![\"\"](\"https://images1-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/i/posts/2019-04-26/share-target.png&resize_w=320&container=focus&refresh=2592000)
\n As many of you know, I’ve been involved in the push for web standards for the better part of two decades. I caught the bug early and have been advocating for their use in pretty much every article, book, talk, and workshop I’ve created. I’ve also had the great pleasure of helping run the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a group whose impact on the web cannot be understated.1 And so, when a handful of my colleagues reached out to see if I’d consider running for the W3C Advisory Board, I was… well… speechless. What an honor it is to be nominated, especially out of the blue like that!
\n\n\n\nYou can read my nomination statement on the W3C site, so I won’t spend a lot of time rehashing that. What I will do is make a brief case for why I think I would be a valuable member of this particular board.
\n\nI’m a web developer whose heart belongs to standards. I may work for Microsoft in Developer Relations, but I started building stuff for the web in 1996 and never stopped. I’ve worked on sites for every kind of business you can imagine—from small mom and pop shops to huge international conglomerates and everything in between. I’ve also held just about every role you can in web projects, from strategist right through to front and back end dev, where the rubber meets the road.
\n\nI think this experience, especially when coupled with my current position at Microsoft—which affords me a lot of time to listen to the challenges faced by the web design and development community—will enable me to bring an “in the trenches” perspective to the W3C. Rachel Andrew provides similar guidance as Fronteers’ representative to the W3C and I relish the opportunity to work with her again2 in this capacity. I honestly wish there were more web designers and developers working within the W3C and my goal is to give voice to their concerns and champion their ideas.
\n\nI’m a diplomat and a pragmatist. Over the years, I’ve participated in varying capacities for a handful of boards and committees. I’ve chaired small town committees (e.g., the Energy Use Task Force in Hamden, Connecticut), been the co-president of a state political party (Green Party of Connecticut), run homeowners associations, and, of course, led the Web Standards Project, to name but a few. In all of these roles—and in my consulting work—I’ve learned how to manage personalities (and politics), set expectations, and get folks to rally together to achieve common goals.
\n\nAnyone who knows me will tell you I am incredibly diplomatic. Perhaps more soo than is warranted sometimes. I believe everyone should be heard, but I’m also unwilling to allow individuals to dominate conversations and drown out other viewpoints. I value diverse opinions and appreciate people who challenge convention. In all interactions, I look for common ground and shared goals. I don’t shy away from uncomfortable conversations and have no problem disagreeing with someone, but I will always do it in a civil and respectful way.
\n\nWhile idealistic—especially when it comes to the web and standards—I’m also a pragmatist. I want to understand problems from multiple angles and use that knowledge to know which battles are worth fighting and when compromise is necessary. And I always seek to build consensus, which is the W3C way.
\n\nI’ve got experience in non-profit work. You may not realize it, but the W3C does not actually exist as a legal entity. It’s currently in the process of changing that and becoming a non-profit corporation. The Advisory Board is overseeing that process. When I lived in Connecticut, I helped form a non-profit corporation. I’ve also got experience in grant writing and other non-profit related work. I think I could be a real asset in that regard.
\n\nIf you can vote in this election and think I’d make a good member of the Advisory Board, please vote for me. If you can’t vote, but know someone who can, please encourage them to read this and consider voting for me. I’d be ever so grateful for your help.
\n\nThank you!
\nMost of the truly impressive and important work was done by the folks who founded the Web Standards Project. I can’t take credit for more than a handful of our activities, but I was honored to have played a bit role in its history. ↩
\nWe worked together in the Web Standard Project. ↩
\nAs many of you know, I’ve been involved in the push for web standards for the better part of two decades. I caught the bug early and have been advocating for their use in pretty much every article, book, talk, and workshop I’ve created. I’ve also had the great pleasure of helping run the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a group whose impact on the web cannot be understated.1 And so, when a handful of my colleagues reached out to see if I’d consider running for the W3C Advisory Board, I was… well… speechless. What an honor it is to be nominated, especially out of the blue like that!
\n\nMost of the truly impressive and important work was done by the folks who founded the Web Standards Project. I can’t take credit for more than a handful of our activities, but I was honored to have played a bit role in its history. ↩
\nProgressive Web Apps are often something we think of as building for others, but while I was redoing the Service Worker implementation on this site—to improve performance for you, dear reader—I decided to throw in a little goody for me as well, in the form of the Share Target.
\n\n\n\nEarly last year, Tim Kadlec shared his bookmarklet for saving links to his site. I thought it was a brilliant setup, especially for a static site:
\n\nSmartly, the form requires you to log in with your GitHub credentials. That keeps it from being abused by others. Sadly, I always struggled to get this setup working fluidly on mobile. With the introduction of the Share Target, it’s become a lot easier.
\n\nYou define a Share Target in your Web App Manifest. The original design only allowed for links and text to be shared, but version 2 is coming soon with support for any file type.1 Pretty cool stuff! As you’d expect, the key is share_target and it takes a JSON object that looks a lot like a form configuration:
\"share_target\": {\n \"action\": \"linky/poo/\",\n \"method\": \"GET\",\n \"enctype\": \"application/x-www-form-urlencoded\",\n \"params\": {\n \"title\": \"title\",\n \"text\": \"body\",\n \"url\": \"url\"\n }\n}\nThe first key is the action page. In this case, it points at my link posting form. I want the shared data passed via the query string, so I’m using GET as the method (but you could use other HTTP request methods as well). I set the encoding (enctype) and then identify the parameters I want to send and what they should be called in the payload.
