Your Favorite Hidden Figures From Black History

We Asked for Your Favorite Hidden Figures From Black History. Your Responses Were Powerful.

“We’ve got to do better.”

Ashley Dejean Feb. 28, 2018 2:39 PM

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/we-asked-for-your-favorite-hidden-figures-from-black-history-your-responses-were-powerful/

For Black History Month, we asked you about the figures you’ve been inspired by and to help us highlight important black Americans who have been left out our history books. One of our readers noted that “the list goes on forever” and named the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer as someone under-appreciated in mainstream history.

Hamer became a leading civil rights activist in the deep south after getting involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and attempting to register to vote in 1962. She was blocked after failing a literacy test. These series of events also led to her being fired from her job and driven from her home—she lived on a plantation worked as a sharecropper. But Hamer didn’t give up, despite the hardships and threats to her life she retook the literacy test the following year and passed.

“First she liberated herself by registering to vote, and then she helped to liberate others by spreading that message and recruiting others to register to vote,” explains Carole Boston Weatherford, a New York Times bestselling author who writes about heroes and forgotten struggles for children.

[...]

President Trump bucks the Republican Party on gun control: full transcript

Source: Vox

Trump appeared to enthusiastically endorse several gun control measures in a roundtable with Congress members.
By Rachel Wolfe Feb 28, 2018, 6:10pm EST

President Donald Trump sat down with lawmakers at the White House Wednesday afternoon to discuss gun policy in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida — and Trump appeared to enthusiastically endorse several gun control measures, including a bipartisan gun control bill that failed to pass the Senate during Barack Obama’s presidency.

It was a surprising scene, but it’s not yet clear if Trump’s words will translate into policy. Below is a full rush transcript of the meeting at the White House:

[...]

Read more: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/28/17064540/donald-trump-gun-control-full-transcript-roundtable