Aaron Gustafson's Blog, page 7

Without Frederick McKinley Jones, where would your food be?

You may not think a lot about where your food comes from, but if you shop at a grocer, chances are you food arrives by truck. And if that food is perishable���fruits, veggies, milk���it likely arrived at your grocer on a refrigerated truck. That truck, and so much more, was made possible by Frederick McKinley Jones.

It���s hard to find a ton of detail about Frederick McKinley Jones, but he was born in 1893 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was pretty much an orphan, living in a Catholic rectory, until he quit school at age 11 to work as a cleaning boy. By 14, he was an auto mechanic. He was an avid reader and combined that with his natural mechanical ability to great success.

After returning from service in World War I, and while working full-time as a mechanic, Jones taught himself electronics and built a transmitter for Hallock, Minnesota���s radio station. He also invented a device that would sync audio with motion pictures, which led to him getting a job with Cinema Supplies, Inc. in 1930.

Around 1938, Jones designed a portable air cooling system for trucks. He received a patent on it in 1940. His boss at Cinema Supplies, Joseph A. Numero, sold his business to RCA and joined Jones in forming the U.S. Thermo Control Company, which we now know as Thermo King. By 1949, it was already a $3 million business. Jones��� invention revolutionized food delivery, but it also made it possible to transport life-saving medicine and blood to army hospitals during World War II.

By the time he died, Frederick McKinley Jones has been awarded over 60 patents, which is astounding. Moreover, they aren���t all focused on refrigeration. He designed ticket dispensers, gasoline engines, and even X-ray machines! That���s quite a resume for a black man in America who was born less than 30 years after the Civil War and died four years before the Voting Rights Act was passed. Amazing!

Amelia Boynton Robinson agitated for the vote

In 1965, Amelia Boynton Robinson helped organize the march on Montgomery, Alabama���s capital in protest of segregation and the continued disenfranchisement of blacks. That march turned became known as Bloody Sunday and has been chronicled in numerous books and films, most recently in Selma. For her part in the march, she was beaten unconscious by a member of the Alabama State Police. Undeterred, she marched again two days later, but they didn���t make it to Montgomery. A few weeks later, with an army of 25,000 at her side, she marched all the way to the capital, helping to draw national attention to the disenfranchisement of black citizens and contributing to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Amelia Boynton Robinson is often brought up in the context of these marches, and with good reason. It took a great deal of courage and faith to participate as it meant risking life and limb. And, in truth, I���m sure it was terrifying. In a 2014 interview with he New York Post, Robinson recalled

Then they charged. They came from the right. They came from the left. One [of the troopers] shouted: ���Run!��� I thought, ���Why should I be running?��� Then an officer on horseback hit me across the back of the shoulders and, for a second time, on the back of the neck. I lost consciousness.

According to the article, another officer stood over her unconscious body, ���pumping tear gas into her eyes and mouth from a canister.��� He left her for dead and it���s a miracle she survived.

But Bloody Sunday wasn���t the only time Robinson agitated for change. As a young girl in Savannah, Georgia, she was involved in the women���s suffrage movement. In 1934, at the age of 23, she registered to vote in Selma, Alabama, where she had relocated after taking a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Registering to vote was no easy task for a black person in Alabama, thanks to disenfranchising constitution it passed during reconstruction. The articles of that constitution excluded most blacks from politics right up until the 1960s.

In 1963, when her first husband, Samuel Boynton, died, Robinson began to focus her attention on the civil rights struggles in Selma. Her home and office became a center for strategy sessions, meetings, and a voting rights campaign. Hoping to encourage black registration and voting, she even ran for Congress���a first for a black woman in Alabama and a first for any woman running as a Democrat in Alabama.1

In 1964 and 1965, she worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights. And, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, she helped raise the number of registered black voters in Selma���a town that was 50% black���from 300 to 11,000.

Amelia Boynton Robinson���s courage and commitment to getting (and keeping) the vote for all black Americans is truly awe-inspiring. We���re lucky to have had her in our world.