With this in place, I installed my site on my phone and could immediately share links directly to it:
\n\n\n On the receiving end, everything works pretty well. Android doesn’t support sharing selected text along with the title of the page and the URL (like Tim’s bookmarklet does), but I can always copy the text I want to quote before I share the page. Another oddity in Android is that it currently sends the URL over as the body for some strange reason, but I set the JavaScript up on the resulting page to enable me to look for a URL in that field and pop it into the right spot. That way, when Android fixes the issue, it won’t cause any issues with a true text body (like your text selection—hint, hint).
\n\nAnother nice enhancement I added to the form was autocomplete for the tag field. Using a datalist element, I have all of my site’s tags ready to autocomplete that field. Unfortunately, autocomplete doesn’t work great for multiple items out of the box, so I got some inspiration from this StackOverflow solution and implemented a vanilla JavaScript multiple choice datalist-driven input. Sweet!
While we often think of PWAs as being something we build for others, I’m totally stoked that I can also add PWA functionality that’s just for me (or, more broadly, internally-focused). That’s pretty exciting and demonstrates just how powerful and adaptable PWAs are.
\n\nIncidentally, the Share Target implementation for Universal Windows Apps has supported file type association for a long time now, which is why the Windows Store version of Twitter (which is a PWA) can receive images, videos, and more, right from the File Manager. ↩
\nProgressive Web Apps are often something we think of as building for others, but while I was redoing the Service Worker implementation on this site—to improve performance for you, dear reader—I decided to throw in a little goody for me as well, in the form of the Share Target.
\n", "date_published": "2019-04-26 09:00:39 -0700" }, { "id": "/notebook/introducing-my-2019-mentees", "title": "Introducing my 2019 mentees", "content_html": "Late last year, I opened applications for my 2019 mentorship cohort.. To say I was overwhelmed by the response is a drastic understatement. I got so many awesome applications, that I decided to increase the slots from two to five! In the end, I’m really excited about the folks I’ll be working with this year: Adewale Abati, Olu Niyi-Awosusi, Marcy Sutton, Sara Wegman, and Desirée Zamora García.
\n\nI’ve been working with all five of them for a few months now and wanted to highlight a bit about who they are and what we are working on.
\n\n\n\nAdewale “Ace” Abati hails from Lagos, Nigeria. He and I connected after I presented at Concatenate last year. He’s eager to write, speak, learn, and share, especially when it comes to accessibility. I love the passion and enthusiasm I’m seeing from the dev community in Nigeria right now and Ace is a pure distillation of that.
\n\nOver the course of the next year, we’ll be working on his technical skills (especially accessibility), his technical writing, and his speaking skills. Ace has a lot of energy and I’m excited to be along for the ride.
\n\nOlu is based in London, works for the BBC, and is a champion for accessibility. I love their passion for the web and that they share a ton of what they learn. So far, we’ve focused much of our time discussing diversity & inclusion and their importance in building the web we want. Olu is focused on improving their JavaScript and accessibility chops and is looking to become a better speaker (they are already a great writer). If you’re looking for a really awesome talk on the intersection of accessibility and social justice, hit them up!
\n\nI was so honored when Marcy Sutton reached out to me and asked me to mentor her. I have a ridiculous amount of respect for Marcy and have learned a ton from her over the years. How could I say no‽ Marcy and I will be spending the bulk of our time discussing work/life balance and career advancement. She’s actually based about an hour north of me too, which means we can get together in person every now & then. Bonus!
\n\nI have to admit I fell in love with Sara’s writing immediately. She’s got a way with words and a sincere kindness that just pours from every project she works on. I use her new tab page in Chrome to give me a little pick-me-up several times a day. Together, we’ll be working on career development, leveling up her dev skills, and looking for opportunities for her to share her knowledge. In the short time we’ve been working together, she’s demonstrated incredible commitment, tenacity, and talent. I even brought her onto the editorial team at A List Apart, where she’s already jumped in and proven herself a valuable contributor to that esteemed publication.
\n\nI’ve the great pleasure of working with Dezzie for a while now on A List Apart. She’s incredible—both as a writer and an editor. She’s got strong, well-grounded opinions and knows how to articulate them. She’s also supremely talented when it comes to UX and design, which is unsurprising given her career path thus far. We’re spending our time talking about her career (and our kids).
\n\nLate last year, I opened applications for my 2019 mentorship cohort.. To say I was overwhelmed by the response is a drastic understatement. I got so many awesome applications, that I decided to increase the slots from two to five! In the end, I’m really excited about the folks I’ll be working with this year: Adewale Abati, Olu Niyi-Awosusi, Marcy Sutton, Sara Wegman, and Desirée Zamora García.
\n\nI’ve been working with all five of them for a few months now and wanted to highlight a bit about who they are and what we are working on.
\n", "date_published": "2019-03-11 10:56:49 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/angie-turner-king-invested-her-energy-in-others", "title": "Angie Turner King invested her energy in others", "content_html": "Chances are you’ve never heard the name Angie Turner King, and that’s because, like so many black women, she invested her time and energy in other people. In King’s case, students.
\n\n\n\nBorn in 1905 in West Virginia coal country, Angie Turner King was the granddaughter of slaves. She lost her parents when she was young and went to live with a light-skinned grandmother who verbally abused and degraded her because of her dark skin. She later moved in with her grandfather who, while illiterate himself, insisted she go to school. She graduated form high school in 1919 at the age of 14.
