O IS FOR ORGANIZE!

 

In October of 1966, this is what organizing looked like.  Take a look back with us to see how the National Organization for Women was founded.

 

 

Events Leading Up to the Creation of NOW:

 

 

1961-1963: President's Commission on the Status of Women
1963: Publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Civil Rights Act of 1964: outlawed sex discrimination, yet many women felt that there was little or no enforcement

1966, June: Washington, DC, meeting of state commissions on the status of women. Betty Friedan and others present were unsatisfied with the lack of action plans coming out of this meeting, and 28 met in Friedan's hotel room, leading to the creation of the National Organization for Women (NOW).


NOW Founded:

In several informal meetings followed by a national conference, a number of activists came together to form the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, seeing the need for a civil rights organization specifically focused on women's rights. Betty Friedan was elected the first president of NOW and served in that office for three years.


The National Organization for Women (NOW) held its organizing conference in October 1966, where the founding presidency was elected. Who were the first NOW officers? Some of the original members of NOW came from the Civil Rights Movement, and many of the important feminist organization’s co-founders had been actively working for women’s equality for years. These five leaders were the first NOW officers:

1. President: Betty Friedan

The legendary feminist Betty Friedan brought together activists from many areas and wrote the NOW Statement of Purpose.









 

 
2. Chair of the Board: Kay Clarenbach

A strong organizer from Wisconsin, Kay Clarenbach spoke about how far women still had to go to reach equality.















3. Executive Vice-President: Aileen Hernandez

Aileen Hernandez was elected in absentia; she was about to leave her position at the EEOC.











4. Vice-President: Richard Graham

Richard Graham was a feminist and a dedicated public servant.









5. Secretary-Treasurer: Caroline Davis

Caroline Davis was a labor leader who headed the UAW Women’s Department .













NOW Statement of Purpose 1966: Key Points:
 
-women's rights as "truly equal partnership with men," "fully equal partnership of the  sexes"
-focused on activism: "confront, with concrete action, the conditions that now prevent women from enjoying the equality of opportunity and freedom of choice which is their right as individual Americans, as human beings"

-women's rights seen in the context of "the world-wide revolution of human rights"; equality of women as an opportunity to "develop their fullest human potentials"

-purpose to put women in the "mainstream of American political, economic and social life"

-NOW's commitment "equality, freedom, and dignity for women" specifically defined as not being about "special privilege" for women or "enmity towards men"


Key Feminist Issues in Statement of Purpose:
   -employment -- the most attention in the document is to issues around employment and  economics

-education

-family including marriage and divorce laws, home responsibilities by gender role

-political participation: in parties, decision-making, candidates (NOW was to be independent of any particular political party)

-images of women in the media, in culture, in laws, in social practices

-briefly addressed issue of "double discrimination" of African American women, linked women's rights to broader issues of social justice including racial justice                      -opposition to "protectiveness" in work, school, church, etc.




NOW set up task forces on issues of women’s equality. The seven original NOW task forces were:

1. Education

Education was one of the most important issues for the founders of NOW.


2. Equal Opportunity of Employment

This issue was central to the creation of NOW.

　

3. Legal and Political Rights

NOW has been at the forefront of many legal battles.

　

4. Women in Poverty

Members of NOW wanted to address the economic concerns of women.

　

5. Family

Family concerns have always been a part of feminism.

　

6. The Image of Women

Feminists paid a lot of attention to media portrayal of women.

　

7. Women and Religion

Several theologians took part in NOW and contributed to feminist theory.

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/feminism/tp/The-Seven-Original-Now-Task-Forces.htm

 

~MORE~

 

 

                                          Honoring NOW's Founders and Pioneers

                                           http://www.now.org/history/founders.html

 

 

AI-JEN POO

 

Ai-jen Poo is currently the Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance – an organization that works to empower and organize domestic workers across 19 cities and 11 states. Ai-jen knows this work is needed, "domestic workers are explicitly excluded from almost every major labor law."

As a student at Columbia University, Ai-jen Poo became outraged by the stories of domestic workers, often immigrant women, who had little recourse when they labored for long hours, in less than favorable conditions. Her gift for organizing worker-led movements has made the National Domestic Workers Alliance a powerful movement, whose policy initiatives and lobbying has led to New York State’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights (with California following), and the expansion of labor laws federally to protect 2.5 million home-care workers. Ai-jen Poo was recently recognized by Time Magazine as one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World."

 

 

 

                       "Women are going to have to lead the way."

 

                  "It feels like we are making history everyday and
                                              that feels great!"

From an interview with Bill Moyers;

BILL MOYERS: You have been doing this a long time now, I know. And you're not even 40 yet. How did you get started as organizers?

AI-JEN POO: I also come from a long line of strong women. My grandmother and my mother were both really influential on me. They're both incredible, caring women who lived a life of service and who raised children. And did both caregiving work and their work in taking care of other people. And still do with a lot of dignity. And it just inspired me.

And I think I also noticed that a lot of the work that they did in the home was not recognized and adequately valued. And I don't recall my mother ever sitting down as a child. She was always working in some way, one way or another. And I think it's a difficult situation that American families are in. Where we're in isolation, dealing with how we're going to take care of our kids. And how are we going to take care of our parents? And I think that for future generations, it should be different.

BILL MOYERS: You have to be tough to be an organizer. You've got to be willing to wear brass knuckles and have sharp elbows, right?

AI-JEN POO: It's true. It is true.

BILL MOYERS: Come on, confess.

BILL MOYERS: What's the secret?