She got 10% of the vote too!��↩

Mark Dean���s work on the PC made personal computing possible

Mark Dean���s name may not be part of the public consciousness that Jeff Bezos��� or Elon Musk���s is, but they actually owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Without his pioneering work at IBM, their big money-makers���Amazon and PayPal, respectively���might never have existed.

Dean grew up tinkering with machinery, building a tractor with his dad from scratch. An ace student, he graduated top of his class at the University of Tennessee in 1979 and joined IBM the next year. His first major project at IBM: chief engineer on the 12-person team developing the first IBM Personal Computer (PC). He was instrumental to the project and holds 3 of the 9 original patents for the device.

To say the World Wide Web might not have been possible without him may seem like hyperbole, but it was his pioneering work designing the Industry Standard Architecture bus that made it possible to connect other devices to the PC���stuff like printers and modems. No modem, no Internet.

Dean also made laid the groundwork for color monitors and helped create the first gigahertz processor. You may well be wondering Is Mark Dean Santa Claus? Perhaps.

Apple released the iPad in 2010. Dean was working on a tablet in 1999. And not just some Palm-like tablet, but a true tablet in the modern sense of the word. He saw this kind of device as being capable of streaming audio and video, connecting wirelessly to the Internet, making phone calls, recognize handwriting, and communicate verbally with its users. While Dean was certainly not the first to dream up or even build a tablet, his vision was pretty much dead-on a full twenty years before similar devices became widely available.

What an amazing career Mark Dean has had. His story only serves to underscore what���s possible when we embrace diversity and push for people from underrepresented communities to have a seat at the table. We need to do better.

Jack Johnson ���trolled��� for his shot at equality and inspired future generations of black athlete activists

As I���ve mentioned before, I���m not much of a sports guy. And if I���m not much of a sports guy, I���m really not much of a boxing guy; I���ve just never been into watching people beat the crap out of each other. That said, I find Jack Johnson���s story an interesting one, especially for its significance in the time of modern athlete activists like Colin Kaepernick.

Jack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas in 1878. His parents were former slaves working blue collar jobs in that southern port city during the height of Jim Crow. Growing up in a mixed neighborhood that was defined more by poverty than race, Johnson recalled ���As I grew up, the white boys were my friends and my pals. I ate with them, played with them and slept at their homes. Their mothers gave me cookies, and I ate at their tables. No one ever taught me that white men were superior to me.���

After moving around a bit, Johnson took an apprenticeship with a carriage painter named Walter Lewis, who instilled in him a love of boxing. After moving briefly to Manhattan, where he lived with West Indian boxer Joe Walcott, Johnson lost his job exercising horses and returned to Galveston and took a job as janitor at a gym owned by German-born heavyweight fighter Herman Bernau. He saved up the money to buy a pair of gloves sparred whenever he could.

Jack Johnson made his professional boxing debut in 1898 in Galveston. By 1903, Johnson had won at least 50 fights against both white and black contenders. It was that year that he took the title of World Colored Heavyweight Champion from Denver Ed Martin.

Even though Johnson had tussled with white boxers previously���most notably Joe Choynski, who became somewhat of a mentor���there was a gentlemen���s agreement that black boxers would not be allowed to challenge white boxers for titles like Heavyweight Champion of the World. Not willing to accept that, Johnson began spending his own time and money traveling the world to take a ringside seat wherever the current champ was fighting. From the seats, he would troll them mercilessly.

James J. Jeffries refused to fight him, even when Johnson reportedly KO���d Jeffries��� brother Jack and taunted him about it. When Tommy Burns took the title, Johnson set his sights on him, daring him to put his title on the line and step into the ring with him.

After sustaining two years of trolling, both from the ringside and in the press, Burns gave in. The two arranged a title fight in Sydney, Australia because no one in the U.S. or Canada would host it. Fourteen rounds in, Burns was taking such a beating that the police stepped to break up the fight and the referee awarded the title to Johnson.