\n\nNot knowing anything about scholarships, King cited tables and did other odd jobs to afford college. She graduated cum laude from West Virginia State in 1927 with a degree in mathematics and chemistry. After graduating, she began teaching, which was one of the few career options for women—especially women of color—in STEM at the time. While teaching high school, she enrolled in Cornell University and worked toward her Masters Degree, which she earned in 1931, over the summers.
\n\nAfter Cornell, she accepted a position at West Virginia State College, teaching at the laboratory school. She focused on getting the labs in shape “so students would know what a real laboratory looks like.” During World War II, she taught chemistry to soldiers as part of the Army Specialized Training Program at the college.
\n\nKing went on to earn her PhD, even after getting married and birthing five daughters. She continued teaching and mentoring young minds. One of those minds was Katherine Johnson, the NASA scientist who cited her as a major influence: “a wonderful teacher – bright, caring, and very rigorous.” Another was entomologist and civil rights advocate Margaret Collins
\n\nTo the best of our knowledge, Angie Turner King only every published two works (her dissertations). She didn’t invent some groundbreaking technology we can’t live without. She didn’t cure a horrible disease. She didn’t do one specific thing we should recognize her for. She did many things. She taught. She mentored. She nurtured. She put her energy into her students and gave them the tools they needed to be successful. She put others before herself and that’s damn admirable.
\n\nFor this reason, I think Angie Turner King is the perfect person on whom to close out this series. So many incredibly important figures have been wiped from history by people who find them threatening. We need to share their stories. And even more never stepped into the limelight (or searchlight) to begin with. We need to discover them and share them too. We need to acknowledge and thank them enough for their activism, their sacrifice, and their commitment to improving this world of ours. We need to remember their names.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/angie-turner-king-invested-her-energy-in-others/", "summary": "Chances are you’ve never heard the name Angie Turner King, and that’s because, like so many black women, she invested her time and energy in other people. In King’s case, students.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-28 16:16:04 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/margaret-collins-used-biology-to-push-for-equality", "title": "Margaret Collins used biology to push for equality", "content_html": "Unless you’re really into bugs, the name Margaret S. Collins may not mean that much to you. She was an entomologist who specialized in the study of termites, publishing prolifically throughout her career. She wasn’t just the “Termite Lady,” though, she was also an advocate for civil rights who pushed for equality through scientific investigation, risking both her life and freedom.
\n\n\n\nCollins was born in 1922 in West Virginia. She was always into bugs and collected them in the woods near her childhood home. At six, she was recognized as a prodigy and was granted access to West Virginia State University’s book collections. She used this opportunity to propel herself forward educationally, skipping two grades and graduating high school at 14. She obtained a Bachelor of Science in biology in 1943 and completed her PhD in Zoology seven years later (at age 28) with a dissertation on termites. At graduation, she became the first female entomologist of color.
\n\nAfter doing a stint as an assistant professor at Howard University, she left because of the inequality she saw between how male and female faculty members were treated. She relocated to Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, Florida. In 1953, she became chair of the Biology department.
\n\nIn the early 1950s, while the civil rights struggles were really beginning to coalesce, Collins realized she could not sit idly by. She began to look for ways to do her part for the cause.
\n\nWhen invited to speak at a predominantly white university nearby, she decided to speak about biology and its implications when it came to discussions of equality. When word got out, someone phoned in a bomb threat and the university canceled her talk.1
\n\nIn 1956, when the president of the Florida A & M Student Council called for a bus boycott in Tallahassee, she volunteered to drive people back and forth to work. When the protest organization got a tip that police and the FBI were going to raid their offices, Collins volunteered to transport the records containing sensitive information like the protestors’ names and addresses to safety. During this time, she recalled being routinely followed by both police and the FBI.
\n\nDuring the period from 1952–1957, Collins didn’t publish a single paper. In the years prior and subsequent to this period, she published at least two. That gives you some idea of how much of a focus her civil rights work had become.She recalled “A lot of people opposed our civil rights efforts. I had to do what I thought was the most important thing. That’s all there was to it.”
\n\nIn 1958, she returned to field work with termites, which was her greatest passion. She continued her research and field work right up until her death in 1996 while researching termites in the Cayman Islands.
\n\nWhat I truly appreciate about Margaret Collins is her focus and drive. She saw work that needed to be done and she stepped up and did it. Even when it terrified her.
\nIt’s worth noting that the bomb threat didn’t stop her from discussing this topic. And she even led an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium entitled “Science and the Question of Human Equality” in 1979. It was turned into a book that was published in 1981. ↩
\nUnless you’re really into bugs, the name Margaret S. Collins may not mean that much to you. She was an entomologist who specialized in the study of termites, publishing prolifically throughout her career. She wasn’t just the “Termite Lady,” though, she was also an advocate for civil rights who pushed for equality through scientific investigation, risking both her life and freedom.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-27 16:53:12 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/katherine-johnson-took-us-to-the-moon-and-back", "title": "Katherine Johnson took us to the moon (and back)", "content_html": "As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve wasn’t all that into space growing up. That said, I remember going to the Kennedy Space Center and watching movies and TV shows about our journeys into space. And I vividly recall the participants being depicted as white men. All of them. But that’s not accurate; there was an entire corps of women who did complex math to make flight (including space flight) possible and safe. And among those women, there was a group of black women who did this work too. Katherine Johnson was chief among them.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve read the book or seen the movie Hidden Figures, you no doubt know who Katherine Johnson is, but I want to share some interesting pieces of her story.