AI-JEN POO: I will say that even with all the brass knuckles and the times when you have to be tough that we still find that the most powerful force for change in the world is still love.

BILL MOYERS: Love?

AI-JEN POO: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: Don't tell me that you won the Albany legislature, one of the swamps of American--

AI-JEN POO: We absolutely did.

BILL MOYERS: --politics over with love? Come on now.

AI-JEN POO: We absolutely did.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, come on, come on.

AI-JEN POO: Absolutely. One of our most effective actions was this children and families march for the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. And it was children of domestic workers together with the children that they take care of, holding signs. "Respect my mommy." "Respect my nanny." And the love and the connection between the children that they take care of and their own children and the employers who really appreciate the service of domestic workers in their home. All of that love and connection was an incredibly powerful force for change.

BILL MOYERS: Those signs and those people who took part in that march, they were very persuasive. They were very impressive. But you don't get legislation passed in Albany, seriously, just by that. What else did you have to do? Did you have to threaten legislators with protests-- withholding your support for them in an election? That sort of thing?

AI-JEN POO: It takes good old-fashioned organizing. It takes bringing people together around common goals, with a plan. When everyday people take action from a place of love and a place of dignity and courage, it's incredibly powerful. So whether that looks like marches or whether that looks like going to the polls and voting. Or that looks like telling your story in legislative offices, year after year after year. It's power. Because people are driving it. And they're committed to it. And they, you know, that's the formula, is really people coming together.

         "Love is the most powerful force for change in the world     
                      and that is a big part of our organizing."

ORGANIZING WITH LOVE: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign
Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible. Like great love affairs, great campaigns provide us with an opportunity for transformation. They connect us to our deeper purpose and to the commonalities we share, even in the face of tremendous differences. They highlight our interdependence, and they help us to see the potential that our relationships have to create real change in our lives and in the world around us.

We learned crucial lessons about personal and social transformation in the process of this campaign. In particular, we learned that the historical assumption on which a great deal of organizing models are based – that we need to build our organizing campaigns based on people’s material self-interests – is not the whole story. Domestic Workers United led a campaign that mobilized many different communities of people based on an expanded sense of self-interest that acknowledged our relationships and our interdependencies.

The personal connections that everyday people of all walks of life had to this workforce became one of the key mobilizing forces throughout the campaign.

We took our first trip – in a 15-passenger van full of domestic workers - to the state capital in Albany in January 2004. As we navigated the narrow streets on that cold winter morning, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, what it would take to win protections for domestic workers.

We spent the first legislative sessions in the Bill of Rights Campaign learning the ropes in Albany. We needed to understand the dynamics in this new world of power relations: What power did we have? What power did we need to win? Who had that power? Where did the legislature stand on our agenda? This was the moment when it became clear that we would not only need to continue building our base of domestic workers, but that we would also need to significantly expand our base of support among other social sectors. So we started by building a network of support among our current allies, recruiting people to get involved in our work in concrete ways like collecting postcard signatures and attending our trips to Albany. We expanded our support base by speaking at other organizations’ meetings and in classrooms and churches. This expanded base of support enabled us to convince more legislators to sign on as co-sponsors on our bill. By our third year, we decided to strengthen our support base by creating a"Campaign Organizing Committee" which our coalition partners and supporters could join to become a part of campaign planning process. We invited anyone who had the desire and energy to attend: students, union members, attorneys and individual activists. By opening that kind of space to all the people who were interested in our struggle, we developed a core group of supporters who could lead independent organizing in their own networks. And the tide started to turn; you could hear a buzz around town about the Bill of Rights Campaign. That was the year when we also started to receive significant support from high-profile labor leaders like John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, whose mother had worked as a domestic worker for over 40 years.

Drawing on the Stories of Domestic Workers: The work of Domestic Workers United is based on the premise that our power is rooted in our membership, specifically on the capacity of our membership to lead our organization and to provide leadership for broader movements that reach beyond domestic workers. The Bill of Rights campaign strengthened that resolve. But it also taught us the ways in which workers stories can play a crucial role in drawing people into a struggle, particularly when those stories emphasize connection and interdependence.

We knew that the stories and leadership of domestic workers would be a driving force throughout the campaign. What we didn’t expect was how many other people would feel that their own life stories were so closely connected to the stories of domestic workers. These connections turned out to be an electric cord that energized the campaign from beginning to end.

But every worker who has stepped up and who has provided the hard work and leadership that helped drive the Bill of Right campaign was motivated by more than a narrow sense of self-interest. They didn’t only talk about bigger paychecks or days off for themselves. Like Allison, they talked about their mothers and their grandmothers who had done this work before them, and they talked about their children for whom they wanted the opportunity to choose different futures.

Framing Our Work Broadly: Rather than framing our work as a narrow workers’ rights campaign focused strictly on the issues of domestic workers, we intentionally built the campaign around broader axes of structural inequality. We based our frames on our analysis of the root causes of the problems facing domestic workers including the devaluing of "women’s work" in the home, the legacy of slavery in the United States, and the lack of a social safety net in the United States and internationally. This broader framing allowed us to develop messages for the Bill of Rights Campaign that then helped us to broaden our campaign by forging key alliances. Our message that we need to "Respect the work that makes all other work possible" allowed us to build relationships with women’s organizations, mothers, and long-time advocates for gender justice and women’s equality.

We learned that it is possible to frame any campaign broadly enough to allow you to pull in unexpected allies and therefore to bring more power to your agenda.

And we didn’t only build the tactical power we needed to win our fight; we changed the nature of relationships between domestic workers, the children they raise and their employers in the process.