If you���ve heard the term ���Great White Hope��� before, it actually originated in the racist backlash to Johnson���s victory over Burns. Whites, furious over this revocation of their supremacy, began searching for a ���Great White Hope��� to put Johnson ���back in his place.��� They even coerced Jeffries1 to come out of retirement in 1910, but Johnson didn���t back down and Jeffries was forced to throw in the towel. Race riots���prompted, no doubt, by feelings of jubilation on one side and humiliation on the other���broke out in more than 50 U.S. cities, killing at least twenty people and injuring hundreds more.

Oddly, as World Heavyweight Champion, Johnson stuck to the script and refused to fight fellow black boxers. Allegedly he did so because he could make more money fighting white boxers, but, regardless of the reason, this decision was incredibly offensive to the black community. And when he did finally agree to fight another black boxer in 1913, he didn���t give the title shot to the then-current World Colored Heavyweight Champion Sam Langford. Instead, he agreed to fight Battling Jim Johnson, a lesser boxer who had lost repeatedly to the various black heavyweights who had reigned from the time Jack Johnson earned the world heavyweight title.

Despite his holding of the ���color line��� when it came to boxing, Johnson had no issues crossing it in his private life. He almost exclusively dated white women and married a few of them too. This was hugely irritating to the white institutions of power that just couldn���t seem to keep him down. Add this to the fact that he was also earning a ton of money from his fights, endorsement, etc. and the white establishment became convinced they needed to take him down by any means necessary.

They decided to use the Mann Act���which was written to counter white slavery���against him. There was a clause in the law that prohibited ���transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes���. Since interracial relationships were considered ���immoral,��� Johnson was arrested in 1912 while traveling with his then-girlfriend (and future second wife) Lucille Cameron. When that case fell apart, they arrested him a second time and convinced Belle Schreiber, another woman who he had been involved with for several years, to testify against him. He was convicted by an all-white jury in 1913, despite the fact that the incidents used to convict him predated passage of the Mann Act.

Aware of the motivations behind this move, Johnson skipped bail and fled to Canada by posing as a black baseball player. There, he reunited with Cameron and the two of them set off for France. For the next seven years, they lived in exile in Europe, Mexico, and South America. In 1920, he returned to the U.S. and turned himself in to authorities. He served about 9 months of his sentence in Leavenworth before being released. He was posthumously pardoned for his obviously racially-motivated conviction by President Trump in 2018.

It���s doubtful that Johnson would consider himself part of the resistance or an activist, but his unwillingness to settle for what he was given as a black man in early 20th Century America became an example for future athletes to use their visibility to agitate for change.

For more on Jack Johnson, check out the Ken Burns documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

They apparently offered him $120,000, which in today���s dollars would be well over $3 million.��↩

Mae Jemison never gave up on her dream

About a year ago, I picked up a copy of Mae Among the Stars for Oscar. The book told an abbreviated story of Mae Carol Jemison, the first woman of color in space. The book itself is a little formulaic and simplistic, but so are most children���s books to be honest. But credit where credit���s due, it introduced me to Dr. Mae Jemison, who I hadn���t heard of previously.

I was never much of a ���space��� kid, to be honest. I was a nerd for sure, and into science, but I always gravitated more toward biology than physics, which aligned with my interest in fantasy over science fiction (if that makes sense). All of that is to say that I don���t really remember who America���s astronauts have been beyond Neil Armstrong and John Glenn (and on a good memory day Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride). So I guess it���s not surprising that Dr. Jemison���s wasn���t a name I was familiar with.

Anyway, after picking up this book and reading the mini-bio about Dr. Jemison, I got interested in learning more about her. The book does a good job of demonstrating her childhood passion for science and astronomy, but it totally jumps from her childhood to her being an astronaut, completely skipping over some of her other impressive accomplishments.