\n\nFirst off, Johnson was born in 1918. Growing up, she showed an incredible gift for mathematics, but she couldn’t attend public school past eighth grade in her West Virginian county because she was black and, well, racism. So her parents arranged for her to attend high school on the campus of West Virginia State College (now University). She enrolled at 10!
\n\nAt 14(!) she graduated high school and enrolled at West Virginia State. She took every math class she could, and when she ran out of those, one of her professors, W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, created new classes for her to take. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937—at the age of 18—with degrees in math and French.
\n\nTwo years later, Katherine Johnson began graduate studies at West Virginia University, becoming the first woman of color to attend the graduate program at the university. In fact, she was one of only three African-American students (and the only woman) selected to integrate the graduate school after Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. She left a year later, after becoming pregnant, to focus on her family.
\n\nThink about how few people of color (let alone women of color) you see in STEM careers today. Now turn the clock back 80 years and you start to get a sense of how hard it was for Katherine Johnson to find any work in mathematics that weren’t teaching positions. However, as luck would have it, she learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA) was hiring mathematicians. She applied and was hired into the Guidance and Navigation Department of NACA, which had a relatively progressive (by today’s standards) hiring policy.
\n\nNACA had a growing pool of women—including black women—who were “computers” that would read data from aircraft black boxes and execute precise mathematical calculations. Despite the progressive hiring policy, NACA segregated its employees and the black women were restricted to their own office and had to eat in their own dining room and use their own toilets. Still, Johnson’s mind and assertiveness enabled her to become part of the previously all-male flight research teams and higher level meetings where there wasn’t a woman in sight. She was matter-of-fact in her assertiveness too, simply telling people she had done the work and she belonged there.
\n\nWhen NACA became NASA, the segregated work environment went away, but discrimination was still pervasive, especially when it came to gender. Johnson recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nWe needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports – no woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with Ted Skopinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston … but Henry Pearson, our supervisor – he was not a fan of women – kept pushing him to finish the report we were working on. Finally, Ted told him, “Katherine should finish the report, she’s done most of the work anyway.” So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something.
\n
At NASA, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shephard’s 1961 space flight. When NASA used computers to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around Earth—the first time they’d used electronic ones rather than human ones—they asked Johnson to verify the result. Glenn apparently refused to go up without her help. In the book Hidden Figures, author Margot Lee Shetterly, also a black woman, nails the irony:
\n\n\n\n\nSo the astronaut who became a hero, looked to this black woman in the still-segregated South at the time as one of the key parts of making sure his mission would be a success.
\n
In addition to verifying their calculations, Johnson worked with computers too. In fact, in many ways she helped build confidence in the burgeoning technology. She calculated Apollo 11’s trajectory to the Moon and it was her work on backup procedures that helped make it possible for Apollo 13 to return safely to Earth.
\n\nI can’t even begin to comprehend the brilliance of Katherine Johnson’s mind. And I am in awe of her, but not just for that… for her perseverance. We are only just starting to recognize, as a society, how much we stand to gain when we work in a diverse and inclusive environment. Imagine how much we might have missed out on had she not been assertive, had she not believed in herself. Her story is yet another in a long line of stories that prove how important it is to give people the opportunity to do their best work. And how important it is to believe in them and encourage them to believe in themselves.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/katherine-johnson-took-us-to-the-moon-and-back/", "summary": "As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve wasn’t all that into space growing up. That said, I remember going to the Kennedy Space Center and watching movies and TV shows about our journeys into space. And I vividly recall the participants being depicted as white men. All of them. But that’s not accurate; there was an entire corps of women who did complex math to make flight (including space flight) possible and safe. And among those women, there was a group of black women who did this work too. Katherine Johnson was chief among them.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-26 12:22:58 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/without-frederick-mckinley-jones-where-would-your-food-be", "title": "Without Frederick McKinley Jones, where would your food be?", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nIt’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.
\n\nAfter 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.
\n\nAround 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.
\n\nBy 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!
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/without-frederick-mckinley-jones-where-would-your-food-be/", "summary": "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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-25 17:01:20 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/amelia-boynton-robinson-agitated-for-the-vote", "title": "Amelia Boynton Robinson agitated for the vote", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nAmelia 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
\n\n\n\n\nThen 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.
\n
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.
\n\nBut 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.
\n\nIn 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
\n\nIn 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.
\n\nAmelia 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.
\nShe got 10% of the vote too! ↩
\nIn 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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-24 16:23:19 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/mark-deans-work-on-the-pc-made-personal-computing-possible", "title": "Mark Dean’s work on the PC made personal computing possible", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nDean 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.
\n\nTo 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.
\n\nDean 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.
\n\nApple 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.
\n\nWhat 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.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/mark-deans-work-on-the-pc-made-personal-computing-possible/", "summary": "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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-23 13:39:27 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/jack-johnson-trolled-for-his-shot-at-equality-and-inspired-future-generations-of-black-athlete-activists", "title": "Jack Johnson “trolled” for his shot at equality and inspired future generations of black athlete activists", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nJack 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.”
\n\nAfter 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.
\n\nJack 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.
\n\nEven 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.
\n\nJames 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.
\n\nAfter 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.
\n\nIf 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.
\n\nOddly, 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.
\n\nDespite 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.
\n\nThey 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.
\n\nAware 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.
\n\nIt’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.
\n\nFor more on Jack Johnson, check out the Ken Burns documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.