The Power of the Children: The Children’s March: On a hot Sunday morning in the summer of 2009, children of all ages and backgrounds colored in chalk on the sidewalks outside New York’s City Hall. They wrote messages like, "Respect My Mom" and "I love my Nanny." Then, with red balloons tied around their wrists that read "DWU," children of domestic workers walked together with children who were cared for by domestic workers. They led a march down Broadway to demand the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The "Children and Families March for Domestic Workers Rights" began with a rally outside City Hall in front of a fence strung with cards made by children with messages like, "I want to thank my nanny for taking me to the zoo."

The affinity between doormen and domestic workers combined with the commitment of progressive union leadership to embracing new forms of organizing offers a glimpse of the potential of an inclusive labor movement, reflective of the hopes and dreams of the new working class.

As a movement, we face enormous challenges ahead. The Bill of Rights Campaign is an example of the types of campaigns – full of hard work, risk and uncertainty – that we will need embrace in order to make a real difference for the next generation. It provides a hopeful push, despite the unknown, toward campaigns based on love, to bring us into the right relationships with one another for the change we need. In taking these risks, we may become who we were meant to be as a movement.
http://www.cew.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Organizingwithlove--FullReport-Cover.pdf



          "Every single one of us can be an agent of change
                        and we can change the world."

                                             ~MORE~

Watch the full interview with Bill Moyers
http://billmoyers.com/segment/ai-jen-poo-and-sarita-gupta-on-workers-rights/


Come visit our website WE WERE NOT BORN TO FOLLOW 

 

BEAUTY IN TRUTH

 

 

 

ALICE WALKER

"Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet."

Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, self-claimed womanist, and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

There is a documentary that debuted last spring about the life and work of author/activist Alice Walker, Beauty in Truth. "Her life, as presented by Parmar (Pratibha Parmar ), inspires with a truth that is as beautiful visually as it is spiritually. It’s a must-see." says Heidi Hutner of YES! magazine. I have yet to see it myself but after watching the trailer I wanted to find out more.

Trailer Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth

I wanted to share this Q & A discussion and the trailer here with you because so many of the topics relate to what we are sharing at WE WERE NOT BORN TO FOLLOW.

Listen in and see if you can find them

Alice Walker Q&A discussion: Beauty In Truth

I have made a short list of over fifty connections, words of wisdom and leadership lessons from a short look into the life of activist/author Alice Walker and I can say without any doubt that indeed there is BEAUTY IN TRUTH.  Would you have any additions to the list?  Share them with us!  

-I am a woman

-give

-begin

-claim your space

-she's talking to you

-be yourself

-care

-don't submit

-think differently

-bloom

-hope & justice

-women's stories

-I can do that

-I can never separate them

-it's a human movement

-welcome any new ideas

-it's about LOVE

-working mothers

-there's a reason we are here that is bigger than self

-making a way out of no way

-respect each other

-being aware

-choices

-spirit of creativity

-standing with

-commitment

-I am

-culture

-never about just you

-it takes a village, a community

-move your muscles

-sometimes you are the first

-work with

-pioneer

-human rights issue

-one point can frame the issue and make change

-we want to try

-feminism

-sisters

-where is loyalty?, solidarity?

-balancing advocacy and writing

-teaching

-education

-teaching the history of so much

-everything is connected

-don't just fight the obvious fights

-taking it a few steps beyond where everybody else is standing

-I did it because it was illegal

-there is a place that we must not let people push us beyond, a line

-connecting with your childhood, those things that were amazing

-what crosses your path

-take the time

-negative impacts- we get tired, learn to pay attention to that

-laugh at yourself

-take care of yourself , do those things that replenish you

-leave a legacy

-write a poem

-be thankful

-nurture

-understanding

-look deep

-natural behaviors

-earth was meant for joy, connect with that joy and you will be forever fed by it.



More about the film

http://www.alicewalkerfilm.com/world-premier/

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/the-human-cost-of-stuff/film-alice-walker-beauty-in-truth




Alice Walker Official Website
http://alicewalkersgarden.com/


 
  

 

ROSINA TUCKER

 

ROSINA TUCKER

1881-1987

 

As founder and secretary-treasurer of the International Ladies' Auxiliary and a force in the establishment of its parent organization, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Rosina Tucker helped to raise the economic level of large numbers of black people in the United States and Canada. She organized porters' wives in activities to support the auxiliary and the union, and their efforts helped to ensure the men of adequate pay, decent working conditions, and new benefits. The brotherhood focused on battling racism and, with Tucker's assistance, organized civil rights marches in 1941 and 1963.

 

"Once a young man asked me, 'What was it like in your day?' 'My day?' I said, 'This is my day!'" - Rosina Tucker, Washington DC

 

 

Rosina Budd Harvey Corrothers Tucker, one of nine children, was born on November 4, 1881, on Fourth Street in northwest Washington, D.C. Her parents, Lee Roy and Henrietta Harvey, had been slaves in Virginia before they relocated to Washington after their emancipation. As was the case with many former slaves, they found the brutal memories of bondage painful to recount. Although the Harveys never told their story to their children, Rosina Tucker overheard them discussing their experiences with each other. Tucker remembered her father talking about the meager amounts of food he received as a slave.

 

Rosina Tucker had pleasant memories of her early childhood and fondly reminisced about her musical training and her father's teachings.  By the time the children entered school, they already had a more than rudimentary musical education and were able to read and write. When she was twelve years old Rosina Tucker played piano for her Sunday school and also taught in the infant department.