Mae Jemison graduated high school in 1973 at 16 (!) and then went to Stamford University, where he received degrees in chemical engineering and African American studies. From there, she went to Cornell to study medicine. She was very interested in international medicine and, while at Cornell, she spent a summer volunteering at a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand. Then she went to Kenya to continue studying. After she graduated from medical school and practicing as a general practitioner in the States, Dr. Jemison joined the Peace Corps as a medical officer and returned to Africa.

While in the Peace Corps, she worked in Sierra Leone and Liberia. There she taught and conducted several research projects in concert with the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, most notably helping to research a hepatitis B vaccine.

After two and a half years in Africa, Dr. Jemison returned to the States and decided to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. She applied to the astronaut program in 1986, but the Challenger explosion delayed selections that year. She re-applied in 1987 and was one of the 15 (of 2,000!) applicants chosen to enter the astronaut training program. Five years later, she became the first woman of color in space, where she (no surprise here) conducted more medical research, including a study of bone cells in zero gravity.

Dr. Mae Jemison���s life has been a pretty interesting one, with lots of twists and turns. It���s hard to find a truly detailed account of her story, but given when she grew up���and the fact that not much has changed in terms of treatment of black women in America since then���I���m certain she���s faced a ridiculous number of obstacles along that path. First, in becoming woman in science���let alone a woman of color in science. Then in becoming a doctor. And finally in her pursuit of becoming an astronaut.

Dr. Jemison���s resilience and persistence is impressive. Her accomplishments have no doubt paved the way for the next generation of women of color who want to claim their rightful place in the world of STEM. Let���s welcome them!

Here���s to you Dr. Jemison!

Minnie Riperton Adventures in Paradise

Baratunde Thurston tackles tough topics with ���deep humor���

I picked up a copy of Baratunde Thurston���s How to Be Black pretty much as soon as it hit the shelves in 2012. I was a huge fan of his work as digital director for The Onion and was really excited to read his take on what it meant to be black in America. The book was brilliant in its concept���part memoir, part satirical self-help book���but also in its execution, which included not only reflections on his own life experiences, but thoughts from others folks like W. Kamau Bell (who I profiled earlier) and damali ayo.

As you���d expect, How to Be Black is incredibly funny. Like tears-running-down-my-face-can���t-stop-myself-from-laughing-or-even-breathe funny. But beneath the humor he tackles a ridiculous number of topics that affect the black community and America as a whole in a way that is completely serious and deep. Topics like the natural segregation that often occurs in majority-white schools, how ridiculous it is that black people are so often expected to speak for the entirety of black humankind, and questioning one���s own black identity.

I���ve seen Thurston use this ���deep humor��� approach to great effect over the years and I was fortunate enough to get to see him speak at a Microsoft event (earlier today, in fact). His talk combined personal stories and humor with an underlying theme of modern day oppression. I was riveted during the talk and didn���t snap any photos of the presentation, but it was recorded���for internal folks only, sorry���so I was able to retrieve perhaps the most compelling part of his talk, which I���ll share with you now.

It started with him recounting a visit to Milwaukee with his fianc��e for Christmas. They had borrowed her parents��� car and were making the trek from their suburban home back to the hotel a few miles away where Thurston and his girlfriend were staying. Out of nowhere, lights started flashing in the windows. It was a police car. I can���t even imagine how he felt in that moment��� a black man driving someone else���s car through a suburb of a highly segregated city. After making his way to a well-lit area and getting his wallet out, he put his hands where the officer would be able to see them and waited to see how everything was going to play out. Waiting to find out if his story would be one of the countless that end badly for black people���men especially���in this country.

This became a segue into a broader discussion of media narratives and headlines like

Woman calls police on black family for barbecuing at a lake in Oakland

White woman calls police on eight year-old black girl selling water

White woman calls cops on black woman waiting for Uber

Thurston began collecting these headlines and realized they all broke down into four critical parts:

A subject
engaging in an action
against a target
engaging in another action

Through this realization, he found that he could diagram each of these headlines and, through that, diagram the white supremacy involved that made the sentence possible. And out of that, he created a game where you have to guess whether the headline was real or fake. Here are a few from the training round:

Police surround black children practicing for Fortnite dance competition

White woman calls cops on President Obama for trespassing at McCain memorial

Hopefully it���s obvious those are fake, but those were easy. What if the subject and target were reversed?