\nThey apparently offered him $120,000, which in today’s dollars would be well over $3 million. ↩
\nAs 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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-22 09:33:30 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/mae-jemison-never-gave-up-on-her-dream", "title": "Mae Jemison never gave up on her dream", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nI 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.
\n\nAnyway, 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.
\n\nMae 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.
\n\nWhile 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.
\n\nAfter 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.
\n\nDr. 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.
\n\nDr. 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!
\n\nHere’s to you Dr. Jemison!
\n\nAbout 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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-21 16:17:45 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/baratunde-thurston-tackles-tough-topics-with-deep-humor", "title": "Baratunde Thurston tackles tough topics with “deep humor”", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nAs 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.
\n\nI’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.
\n\nIt started with him recounting a visit to Milwaukee with his fiancée 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.
\n\nThis became a segue into a broader discussion of media narratives and headlines like
\n\n\n\n\nWoman calls police on black family for barbecuing at a lake in Oakland
\n
\n\n\nWhite woman calls police on eight year-old black girl selling water
\n
\n\n\nWhite woman calls cops on black woman waiting for Uber
\n
Thurston began collecting these headlines and realized they all broke down into four critical parts:
\n\nThrough 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:
\n\n\n\n\nPolice surround black children practicing for Fortnite dance competition
\n
\n\n\nWhite woman calls cops on President Obama for trespassing at McCain memorial
\n
Hopefully it’s obvious those are fake, but those were easy. What if the subject and target were reversed?
\n\n\n\n\nBlack woman called police on white man using neighborhood pool
\n
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.”
\n\nThurston 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.
\n\n\n\n\nOne 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.
\n
Thurston then related this all back to the history of lynchings in this country, all of which had similar headlines:
\n\n\n\n\nReverend T. A. Allen was lynched in Hernando, Mississippi,in 1935 for organizing local sharecroppers
\n
\n\n\nOliver Moore was lynched in Edgecomb, North Carolina, 1930 for frightening a white girl
\n
\n\n\nWilliam Lewis was lynched in Tullahoma, Tennessee, in 1891 for being intoxicated
\n
He continued:
\n\n\n\n\nCalifornia 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.
\n
He closed out the talk beautifully by imploring us to make better choices.
\n\n\n\n\nWhite 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.
\n
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.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/baratunde-thurston-tackles-tough-topics-with-deep-humor/", "summary": "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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-20 16:14:13 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/ida-b-wells-shone-light-in-the-darkness", "title": "Ida B. Wells shone light in the darkness", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nIda 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.
\n\nIn 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). The railroad appealed, naturally, and the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision and ordered her to pay the court fees.
\n\nAnd 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.
\n\nIn 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:
\n\n\n\n\nThere 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.
\n
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.
\n\nLater that year, she published 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.
\n\nThree 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.
\n\nDespite 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 for leadership in the civil rights movement. Perhaps it was the fact that she was a woman, but many in the movement 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
\n\nAfter 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).
\n\nShe 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.
\nIn his own autobiography, Du Bois claimed she didn’t want to be included. ↩
\nInvestigative 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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-19 16:31:02 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/lebron-james-converts-power-into-promise", "title": "LeBron James converts power into promise", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nBack 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.
\n\nIn 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.
\n\nThen, 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.
\n\nSo 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.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/lebron-james-converts-power-into-promise/", "summary": "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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-18 14:27:10 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/w-kamau-bell-is-all-about-dialogue", "title": "W. Kamau Bell is all about dialogue", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nThis 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.
\n\nI 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.
\n\nIf 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.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/w-kamau-bell-is-all-about-dialogue/", "summary": "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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-17 10:49:06 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/pauli-murray-dismantled-systems-of-oppression", "title": "Pauli Murray dismantled systems of oppression", "content_html": "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.
\n\n\n\nRace 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.
\n\nBorn 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.
\n\nShe 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.
\n\nMurray 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.
\n\nAfter 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.
\n\nIn 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.
\n\nShortly 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.
\n\nBetween 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.
\n\nIn 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:
\n\n\n\n\nI 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?
\n
I can’t think of a better way to highlight such a ridiculous policy like not admitting women.
\n\nFollowing 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.
\n\nIn 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.
\n\nIn 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.
\n\nAs 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:
\n\n\n\n\nI 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.
\n
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:
\n\n\n\n\nNot 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?
\n
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.
\n\nLater 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.
\n\nIn 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.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/pauli-murray-dismantled-systems-of-oppression/", "summary": "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.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-16 11:43:27 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/lizzo-is-all-about-self-acceptance-and-empowerment", "title": "Lizzo is all about self-acceptance and empowerment", "content_html": "I can’t remember exactly when I discovered Lizzo, but I do remember how refreshing I found her work. A self-professed “big girl with a cute face,” Lizzo is incredibly empowered and comfortable in her own skin. Having struggled with my own body image issues—including dealing with a decent amount of body shaming—I’ve found her ability to find beauty in everyone—including herself—inspirational.
\n\n\n\nLizzo was born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit and grew up in Texas. Growing up, she played flute, listened to gospel, fronted an experimental rock band, and rapped alongside friends in a group called the “Cornrow Clique.” After bouncing around between a few different rap crews and R&B groups in Texas with little success, Lizzo decided to relocate to Minneapolis to focus on music full time. A friend offered her a place to stay and she began performing with an electro soul-pop duo, Lizzo & the Larva Ink, and an all-female rap and R&B group, The Chalice.