After her first husband James Corrothers died in 1917, Rosina returned to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a file clerk with the federal government and became involved in civic activities. Through friends she met Berthea J. Tucker, known as B. J., who had worked as a carpenter's helper before becoming a Pullman car porter. They married on Thanksgiving eve in 1918, when she was thirty-six years old, and moved into a two-story brick house on Seventh Street northeast near Gallaudet College, where she remained the rest of her life.

Although the black porters were restless at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was not until some years later, in 1909, that the porters formulated their grievances and made efforts to organize.

 

On August 25, 1925, in the Imperial Lodge of Elks, 160 West 129th Street, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was launched and Randolph began what was to be a long tenure as president. The union also established the Women's Economic Councils, an organization through which women could work for the rights of the brotherhood.

Randolph and Totten tried to bring the union to Washington, D.C., where they had a big meeting at John Wesley Church for the porters as well as their wives. But the porters were reluctant to join for fear of losing their jobs. B. J. Tucker joined the union immediately--in time he became a member of the executive board--and then he and Rosina took up the cause in the District. At first the men's work was so demanding that they had little time for union activities; therefore, their wives did much of the work for them and held secret meetings so that the men's positions would not be threatened. When Rosina Tucker met with Randolph and Totten, they did so in private and secret places, including Tucker's home, so that informers would be unable to report on the sessions to the company. To organize unions in the South, Tucker visited the homes of some three hundred porters who lived in the Washington area, distributed literature, discussed the organization with prospective members and their wives, and collected dues from the women as well as the men.

The next step for Tucker was to organize the local Ladies' Auxiliary, which, over the years, provided financial and emotional backing for the brotherhood. From the start, the women raised a great deal of money by hosting parties, dances, dinners, and other activities. Tucker called upon her church and social service background to help families experiencing illnesses and other difficulties, including loss of employment.

 

"We would have to act in secret because if the management found out, they would fire people. That's why, in one sense, it was easier for the wives to do the work. That's how I got involved."

 

In time the Pullman Company learned about her work and reacted by firing her husband. When she heard about the company's punitive action, she declared, "I'm not going to take that." She told Susan Ellen Holleran for about...time, that she tried to contact the company superintendent, who was always "in conference." Then she went to his supervisor and said, "I'm Mrs. B. J. Tucker and I came over to see you about why my husband lost his job." When the man asked why B. J. Tucker was not there to see about it himself, Rosina reacted by banging on his table and saying, "You brought me into this thing, and you have nothing to do with what I do." B. J. Tucker was rehired.

In 1937, when the porters and the Pullman Company signed a contract, for the first time there was a formal agreement between a union of black workers and a major American corporation. The next year Rosina Tucker attended the union's national convention in Chicago and chaired the Constitution and Rules Committee. Immediately after the brotherhood's convention, the International Ladies' Auxiliary was established and held its first meetings on September 24-27.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/rosina-tucker#ixzz2iTJJlx65

From: Black Women in America: Social Activism, Encyclopedia of Black Women in America.

These black women trade unionists believed the American labor movement was not only for men but also for their wives and families. "Marching Together" (the title of the auxiliary's official anthem), the wives and female relatives of sleeping car porters, attendants, and maids helped the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) American Federation of Labor become the first successful national black trade union. Membership figures varied, but in 1945, the auxiliary had more than 1,500 dues-paying members in the United States and Canada. Chicago, the largest local, claimed nearly 175 members, while smaller districts such as Portland, Norfolk, and St. Paul had core memberships of more than forty. Active between 1925 and 1957, the auxiliary also affiliated with the National Women's Trade Union League and American Federation of Women's Auxiliaries to Labor.

The Hesperus Club of Harlem became the first auxiliary in October 1925, with the encouragement of A. Philip Randolph, publisher of the Messenger and general organizer of the six-week-old BSCP. Other women's groups soon followed, along with Brotherhood locals in Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; St. Louis; Omaha; Kansas City; Los Angeles; and elsewhere. For twelve years these auxiliaries, known formally as the Colored Women's Economic Councils, kept the faith during the "dark days" of the union's struggle for recognition.

Council activities varied with the Brotherhood's needs and differing locales. The new union always needed money. Often evicted, frequently without funds for heat and light, the struggle to keep the union going often fell to the councils. Using fund-raising methods learned in church and other women's groups, they sponsored dances, bazaars, silver teas, chitterlings and chicken dinners, and apron and pajama sales to send Brotherhood officials on cross-country organizing tours. When Randolph and other organizers arrived in Washington, D.C., for example, Brotherhood women such as Rosina Corrothers-Tucker (1881–1987) housed and fed them.

The Women's Economic Councils operated as local units until 1938, when President Randolph called women together in Chicago to found the International Ladies' Auxiliary Order to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, "the first international labor organization of black women in the world" as Tucker wrote in her unpublished autobiography. Delegates from twenty-seven cities elected Halena Wilson as president, Rosina Corrothers-Tucker as secretary-treasurer, and recognized twelve other faithful wives with international offices. Brotherhood president Randolph became the international counselor to the auxiliary, maintaining his central advisory role in the women's organization.

 

Under the international structure, President Wilson, with Counselor Randolph's approval, developed a three-part program of organization, legislation, and cooperation designed to educate black women about the labor movement. The Ladies' Auxiliary believed labor solidarity meant family unity. The Brotherhood brought domestic security to porters' families through increased wages and better working conditions for husbands. The assumption was that women should take responsibility for the labor movement because women spent 85 percent of the family income; wives should spend their husbands' wages on union-label goods and services to guarantee organized labor's success. Members studied the consumers' cooperative movement; the Chicago and Denver auxiliaries founded cooperative buying clubs. One meeting each month focused on workers' education; each summer as many as a dozen members or their daughters received labor school scholarships to learn labor history, economics, union leadership, public speaking, and union homemaking.