Black woman called police on white man using neighborhood pool

It might be refreshing, but it���s not really progress. Plus, as with the original headline, it���s not really justified. As Thurston said that day ���Reversing the flow of injustice is not justice ��� it feels good to flip the scales, to reverse the direction of the gun, but you���re still holding a gun and the point is to put it down.���

Thurston goes on to dig a little deeper and reveal the common thread throughout all of these headlines: black people existing and some presumed criminality to that existence. From here, Thurston discussed policing, over-policing, and self-policing, wherein the black community���out of an interest in their own safety���has in many ways enslaved themselves in order to put white people���s comfort above their own.

One of the greatest threats in this country is the prioritization of white people���s comfort, and the power to call on potentially deadly force to ensure it. This action, ���calls police,��� is the thing that needs to change in this story. Because these white people are using police to enforce, to clean up, their environment. California Safeway didn���t just call the cops on the Black woman donating to the homeless, they ordered armed, unaccountable men on her. They basically called in a drone strike on a fellow human being doing charitable works. It���s weaponized discomfort.

Thurston then related this all back to the history of lynchings in this country, all of which had similar headlines:

Reverend T. A. Allen was lynched in Hernando, Mississippi,in 1935 for organizing local sharecroppers

Oliver Moore was lynched in Edgecomb, North Carolina, 1930 for frightening a white girl

William Lewis was lynched in Tullahoma, Tennessee, in 1891 for being intoxicated

He continued:

California Safeway doesn���t have to call the cops on that Black woman, they could just thank her. It���s another option. You can choose a different action in the game. ��� The white woman who called the police on an eight year old Black girl selling water, could have ignored her and minded her own damn business.

He closed out the talk beautifully by imploring us to make better choices.

White supremacy has a pattern and a grammar. So does misogyny. So do all systemic forms of power abuse. So what do we do about it? Let���s ask ourselves: Where do I sit in that structure? How can I use my position within that grammar to write a different reality? We can change our story. We have that choice. When we change the story, we change the system. We can choose. We can choose something different.

I truly appreciate how Baratunde Thurston so deftly weaves important lessons and difficult conversations with humor. It���s an incredibly difficult thing to do well as you often run the risk of being too superficial in your critique or of your humor directly undermining the actual point of the conversation in the first place. But he does it brilliantly.

Ida B. Wells shone light in the darkness

Investigative journalists have it rough. First off, it takes a ton of research to uncover the truth. Triple that if the subject is something folks really don���t want you investigating. Then there are the smear campaigns, threats of violence, intimidation, and (in some cases) actual violence committed against these reporters. With that in your head, imagine being Ida B. Wells, a black former slave (and woman) reporting on lynchings throughout the South after Emancipation. Brave doesn���t even begin to describe her.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was born into slavery, but freed under the Emancipation Proclamation. When her parents and brother died from yellow fever, she took a job as a schoolteacher in a black elementary school in Holly Springs, Mississippi in order to support herself and her four siblings. When her paternal grandmother���who had been helping care for the children���and her sister Eugenia also died, she decided to relocate the family to Memphis, Tennessee where the pay was a bit better.

In 1884, Wells had a run-in with a train conductor who ordered her to give up her seat in the first class ladies car and move to an overcrowded smoking car. She refused���as was her right under the Civil Rights Act of 1875���and was dragged from the car by two men and the aforementioned conductor. Pissed as hell, understandably, she wrote about it for a black church weekly called The Living Way and hired a black lawyer in Memphis to help her sue the railroad. When they bought him off, she hired a white attorney and eventually won her case (and $500). They appealed, naturally, and the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision and ordered her to pay the court fees.