\n\nSometimes things happen in unexpected ways. Such was the case when, in the midst of a bout of writer’s block, she discovered Lazerbeak’s album Lava Bangers. Inspired, she began writing lyrics over his music and decided to tweet at him, saying she’d love to work with him. Fast forward a tad and she released Lizzobangers with Lazerbeak on beats and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon producing (no word if she paid him in Mike’s Hard Strawberry Lemonade though).
\n\nIn her solo career, especially, Lizzo has spent a good deal of time at the intersection of gender, race, and politics. Skipping the obvious societal disadvantages of being black, people dismissed her for being a female rapper and people ignored her because she’s not skinny. Rather than letting it hold her back, however, Lizzo seems to harness that oppression as fuel. It seems to have become a source of her power and inspiration for her work. Consider her raw testament that introduces “My Skin”:
\n\n\n\n\nLearning to love yourself and like learning to love your body is like a whole journey that I feel like every person, but more specifically, women, have to go through so I feel like doing this is a good way to kinda break through and kinda seal the last chapter of the “learning to love” and just loving.
\n
The song is, quite literally, about learning to love the color of her skin:
\n\n\n\n\nI woke up in this, I woke up in this
\n
\nIn my skin
\nI can’t wash it away, so you can’t take it from me
\nMy brown skin
I hope Oscar feels the same way as he grows up. I hope I can help him realize how beautiful he is; he certainly hears it a lot from me and Kelly, but he’s only three. I‘m sure he’ll struggle with what it means to be the black child of two white parents, but I wish for him to never doubt his own worth, especially based on the color of his skin.
\n\nIn an interview with Teen Vogue, Lizzo
\n\nrecalled “When I was in high school, I was a big girl with a cute face. So dudes liked me secretly, but they didn’t like me publicly. I never had a boyfriend because they didn’t want to claim me.” Now that she’s a “star,” she doesn’t feel like much has changed. “So now in this industry, I’m a big girl with a cute face and some cute music and I’m still being liked secretly and not claimed publicly.”
\n\nThat said, Lizzo does have a strong following and a lot of supporters. We appreciate her self-assured attitude. She exudes confidence and it’s infectious. “It’s like, ‘She’s comfortable in her own skin. Can I just put on her music and sing along and pretend I’m like that for a second?’ That’s the story I get from a lot of girls,” Lizzo told Billboard. “They say, ‘Thank you for making this body-positive music. Thank you for being a body-positive performer, and thank you for being you.’ That helps me be comfortable. It’s a journey but I’m getting there.”
\n\nOn “Fitness,” she celebrates her curves in her patently cheeky way:
\n\n\n\n\nThink about how I’m gonna feel when I step up on the catwalk
\n
\nThink about how I’m gonna feel when I got that ass that don’t stop
\nThat ass that don’t stop, that ass don’t stop
\nAnd think about how I’m gonna feel when I take it all off
\nBut I don’t do this for you
That last line cuts right through, though, and clearly demonstrates how empowered she truly is: “I don’t do this for you.”
\n\nNot all of Lizzo’s music is about self-acceptance though; it’s also about seeing beauty and value in everyone. I particularly love this verse from “Boys”:
\n\n\n\n\nI like big boys, itty bitty boys
\n
\nMississippi boys, inner city boys
\nI like the pretty boys with the bow tie
\nGet your nails did, let it blow dry
\nI like a big beard, I like a clean face
\nI don’t discriminate, come and get a taste
\nFrom the playboys to the gay boys
\nGo and slay, boys, you my fave boys
Unsurprisingly, Lizzo’s also a champion for other “big” girls. Her dance crew, for instance—“The Big Grrrls”–are all considered “plus size” by American standards. That would cause most folks in the U.S. to write them off as a novelty act, a joke… but damn they can dance. She once told Vogue “I don’t really care about having the number-one album; I care about the influence. … I’d rather have 100K big girls on the field at the Super Bowl dancing, showing the world all we can do.”
\n\nFrom everything I’ve read, Lizzo still struggles—like we all do—with self esteem, but her ability to push through that and be a bold example for how we all should feel about our bodies just blows me away. She’s at once positive, playful, and powerful and I can’t help but feel inspired.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/lizzo-is-all-about-self-acceptance-and-empowerment/", "summary": "I can’t remember exactly when I discovered Lizzo, but I do remember how refreshing I found her work. A self-professed “big girl with a cute face,” Lizzo is incredibly empowered and comfortable in her own skin. Having struggled with my own body image issues—including dealing with a decent amount of body shaming—I’ve found her ability to find beauty in everyone—including herself—inspirational.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-15 14:11:41 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/nina-simone-said-it-when-others-were-afraid-to", "title": "Nina Simone “said it” when others couldn’t", "content_html": "Nina Simone’s performance of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” has long been one of my favorite songs. Her hands slink across the piano keys as her unmistakable voice seems to dance in, out and, around the melody they produce. It’s a joy to listen to and still gives me those this-is-amazing shivers that only the best music does. I don’t recall my first introduction to Nina Simone, but I remember how striking her voice was. And she used that voice to say the things others couldn’t.
\n\n\n\nNina Simone began her professional career in a piano bar in Atlantic City in the mid 1950s and charted her first single—an arrangement of George Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy“—in 1958. As her popularity grew, she began drawing larger, and whiter, audiences.
\n\nIn 1964, she played the renown Carnegie Hall to a mostly white audience and hit them with an ice cold bucket of confrontation entitled “Mississippi Goddam.” The song was a reaction—reportedly penned in under an hour—to two horrific events in 1963: the assassination of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young black girls.