The Ladies' Auxiliary Constitution declared subordination to the Brotherhood, but men and women contested women's proper role in the union. Many men objected when Randolph announced he would encourage women to join the union's fight, believing that women's participation would complicate matters. In some locals, Brotherhood men appear to have deliberately sabotaged the women's efforts; in other locals, a few in the Ladies' Auxiliary insisted they had a right to attend the men's union meetings and to vote. Yet when the Chicago auxiliary debated the Brotherhood in 1951 on "Who Makes a Better Union Member, Man or Woman?" the women won by a majority vote.

 

It has taken many years, but at the end of her long life, Tucker's view was that "blacks have made substantial progress. But we have a long way to go." She often talked -- proudly -- of her long years of activism, which stretched to almost half the life of this Republic. But she would always stress as well that she lived in the present, not the past.

 

In the closing years of her life, she gave lectures across the country, and appeared before congressional committees, in particular to lobby for greater protection for senior citizens. The once elegant neighborhood in which she lived had long since fallen into decline. But she refused to leave the house she had lived in since 1918, even though she lived there alone. Her husband and relatives were long gone. Her only son died young -- in 1945.

Losing loved ones and friends is an inevitable consequence of living long enough. But Rosina Tucker was never lonely in her last years. She received numerous awards from organizations such as the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. She seemed most content in her work for the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. She was a member of the congregation for 65 years. Everyone there knew her as "Mother Tucker" and children would often surround her, demanding to hear stories of her life long ago.

 

In 1987 -- on a beautiful spring day -- Rosina Tucker died, 105 years after her birth during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur. At her funeral, one speaker remarked on the landmark events in American history through which she had lived, recalling that she had been a mourner at the funeral of Frederick Douglass (the noted abolitionist) in 1895, and an organizer at the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his unforgettable, "I have a dream," speech. She was here so long, remembered another speaker, that she "experienced life before segregation, during segregation and after segregation."

 

Following her death, an unpublished autobiography was discovered that she authored in her nineties. In it, she wrote,

 

"Today is my day, as it is your day. Although I live far removed from the time when I was born, I do not feel that my heart should dwell in the past. It is in the future. While I live, let not my life be in vain. And when I depart, may there be remembrance of me and my life as I have lived it."

 

 

 

 

What will you do with your day?

 

What does the future look like to you?

 

Whose life will you make a difference in?

 

FLORENCE KELLEY

 

 

Florence Kelley (1859–1932)　

Florence Kelley was a social reformer and political activist who championed government regulation to protect working women and children.

 

Kelley was born into a Pennsylvania Quaker and Unitarian family with a strong commitment to abolitionist and women's rights activism. After reading through her father's library and graduating from Cornell, Kelley studied law and government at the University of Zurich, joined the German Social Democratic party, and translated Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England into English. In 1884 Kelley married a socialist Russian medical student and the couple had three children. After returning to the US, she divorced in 1891 and joined Jane Addams and other reformers at Hull-House, the Chicago social settlement. In 1892 the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics hired her to investigate the "sweating" system in the garment industry, and the federal commissioner of labor, Carroll Wright, asked her to survey Chicago's 19th ward, her findings appearing in Hull-House Maps and Papers. She was soon appointed chief factory inspector by Illinois Governor John Peter. Kelley earned her law degree from Northwestern University in 1895.

 

In 1899 Kelley became head of the National Consumer's League (NCL), a position she held for over 30 years, and she moved to Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York City. Working for the NCL, Kelley organized local leagues and lobbied for better working conditions and minimum-wage and shorter-working-hours legislation. She helped Josephine Goldmark, director of research at NCL, to prepare the successful "Brandeis brief" defense of 10-hour workday legislation for women in the 1908 US Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon. The following year the NCL launched a minimum-wage campaign, which eventually succeeded in obtaining the passage of 14 state laws for women. Kelley later helped extend such state legislation to male workers.

 

In 1909 Kelley also helped organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was a founder of the National Child Labor Committee, and her efforts contributed greatly to the creation in 1912 of the US Children's Bureau, the only government agency run by women, In 1912, Kelley provided presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt with facts and figures to substantiate his call for a minimum wage, pensions, and health insurance, as she became part of his "Female Brain Trust" and a significant supporter of the Progressive Party. Many of Kelley's ideas were later incorporated into New Deal programs.

 

Roosevelt and Kelley parted ways during World War I, when Kelley, a pacifist, helped to create the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and led the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (from 1913 until 1920). For several years she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Kelley spent her final decade defending herself from attacks during the "red scare" of the 1920s and stressing the concrete gains of gender-specific labor legislation to those committed only to laws applying to both sexes. . An icon of labor reform, Florence Kelley died on February 17, 1932, of natural causes in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/kelley.html

http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/Themes/Capitalism-and-Labor/Florence-Kelley.aspx

Florence Kelley Interview


Was there a specific event or perhaps an experience that led you to become a social reformer?

"When I was at the age of twelve, my father had me visiting glass factories at night. There, I saw a little boy bending towards a hot furnace, coughing, and everyone besides me were looking at this as if it was something that is seen every day in the daily routine. Which, in fact, it was. I still can’t forget that scenery. In fact, I don’t think I will forget this ever. So yes, there was something that gave me an impact to become a reformer."


Wow, you were against child labor since you were twelve, then.


"I think for many social reformers there are big and little events like this for every issues, or ‘evils’ as they call it these days."

By that you mean?