And so began Wells��� activism in the form of journalism. While still teaching, she began writing articles attacking Jim Crow laws in The Living Way under the pen name ���lola���. Two years after the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against her, she became editor and co-owner of The Free Speech and Headlight, a black-owned newspaper based out of the Beale Street Baptist Church. Two years after that, her critical articles got her dismissed by the Memphis Board of Education.

In 1892, a good friend of Wells was among a group of black men lynched by a mob of 75 men in masks, prompting her to declare that blacks should leave Memphis:

There is, therefore, only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.

Driven by this horrific event, she began to interview people associated with lynchings, investigative journalist style. One of her first included an interview with a father who had implored a lynch mob to kill the black man who his young white daughter was sleeping with. When she called out the lie that black men rape white women in an editorial, her newspaper office was burned to the ground. Unsurprisingly, she left Memphis.

Later that year, she began publishing a pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Through her investigations, she concluded that Southerners used accusations of rape to mask their fears over black economic progress and competition.

Three years later, in The Red Record, she chronicled the history of lynchings since the Emancipation Proclamation. In it, she proposed that during slavery, whites didn���t commit as many lynchings because slaves were a valuable commodity, but noted that by 1895 ���ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.��� Her 100-page pamphlet included statistics, charts, and graphic accounts of lynchings, much of which was sourced from reporting by white writers in white newspapers. This document, and Southern Horrors, had a far-reaching influence on discussions of lynching, especially in the North, where it was not as familiar an occurrence.

Despite her best efforts, Wells didn���t feel her work was doing enough to affect change and criminalize lynchings. She felt that armed resistance was the only true defense. Fredrick Douglass often praised (and funded) Wells��� work, but upon his death in 1895���and at the height of her notoriety���she wasn���t considered a leader in the black civil rights movement. Perhaps it was the fact that she was a woman, but many also considered her a radical. Case in point, in her autobiography Wells stated that W.E.B. Du Bois deliberately excluded her from the list of the NAACP���s founders.1

After Memphis, Wells settled in Chicago and continued her fight against lynchings. She also continued her investigative work as a journalist, writing on a number of topics including the East St. Louis Race Riots that led to the death of up to 250 black people and left over 6,000 more homeless. She traveled south again to cover the Elaine Race Riot in Arkansas that led to the deaths of as many as 237 black people (and only five white men).

She was heavily involved in women���s suffrage, was placed under surveillance during World War I as a ���race agitator,��� and was instrumental in the effort to block Chicago���s plan to segregate its schools. Ida B. Wells left an incredible legacy when she died in 1931, the ripples of which have touched pretty much every push for civil rights in America.

In his own autobiography, Du Bois claimed she didn���t want to be included.��↩

LeBron James converts power into promise

I���m the first to admit that I really don���t know much about sports. Sure, I know, generally, how most sports are played, but I only recognize a handful of ���sports heroes,��� mainly because I dabbled in collecting sports trading cards in my teens. When it comes to sports, I may live under a rock, but I know who LeBron James is. I also respect the hell out of him. Not because he���s a phenomenal basketball player (which I���m sure he is��� I���ve never seen him play), but because of how he has channeled his power as a cultural icon into making a difference for the children of Akron, Ohio.

Back in 2011, LeBron James started a program in Akron he called ���I Promise.��� The idea was to reach at-risk students and help give them the support and opportunities they need to be successful. They were especially focused on reducing drop-out rates. James was familiar with the struggles of children in Akron because he had his own growing up���he missed 83 days of his fourth grade year���nearly half the school year���due to instability at home.

In 2015, James took things a step further and partnered with the University of Akron to offer a free college education to all I Promise kids who complete the program and meet attendance and grade requirements. Through his foundation, he pledged $41 million to make that happen.

Then, in 2018, he partnered with Akron Public Schools again to launch the I Promise School. It kicked off that fall with third and fourth graders and the school plans to expand to over 1,000 students in grades one through eight by 2022. And upon graduation, the school���s students will also be able to attend the University of Akron free of charge. It���s an ambitious move, but one that will have a lasting impact on the youth of Akron.