\n\n\n\n\nYes you lied to me all these years
\n
\nYou told me to wash and clean my ears
\nAnd talk real fine just like a lady
\nAnd you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie
\n
\nOh but this whole country is full of lies
\nYou’re all gonna die and die like flies
\nI don’t trust you any more
\nYou keep on saying “Go slow!”
\n“Go slow!”
\n
\nBut that’s just the trouble
\n“Do it slow”
\nDesegregation
\n“Do it slow”
\nMass participation
\n“Do it slow”
\nReunification
\n“Do it slow”
\nDo things gradually
\n“Do it slow”
\nBut bring more tragedy
\n“Do it slow”
\nWhy don’t you see it
\nWhy don’t you feel it
\nI don’t know
\nI don’t know
The song is incendiary and the response was… unsurprising. Radio stations in the South banned it and celebrated smashing the singles (of course, I assume they had to pay for them, so at least there’s that). White people just weren’t (and really still aren’t) used to having to confront their legacy.
\n\nDick Gregory, the comedian and activist, later recalled “If you look at all the suffering black folks went through, not one black man would dare say ‘Mississippi Goddam.’ We all wanted to say it. She said it.”
\n\nAnd “Mississippi Goddam” wasn’t the only protest song Nina Simone would pen. During that same concert series, which was immortalized on Nina Simone in Concert, she also recorded “Old Jim Crow” about the Jim Crow laws prevalent throughout the South. In addition to performing songs as acts of protest, she was also active at civil rights meetings and events like the Selma to Montgomery marches. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr, however, Nina Simone was not against armed combat in the struggle for civil rights.
\n\nSimone went on to pen many more protest and political songs throughout her career, but the other big highlight for me—and another source of those chills—is “Young, Gifted and Black” from her album Black Gold. This one has more of a gospel feel to it, it’s powerful and uplifting and it became an anthem of the Black Power movement.
\n\n\n\n\nYoung, gifted and black
\n
\nWe must begin to tell our young
\nThere’s a world waiting for
\nThis is a quest that’s just begun
Truly the struggle she wrote about in 1969 is still (sadly) ongoing, but she seemed to see a light in the distance. She saw that period as a time to focus on the future, the youth, and on all of the potential that had been locked away with the subjugation of black people. She wanted people to recognize their gifts, their talents and the power.
\n\n\n\n\nOh but my joy of today
\n
\nIs that we can all be proud to say
\nTo be young, gifted and black
\nIs where it’s at
For many, Nina Simone was the musical voice of the civil rights era. She wasn’t afraid to say what others wouldn’t… or couldn’t. Her career in America doubtless suffered because of that, but she did it anyway and I can’t help but respect that.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/nina-simone-said-it-when-others-were-afraid-to/", "summary": "Nina Simone’s performance of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” has long been one of my favorite songs. Her hands slink across the piano keys as her unmistakable voice seems to dance in, out and, around the melody they produce. It’s a joy to listen to and still gives me those this-is-amazing shivers that only the best music does. I don’t recall my first introduction to Nina Simone, but I remember how striking her voice was. And she used that voice to say the things others couldn’t.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-14 15:16:02 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/bayard-rustin-advocated-for-marginalized-people-everywhere", "title": "Bayard Rustin advocated for marginalized people everywhere", "content_html": "During Black History Month, there is, understandably, a great deal of focus placed on the folks who risked their lives (and, in some cases, lost them) in the fight for the civil rights of their fellow Black Americans. Growing up, however, I never heard about Bayard Rustin and his incredible legacy of standing up for marginalized people, both here in the U.S. and abroad.
\n\n\n\nBayard Rustin was born in 1912 and raised by his maternal grandparents in West Chester, PA. He was greatly influenced by his grandmother, a Quaker. As a relatively well-off member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she frequently hosted NAACP leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson in her home. Given his upbringing in this environment, it’s unsurprising that he found a way to wed the pacifism of Quakers with a strong interest in joining the Civil Rights movement.
\n\nRustin’s first political action—a protest against poor cafeteria food—got him expelled from Wilberforce University. Bit by the bug of activism, he completed a training course offered by a Quaker social justice organization and moved to Harlem. While in New York, he became involved in the defense of the nine black “Scottsboro Boys” accused of raping two white women in Alabama.
\n\nIn 1941, Rustin joined A. Philip Randolph and A. J. Muste in the Oval Office to inform President Roosevelt that they would be organizing a march on Washington if he did not desegregate the military and provide fair working opportunities for the black community. Randolph cancelled the march when Roosevelt signed the Fair Employment Act, despite Rustin’s reservations.
\n\nFollowing that, Rustin went to California. Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had ordered the imprisonment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. During their incarceration, Rustin worked and organized for the protection of these Americans’ property.
\n\nIn 1942, Rustin boarded a bus from Louisville, KY to Nashville, TN and sat in the second row in protest of the segregation of interstate travel and the American South’s Jim Crow laws. For this non-violent transgression, he was arrested outside of Nashville and beaten by police. When asked about it later, he recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nAs I was going by the second seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring necktie I was wearing and pulled it, whereupon its mother said, ‘Don’t touch a n*****.’ If I go and sit quietly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so innocent of race relations that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down quietly that it’s going to end up saying, “They like it back there, I’ve never seen anybody protest against it.” I owe it to that child, not only to my own dignity, I owe it to that child, that it should be educated to know that blacks do not want to sit in the back, and therefore I should get arrested, letting all these white people in the bus know that I do not accept that.