"I was first known through my work, the translation of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ by Engels. Then, I guess, someone noticed that I was a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which I joined when I was back in Cornell. That became an issue, and soon the papers started introducing me as an activist for civil rights movement. I think it was because I was constantly fighting for woman suffrage and African-American civil rights. And having this idea of myself being a well known reformer, now everywhere I go, I noticed something that is to be changed. At this state, it is likely to come across an event or an experience about... anything."


After you came back from Europe, You campaigned for state statistical bureaus and the creation of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. How did you come across that?


"After returning from Europe, I was thinking of writing a book of my own, on the condition of the working class in the United States. But I discovered that there were no adequate statistics. That was the start of it."

You are now living in the Hull House settlement in Chicago.


"Yes,"

The founder of the Hull House, who is also Ja ne Addams' nephew, called you "the toughest customer in the reform riot, the finest rough-and-tumble fighter for the good life for others, that Hull House ever knew." Any comments on that?


"I know I am known for firmness and fierce energy. Merely, I try my best to fighting for the good."

What are your further plans?


"As you know, my focus in these days is women’s rights. I am still on to fighting for limiting the long hours female workers are working in hazardous professions."

http://kduncan.phoenix.wikispaces.net/Florence+Kelley+Interview


VIDEO- Florence Kelley: Impatient Crusader

A brief look at the life of Florence Kelley, a social and political reformer who founded the National Consumers League and worked tirelessly to set the minimum wage, limit the hours in a work day, and remove children from the workplace.

 

 

Do you and Florence care about the same things? 

 

Have you ever been a 'first' at something?

 

How do you overcome obstacles?

 

MARGARET HALEY

 

Margaret Haley (1861-1939)

LADY LABOR SLUGGER

Through her leadership of the Chicago Teachers Federation, Margaret Haley became a voice in national education politics. She promoted a more professional approach to teaching, including improved teacher education and teacher involvement in school management. But Haley also fought for traditional bread-and-butter issues: pensions, salary increases and other benefits for teachers. The first woman and teacher to speak from the floor at a National Education Association meeting, she delivered the influential speech, "Why Teachers Should Organize" in 1904. In this speech, she introduced issues that continue to be debated by teachers' unions and the public today.

Margaret Haley was born in Joliet, Illinois, on November 15, 1861, to Irish immigrant parents. Growing up, she was influenced by her father, an active member of several labor organizations. After attending a progressive normal school, she moved to Chicago to teach sixth grade in the infamous stockyards district, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. There she taught classes of 50 to 60 students, in deplorable conditions, according to a rigid curriculum imposed by educational bureaucrats. Over the next 16 years, she observed the unchanging poverty of the community in which she taught. She also discerned a constant decline in the conditions of the schools for teachers and students.

Haley came to understand that it was up to teachers to fight for change, both in the schools and in society. She was influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey, who believed that schools should be microcosms in which students learned the process of democracy through participation in a community. According to Haley, the tendency of schools to treat teachers as "automatons, mere factory hands" was in direct conflict with the principles of democracy.

In 1897, Margaret Haley joined the fledgling Chicago Teachers' Federation (CTF). The CTF grew out of intense teacher dissatisfaction: most of the nation's city teachers earned less than unskilled workers. Unlike other teachers' associations of the time, the CTF earned the distinction of being dominated by women teachers instead of male administrators. Because high school teachers (who were then mainly men) were subject to different guidelines and received higher salaries, only grade school teachers were invited to join the CTF. In 1900, Haley became the district Vice President of the CTF and soon gave up teaching for full-time union work. Under Haley's leadership, the CTF fought for higher salaries, pensions and tenure, better school conditions, and, in Haley's words, the right "for the teacher to call her soul her own." The union also fought against the "factorization" of the schools and the increasing constraints placed on teachers by rigid bureaucracies.

The earliest teachers unions lacked any real legal authority. Without collective bargaining rights, the CTF relied on lawsuits and political campaigns to effect change. Haley's first action for the CTF was to file suit when the Chicago Board of Education refused to honor a promised pay raise for the city's grade school teachers. Haley cleverly discovered that many of the city's corporations were not paying their fair share of taxes, which deprived the city of needed funds for schools. The CTF's lawsuit forced the corporations to pay their taxes and the city's teachers won their raise. But equally important to Haley was the fact that the corporations were forced to assume their civic responsibility to the public schools.

At the turn of the 20th century, the CTF was the most prominent and most militant of the teachers' organizations. In 1902, Haley led the CTF to join the Chicago Federation of Labor. She understood that teachers had much in common with manual workers, especially in light of the increasing "factorization" of the schools. The CTF's affiliation with labor shocked the Chicago establishment -- and many teachers. But it ultimately helped the CTF gain political power and an important victory regarding pensions. Eventually, political pressures forced Haley to renounce her alliance with the CFL.

Haley ardently believed that school reform was fundamental to social reform. She saw the struggle for teachers' rights as intrinsically linked to other social struggles and she used the union to back progressive causes, among them, woman suffrage and child labor legislation. Under her leadership, the teachers union became a political force for both school and social reform. Haley and her cohorts were so successful that they acquired the nickname "Lady Labor Sluggers."

http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/haley.html

"Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. If this ideal of the educators cannot be carried over into the industrial field, then the ideal of industrialism will be carried over into the school. Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free. If the school cannot bring joy to the work of the world, the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school as in the factory will become drudgery."-Excerpt from a speech she gave at the NEA convention in 1901, "Why Teachers Should Organize."

In what ways are you like Margaret?