So yeah, LeBron James is likely to go down in basketball history as one of the greats��� I don���t think that���s up for debate. But to me, James��� greatest legacy will be as a champion for education and the future promise of kids in Akron.

W. Kamau Bell is all about dialogue

I don���t recall the first time I heard W. Kamau Bell speak. Perhaps it was one of his stand-up specials or maybe it was an interview on the Daily Show or an appearance on Premium Blend, but he immediately made an impression. Throughout his career, he���s never shied away from confronting issues of race, racism, and the systemic oppression of blacks in America, but he���s also used his bully pulpit to start some important, but difficult conversations.

This is no more apparent than on his CNN program United Shades of America. On this show, Bell tackles many of the issues this country struggles with daily���immigration, policing, gun control���while at the same time providing a deeper understanding of all of the different kinds of Americans. Sure, there���s a fair degree of snark that comes out when he���s sitting down with KKK members, but he���s clearly out there listening too. And listening is important, even if you vehemently disagree with someone.

I harbor no delusions that action is incredibly important, especially for large-scale efforts like the fight for civil rights and the dismantling of the institutions that contribute to the continued oppression of people based on their race, religion (or non-religion), gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. Unfortunately, changing how a society operates doesn���t always guide everyone down the road to understanding. That often requires individual interactions. It requires exposure to our differences and highlighting our similarities. It requires conversations. And that���s why I���m glad there are people like W. Kamau Bell who are using the opportunities they are given to bring these important conversations into people���s homes, en masse.

If you haven���t read it yet, I highly recommend picking up Bell���s book The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6��� 4���, African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama���s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian. Or better yet, get the audio book and let him read it to you.

Pauli Murray dismantled systems of oppression

History is filled with people who are notable for one reason or another. Pauli Murray is notable for dozens. Throughout her life, she was told she couldn���t do things, often because she was black or a woman (or both). In pretty much every instance, she pushed back, challenging the cultural norms of her time and notions of what was acceptable.

Race was a complicated subject for Anna Pauline ���Pauli��� Murray, who was born in 1910. On both sides of her family, her lineage included black slaves, white slave owners, Native Americans, Irish, and free black peoples. Her parents identified as black, as did she, but at least one branch of the family���her cousin Maude���s���passed for white and was living in a white neighborhood in New York.

Born in 1910, Pauli Murray lost both of her parents pretty young. Her mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage when she was three. Her father was beaten to death by a white guard at the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland���where he���d been committed after having emotional problems as a result of typhoid fever���when she was 13.

She was raised by her mother���s family in Durham, North Carolina, but moved to New York to finish high school and prepare for college. There, she lived with her cousin Maude���s family. This complicated things a bit with Maude���s white neighbors, who weren���t enthusiastic about someone of at least partial African descent living in their neighborhood.

Murray graduated with honors in 1927 applied to Columbia University. She was rejected because they didn���t admit women, a position they held until the first women received diplomas from Columbia���s undergraduate program in 1987. Unable to afford to attend Barnard College, Columbia���s women-only affiliate, Murray attended Hunter College���a free city university where she was one of only a handful of students of color���and graduated with an English degree.

After spending some time working in a She-She-She camp, where she met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she applied to the University of North Carolina and was rejected because of her race. Not willing to accept the rejection���and the segregation of schools���Murray wrote to everyone from the university president to President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself and released the responses to newspapers in hopes it would force them to reconsider the decision. It looked like the NAACP was going to take on the case, but they backed down at the last minute. Ostensibly, they dropped the case because she���d released their responses to her letters, but some suspect her sexuality played a role as well: Murray was open about having relationships with other women and she liked to wear pants instead of skirts.

In 1940, Murray and her roommate/girlfriend Adelene McBean were traveling from New York to Durham to visit here aunts. They were traveling by bus and, in Virginia, they moved from a set of broken seats in the back of the bus to a non-broken seat further up. In Virginia, however, state law required blacks sit in the back of the bus and the women were asked to return to the back of the bus. In an act of civil disobedience, they refused. The police were called and the women were arrested and jailed. The two were eventually convicted of disorderly conduct���rather than violating segregation laws���and the Workers��� Defense League (WDL) stepped up to pay their fines.