\n
This was yet another clear example of Rustin’s commitment to the social justice pacifism of the Quakers.
\n\nThat same year, Rustin became involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a pacifist organization heavily influenced by the writings of Mohandas Gandhi and Krishnalal Shridharani. In 1947, he and CORE co-founder George Houser organized the first of the Freedom Rides to test Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia’s ban on racial discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin was arrested and served 27 days in a chain gang in North Carolina for his participation.
\n\nIn 1948, Rustin travelled to India to learn more about non-violent civil resistance. During this period, he also met with leaders of independence movements from Ghana and Nigeria and, in 1951, founded the Committee to Support South African Resistance.
\n\nBack in the States, Rustin became an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. on Gandhian tactics. King was in the process of planning the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rustin encouraged him to turn it into a non-violent protest rather than relying on guns for protection. Later, Rustin and King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), but Rustin was forced out by other leaders in the community who were concerned with his “morals” (Rustin was gay).
\n\nNot dissuaded by his ouster, Rustin organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Weeks before the march, renown jackass—and segregationist—Strom Thurmond “filled eight pages of the Congressional Record with detailed denunciations of Rustin as a draft-dodging communist homosexual and a convicted ‘sex pervert.’” (Rustin was arrested in Pasadena for lewd conduct—consensual relations with another man in a parked car—in 1953.) Thurmond even tried to paint Rustin’s relationship with King as a homosexual one, which both men denied. Rustin, nevertheless, organized the hell out of the March, despite the fact that many in the civil rights movement didn’t want him associated with it.
\n\nUp until his death in 1987, Bayard Rustin fought—non-violently for the most part, though he did become a little more apt to condone violence in his later years—for anyone he saw as oppressed. Oddly, however, he never saw himself as a member of the struggle for gay rights. That said, Rustin saw a great deal of alignment between the struggle for black equality and the gay rights movement.
\n\nIn 2013, Barack Obama posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bayard Rustin. He called Bayard “an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all” who “fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad.” And he’s right: Bayard Rustin was an extraordinary man whose influence on the civil rights movement was profound, both in its impact and in its pacifism.
\n\nYou can read more about Bayard Rustin at rustin.org.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/bayard-rustin-advocated-for-marginalized-people-everywhere/", "summary": "During Black History Month, there is, understandably, a great deal of focus placed on the folks who risked their lives (and, in some cases, lost them) in the fight for the civil rights of their fellow Black Americans. Growing up, however, I never heard about Bayard Rustin and his incredible legacy of standing up for marginalized people, both here in the U.S. and abroad.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-13 10:54:52 -0800" }, { "id": "/notebook/anna-arnold-hedgeman-was-the-glue-for-the-civil-rights-movement", "title": "Anna Arnold Hedgeman was the glue for the civil rights movement", "content_html": "A few weeks back, Marcy Sutton shared a slide deck by Tanya Reilly with me. The talk was “Being Glue” and it discussed the incredibly important (and shamefully undervalued) role of being the “glue” that holds a team together and makes them successful. That talk was concerned with technical teams, but this role is universal to any organization, collaboration, or project. In many ways, Anna Arnold Hedgeman was glue for the civil rights movement and I don’t think she gets enough credit for it.
\n\n\n\nDuring the Great Depression, Anna worked with New York City’s Department of Welfare, investigating racial issues. Instead of merely investigating and reporting, however, she pushed for the appointment of people from under-represented communities to civil service positions. She used her influence to bolster the visibility of minority populations and helped create employment opportunities for them at the same time. Textbook glue.
\n\nIn the 1940s, she was recruited to lead a national council to lobby for the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). The story of the FEPC is a whole thing, but Anna’s role was connecting the federal effort to improve employment options for blacks and other minorities with numerous local FEPC Councils that were working to bring that same fairness to local and state governments. Sadly, the FEPC wasn’t successful in its ultimate goal, but it did move the needle by helping blacks enter “industries, firms, and occupations that otherwise might have remained closed to them.” And Anna was the glue.
\n\nIn the 1950s, she became the first black woman to be appointed to the mayoral cabinet in New York City. Her role? Liaison between Harlem and City Hall. Glue!
\n\nIn the 1960s, she helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (yes, that March on Washington). She reportedly recruited 40,000 protestant churchmen—all by herself!—and the march is credited with helping pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not one to rest on her laurels, Anna co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a direct reaction to failure of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce Title VII of that very same Civil Rights Act. Glue!
\n\nI could go on, but I think that’s probably enough for you to recognize how many amazing things this one woman accomplished in her lifetime. Throughout her careers as a civil rights leader, politician, writer, and educator, Anna Arnold Hedgeman found ways to bring people together for a common cause. She was the glue for several civil rights movements and her efforts have had a lasting impact on this country. And yet she rarely gets the credit she is most assuredly due.
\n\nNever underestimate the value of someone who is the glue for your team. Thank them for their work and give them the respect they deserve.
\n", "url": "https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/anna-arnold-hedgeman-was-the-glue-for-the-civil-rights-movement/", "summary": "A few weeks back, Marcy Sutton shared a slide deck by Tanya Reilly with me. The talk was “Being Glue” and it discussed the incredibly important (and shamefully undervalued) role of being the “glue” that holds a team together and makes them successful. That talk was concerned with technical teams, but this role is universal to any organization, collaboration, or project. In many ways, Anna Arnold Hedgeman was glue for the civil rights movement and I don’t think she gets enough credit for it.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-12 15:57:12 -0800" } ] }