                                                                       ~MORE~

MORE - AFT History Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Zq3l-deUg&feature=share&list=PL-T5PpTCIN8BbRxbnpMVU-SAPIREBB3tR

 

EMMA TENAYUCA

 

Emma Tenayuca (December 21, 1916 – July 23, 1999) was an American labor leader, union organizer and educator. She grew up in a family of eleven and began living with her grandparents at an early age in order to ease the burden on the rest of her family. Emma and her family were hit hard by the Depression, and all around her Emma Tenayuca began opening her eyes to see the suffering of low class workers. She became interested in activism and was a labor activist even before graduating from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. Tenayuca’s first arrest came at the age of 16, in 1933, when she joined a picket line of workers in strike against the Finck Cigar Company.

After high school, Tenayuca obtained a position as an elevator operator, but she made a career out of her passion for labor rights. She founded two international ladies' garment workers unions, and was highly involved in both the Worker’s Alliance of America and Woman’s League for Peace and Freedom. She organized a protest over the beating of Mexican migrants by United States Border Patrol agents. In her early adulthood she was arrested for a second and third time: once on a charge of "disturbing the peace" during a nonviolent protest, and again for her leadership role in a labor strike in 1938.

Organizing large scale strikes against the injustices in the labor sphere was also one of Tenayuca’s vocations. Tenayuca was instrumental in one of the most famous conflicts of Texas labor history–the 1938 Pecan Shellers Strike at the Southern Pecan Shelling Company. During the strike, thousands of workers at over 130 plants protested a wage reduction of one cent per pound of shelled pecans. Mexicana and Chicana workers who picketed were gassed, arrested, and jailed. The strike ended after thirty-seven days when the city's pecan operators agreed to arbitration. In October that year, the National Labor Relations Act raised wages to twenty-five cents an hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Tenayuca

"I was arrested a number of times. I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice."

                                                           Emma Tenayuca standing inside jail, June, 1937.
                                                                      Photographed in San Antonio, Texas.


In 1939, as Emma was giving a speech, an enraged mob attacked the San Antonio´s Municipal Auditorium. Fearing that she would be lynched, Emma was led away through a secret passageway. The mob threw bricks, broke windows, set fires, ripped out auditorium seats, and later that night, together with the Ku Klux Klan, burnt the city’s mayor in effigy for having defended Emma’s right to free speech. This event is still on record as the San Antonio’s largest riot.

Black-listed, Emma left the state for many years, suffering poverty, unemployment, and personal threats against her own safety. A voracious reader, she put herself through college, and never stopped searching for an answer to the injustices she saw around her.

In the 1960s, Emma returned to San Antonio and began a different phase of her life-long community service, becoming a reading teacher for migrant students. Emma always focused on empowering people in the most basic and humane ways: the ability to work, to eat, to feed one’s family, to read, to vote. The things she fought to achieve in our society -- social security, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, equal access to education, disability benefits -- were in her days called communist. Today, they are called social justice.

Yet among the people for whom she fought and spoke and went to jail, her name was whispered with a respect reserved for no other leader. They called her "La Pasionaria". And they kept her story alive, even when so many others tried to erase it from history.

http://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/emma-tenayuca

 

 

                                                                                                    

 

Here's another video you may like 

                                                    http://youtu.be/yxr2RaTeYuA

 

 

MAIDA ROSENSTEIN

                                         MAIDA ROSENSTEIN

Today in #LaborHistory : October 13 -- via -- www.unionist.com

More than 1,100 office workers strike Columbia University in New York City. The mostly female and minority workers win union recognition and pay increases – 1985

PHOTO BY Thomas Altfather Good - Maida is pushing the stroller.

Sharing from an interview by Gerrie Casey in the Fall of 2003

Non Traditional Organizing A Conversation With Maida



Maida Rosenstein has been a leading UAW organizer among university teaching and research employees as well as clerical workers,and is now the President of UAW Local 2110, based in New York City. Last April, she spoke with Gerrie Casey.

 Q: Could you first tell us a little bit about your personal background, your own history in terms of how you grew up and how you became a union organizer?

 MR: Well, I grew up here in New York and ended up going to college in New Jersey from 1969 through '73. I was an art major there so I graduated very well-prepared to earn a living! I wanted to get a job that wasn't in the corporate world. I came from a pretty progressive background. And I thought maybe I would go to graduate school.



So I got a job as a clerical worker at NYU, as a University secretary. One day I was walking through Washington Square Park and I saw a notice posted that said "We are trying to organize a union. Come to our next meeting." I already had a very positive viewpoint of unions because of my family background.

I grew up where unions were a good thing, even though I had no experience with them. And I thought the initial strategy of secretaries and clerical workers having a union was really strange. But I responded to this sign and walked into a club. I was also coming off the sixties view where being an activist was a good thing and not a bad thing. And so, going to a meeting was a good thing not a bad thing.

So I went this meeting and it turned out people were trying to organize a union for the clerical workers at NYU. That was my first sort of contact with union. The union was District 65, which later on became part of the UAW.

It was probably around 1975. That campaign really never took off. We didn't know what we were doing. We had an organizing committee and we spent a lot of time writing very long leaflets. But, we didn't really give them to anybody, and we didn't talk to anybody. But, basically that was the first contact that I had. And I remember going over to 13 Astor Place, where the union's headquarters was, and being very impressed. My parents knew about District 65 s and they had been to the union headquarters in the old days. So I felt like, wow, this is really a place that had some history to it.

