was also known for her radicalism as a woman suffrage activist and her role in a sex scandal involving noted preacher of the time, Henry Ward Beecher. More »
Belva Lockwood
National Equal Rights Party: 1884, 1888Belva Lockwood, an activist for voting rights for women and for African Americans, was also one of the earliest women lawyers in the United States. Her campaign for president in 1884 was the first full-scale national campaign of a woman running for president. More »
Laura Clay
Democratic Party, 1920Laura Clay, a Southern women’s rights advocate who supported state suffrage amendments so that the Southern states could limit suffrage to white women, had her name placed in nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, to which she was a delegate. More »
Grace Allen
Surprise Party: 1940Comedian and actress, partner with husband George Burns on the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Grace Allen ran for president in 1940 as a publicity stunt. She was not on the ballot — it was, after all, a stunt — but she did get write-in votes.
Margaret Chase Smith
Republican Party: 1964She was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for president at a major political party’s convention. She was also the first woman elected to serve in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. More »
Charlene Mitchell
Communist Party: 1968Nominated by the (tiny) Communist Party in 1968, Charlene Mitchell was the first African American woman nominated for president in the United States. She was on the ballot in two states in the general election, and received less than 1,100 votes nationally.
Shirley Chisholm
Democratic Party: 1972A civil rights and women’s rights advocate, Shirley Chisholm ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972 with the slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed.” Her name was placed in nomination at the 1972 convention, and she won 152 delegates. More »
Patsy Takemoto Mink
Democratic Party: 1972She was the first Asian American to seek nomination as president by a major political party. She was on the Oregon primary ballot in 1972. She was at that time a member of the U.S. Congress, elected from Hawaii.
Bella Abzug
Democratic Party: 1972One of three women to seek the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1972, Abzug was at the time a member of Congress from the West Side of Manhattan. More »
Linda Osteen Jenness
Socialist Workers Party: 1972Underage for the Constitution’s requirements for the presidency, Linda Jenness ran against Nixon in 1972 and was on the ballot in 25 states. In three states where Jenness was not accepted for the ballot because of her age, Evelyn Reed was in the presidential slot. Their vote total was less than 70,000 nationally.
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