Shortly after they paid her fine, Murray was hired by the WDL. While there, she became involved in advocacy work for Odell Waller, a black sharecropper who was sentenced to death for killing his white landlord. Murray worked to assemble funds for his appeal and even wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt to ask for any assistance she might be able to give Waller. Roosevelt wrote to the Virginia governor on Waller���s behalf and even had her husband, the president, privately request commutation of Waller���s sentence. Sadly, those requests fell on deaf ears and Waller was executed in 1942.

Between her advocacy for Waller and the whole bus incident, Murray was inspired to start a career in civil rights law. She went to Howard University, where she was the only woman in her law school class. To add insult to injury, on her first day of class, one of her professors remarked that he didn���t know why women went to law school to begin with. Infuriated with comments like that, and other forms of sexism at the school, she coined the term ���Jane Crow��� to highlight the unfair oppression.

In 1944, Murray graduated first in her class from Howard. Men attaining that same level of accomplishment were awarded Julius Rosenwald Fellowships for graduate work at Harvard University. At the time, however, Harvard did not accept women���even those with a letter of recommendation from President Roosevelt! Her response to their rejection was perfect:

I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other?

I can���t think of a better way to highlight such a ridiculous policy like not admitting women.

Following her rejection from Harvard, Murray went to the University of California, Berkeley to do post-graduate work. In 1946, after completing her thesis, entitled ���The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment,��� and passing the bar exam, Murray became the first black deputy attorney general in the state of California. That year, the National Council of Negro Women named Murray ���Woman of the Year��� and Mademoiselle followed suit in 1947.

In 1950, Murray published States��� Laws on Race and Color, a critique of state segregation laws throughout the U.S. Thurgood Marshall, who later became a supreme court justice, called her book the ���bible��� of the civil rights movement. In it, Murray argued that civil rights lawyers should directly challenge state segregation laws as unconstitutional, instead of trying to prove that ���separate but equal��� facilities were not equal (as was the then-current norm). Drawing on her approach���which was grounded in psychological and sociological evidence���the NAACP argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, which eventually led to the desegregation of schools.

In 1961, President Kennedy appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, where she advocated that the 14th Amendment applied to gender discrimination as well as racial discrimination.

As the Civil Rights Movement began to pick up steam, Pauli Murray was there too, protesting both racial discrimination and sexism. And she saw a lot of sexism, noting that no women were invited to give a major speech at the 1963 March on Washington nor were they invited to be part of the delegation to the White House. She wrote:

I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grassroots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions. It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader.

She continued to call out ���Jane Crow��� whenever she saw it. In a 1964 speech delivered in Washington, DC, she highlighted the dual struggle of black women:

Not only have they stood ��� with Negro men in every phase of the battle, but they have also continued to stand when their men were destroyed by it. ��� One cannot help asking: would the Negro struggle have come this far without the indomitable determination of its women?

In 1965, she co-authored ���Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII��� with Mary Eastwood. That article discussed how Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied to women. In 1966, she helped co-found the National Organization for Women (NOW) and in 1971, Ruth Bader Ginsburg���yes, that RBG���added Pauli Murray and Dorothy Kenyon as authors on her brief for Reed v. Reed, the case that extended the Fourteenth Amendment���s Equal Protection Clause to women.

Later in her life, Murray taught law at Brandeis University, where she also taught the first classes on African American studies and women���s studies in that university���s history. Then she left academia to go to seminary and, in 1977, she became the first African-American woman���and one of the first women, period���to be ordained in the Episcopal church.

In her 75 years, Pauli Murray was a trailblazer on so many fronts. She was fearless, outspoken, and committed to removing barriers and dismantling the systems of oppression in the United States. Her story is an amazing one that I won���t forget.