I was kind of going to graduate school at the same time. I was trying to be a painter and I was sort of fumbling around with my life and my identity. Not unusual for those times. And I decided that I ought to get my act together and get a professional degree, a real job. So I thought I would go to library school. And I applied to library school at Columbia. And then I decided to get a job up there so that it would cover tuition.  And -- you know, get some tuition benefits.  So I got a job as a clerical worker at Columbia.


Well, I was working for a while when the woman who was the [District 65] union organizer said, "You know we might be organizing up at Columbia. So can I call you if we do?" And I said, "Sure, of course." So, a couple of years later, she did call me. Maybe it was in '78 or '79. She did call me and we had a little house meeting. She said they were going to start a campaign at Columbia. And it took a long time to get off the ground. I mean, I think we had that one meeting and then I didn't hear from her again for months.

Then a campaign started. I wasn't real involved with it at first. I was very supportive but I was probably a little wary of getting involved. In the meantime, my pursuit of graduate school was not going all that well. And I was, you know, chugging away at the 9 to 5 job.

Eventually I did get more involved in the union and joined the organizing committee. In 1981, we actually filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for an election at Columbia. And I've got to say I was on the organizing committee but I wasn't super active in it. I was probably more peripherally involved. But when we got to that point where we filed the petition, I got more involved in it and made more of a commitment to it. The petition was caught up in litigation so this campaign went on for a long time. I became a regular on the organizing committee for several years.

Soon it became really the most important thing that I was doing in my life. Far more important than trying to go to graduate school, a lot more real than trying to be an artist. And certainly more consuming and of greater interest to me than the office job that I had.


I drove my office crazy too because I was so involved in the organizing. You can imagine -- they would've loved to have gotten rid of me. And they actually seized the opportunity to do so when in 1983 we had an election. We won the election but there were a huge number of challenged ballots. So we went back into litigation at the Labor Board. And the union at that point decided they were going to bring on a couple of people from the committee to continue the organizing so that we wouldn't lose ground given the turnover among the workforce. So I was asked to go on staff.

I was really scared to become a union organizer. First of all, I didn't see myself as having the organizing personality at all. And second, I was just so afraid of being stuck into that hole, you know, totally consumed by the organizing campaign. So, I -- so there was a part-time job available -- openings in the office that I work in at the School of Social Work. And I asked to be transferred to the part-time job and I said to the union that I would work part-time on the union campaign
and I would still work part-time at Columbia. I think I was just postponing the inevitable. But I did that for a few months and then --

　
 Q: What did you think the personality of a union organizer was?

  MR: Oh, you know somebody very outgoing, social person who loves talking to people and was good a public speaking and was a complete take charge person. And I didn't see myself in that way.




Q: Looking back on that, what do you think... that perception that you had of yourself?

  MR: I think -- I actually think I had mistaken -- I had a mistaken impression about what the important things were about being a union organizer. I thought being a union organizer was -- I don't know -- somehow a... difficult and was great at making public speeches.




Q: And how did that shift? What did you learn later about being a union organizer?

  MR: Well, I think there are other things that became obvious once you're doing the work that that doesn't tell you. You have to be able to -- it's hard work. It's work that you have to work at very hard and it takes a great deal of dedication and commitment to work through it. And you have to be willing to work though problems and deal with very down side. You have to be willing to work with loses if that's necessary.  You have to be willing to push people.





Q: Does being a woman -- did that have something to do with you being a little unsure about being a union organizer in the beginning?

  MR: Probably because I don’t think there were too many models for women leadership at the time. And -- I mean union organizers that I've met, men and women seem so knowing and competent. And they knew all about labor movement. And they were sharp politicos. I mean, they knew all about so many of these things.





Q: And so once you went on staff, then what happens in terms of your own history with the union? 
 
MR: Well -- it was so hard. It was so hard. And I think this is true for most organizers. It's like the first year the learning curve on these jobs is long, and the first year was just murder. And I -- first of all, the internal politics of the organization: I didn't know anything about and I was really unprepared for it. And it's a tough atmosphere. The pot is always simmering in a union. And you're consumed with your job, you're consumed with conflict.  And it was so hard.
But I was primarily doing organizing at Columbia. We had the election behind us but we were not recognized as a union. So we had to continue to organize workers. And I did that and that part was good. It was fun even though it was hard. And I did that for a couple years. Finally in 1985, we got recognition for the union. And we started negotiating contracts.

 Q: But this must have been one of the first trade union contracts that stuck hard language on the issue of a spouse equivalent for any kind of rights? So it was trend-setting in a way, right?

 MR: Right, right. And we got an equity fund to try and deal with some of the inequities. We did this analysis on the basis of race and gender which we looked at the back across pay rates to see whether there was a pattern whereby white workers and male workers who didn't earn very much earned more than women workers and workers of color. And this was something we tried to grapple with over several contracts. But the first contract we got an equity adjustment. 

My only experience was in going to the negotiations at Columbia. So I had to kind of learn everything from scratch. Well, we elected stewards. We weren't really a local at that point. I guess you'd call it the Columbia local. We elected stewards and so on. And I was supposed to work with the stewards. And none of us knew how to do anything. None of us [LAUGHS] -- you know, we sort of learned. We kind of trained ourselves. There was a contract. We struggled with it. We tried to figure out how to do things. But none of us knew how to do anything. And then I handled a lot of grievances. It was like a sink or swim situation. So, I'm kind of grateful for that experience in a way because over a period of a few years I just handled hundreds of grievances and I really became immersed in that.

  Q: That's great. And you probably went into training to know how to do it too?

  MR: Eventually I did.



READ MORE OF MAIDA'S STORY HERE
 http://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/academics/colleges/hclas/cld/cld_rlr_f03_nontraditionalorg.pdf