https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a24429/hidden-figures-real-story-nasa-women-computers/

Loved that movie. Colored computers. That's so bizarre a concept it's "not even wrong". To impose racial prejudice onto abstractions such as numbers and their manipulation is mind-boggling.

Fannie Lou Hamer.



Thanks for the reminder that I have a biography of her and her powerful life around somewhere that I think I didn't finish, but not because it isn't fascinating to read. Just found the title, "This Little Light of Mine," now just have to find the book. To put it mildly, oppression didn't have its usual effect on this person.

- You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not gonna put it in your lap... <...> And it's no need of running and no need of saying, "Honey, I'm gonna get into the mess". Because if you were born in America with a black face, you were born in the mess...

In fact I just found a video from last year where he plays the clip of her (at the 2:00 market) in answer to a caller -

Whole speech here - http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/hamer-were-on-our-way-speech-text/

As a note about her - the DNC of the '60s refused to seat her as part of the Mississippi delegation because she was black.

Thanks. So sad that she died fairly young with so much more to do.

Regarding the 1964 DNC for those interested, the Mississippi delegation was all white, and her organization showed up with people they wanted seated as delegates and asked the DNC for proper representation. They were offered 2 seats as a token in conciliation, which they refused.

Not our finest moment as a whole for sure, but one of hers. Note that Johnson knew who Fannie Mae Hamer was as surely as he knew who MLK was.

But for those who don't remember the context, at that time most Southern conservatives (who after 1964 moved to the GOP and found fertile soil to grow power in there) were a hostile opposition faction within the Democratic Party. If Hamer's group had been given proper representation (and she the honor she deserved), Democrats would have lost the southern states to the Republicans on election day.

Instead, the 3 TV networks paid her that honor. She wasn't allowed to speak at the convention, so they put her speech on the evening news that all America watched in those days.

Because she was beaten to a pulp in prison and then the guards forced 2 other black inmates (men) to beat her some more. She ended up with damaged kidneys as a result but fought to have the LEO for that jail charged for it, but of course as we see happens today, the sheriff and his thugs were acquitted.

That was what her speech was about.

before the convention, but it wasn't. No wonder she chose too-vivid memories that only made her more fiercely determined to try to energize America into caring enough.

And no doubt many of our party's defeatist weaklings heard her and whined then, as now, about how dreadful this was and how they were sure that "they" wouldn't do anything about it. I know he's not a big hero in this particular story, but compared to them, President Johnson was marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Mrs. Hamer and all the rest.

if you had to pick someone to be President during such a tumultuous time, then LBJ would probably be the one. I.e., he knew all about the scum of the earth who dogged him but he also didn't take shit from them either. I suppose you could say that he was a lot of hat and cattle too! I guess that is what differentiated him from Carter.

It's a good one. Yes, he was all that and some of the horses' asses thrown in also. For, or perhaps because of, all his great flaws to go with his great virtues, he's one of my favorites, along with Truman, who couldn't be more different. (Carter is not, lots of virtues but I don't like zealous righteousness and its signature contempt for differing opinions, and he's full of it.)

It's so long since I read Caro's biography series that it's almost as if I never did, but one of my favorite stories about LBJ still sticks. It was when Bobby Kennedy came down to the ranch to get Jack's vulgar VP to do something or other. LBJ's housekeeper, Zephyr Wright, took the opportunity of escorting Bobby back to favor him with some thought of hers on current politics. When the guys were alone, Bobby commented, genially no doubt, to LBJ about his opinionated "servant." Johnson pointedly told Bobby the difference between them was that Bobby had servants and he had employees.

Some of the other stories suggest employees also had to put up with a lot of course. When people commented on JFK's womanizing, Johnson reportedly like to bang the furniture and claim he had more women by accident than Kennedy'd had on purpose. Lol, but what took Vietnam 6 years, #Metoo would accomplish in a week.

Mrs. Wright is a woman in black history also, of course. She refused to drive from DC back to Texas with the Johnsons after the drive to DC when she and her husband couldn't use the restrooms or restaurants, had to sleep in the car, etc. But she was there to witness him signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

William L. Patterson (August 27, 1891 – March 5, 1980) was an African-American leader in the Communist Party USA and head of the International Labor Defense, a group that offered legal representation to communists, trade unionists, and African Americans in cases involving issues of political or racial persecution.



William Lorenzo Patterson was born August 27, 1891 in San Francisco, California. His father, James Edward Patterson, originally hailed from the island of St. Vincent in the British Virgin Islands. His mother, Mary Galt Patterson, had been born a slave in the state of Virginia and was the daughter of the organizer of a volunteer regiment of black soldiers who fought with the Union army during the American Civil War.

Patterson's father was a Seventh-day Adventist missionary to Tahiti and he spent extensive time there, with the rest of the family moving between the California cities of Oakland and Mill Valley, where William attended public schools.

In 1911 Patterson was the first African-American graduate of Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California. In the yearbook, his stated ambition was "to be a second Booker T. Washington." After graduation Patterson supported himself working as a laborer in railroad dining cars and on boats which worked the Pacific coast. He saved up enough money to enter the University of California, Berkeley but was expelled during the years of World War I due to his refusal to participate in compulsory military training.

Deciding to set his sights on becoming a lawyer, Patterson entered the Hastings College of Law, from which he graduated in 1919. He failed the California State Bar Examination, however, and decided to pursue emigration to Liberia, taking a job as a cook on a mail ship to England as a means to this end. Patterson found his inquiries about Liberian emigration put off in England due to his lack of construction or practical craft skills, and he determined to return to the United States, landing in New York and gaining employment as a longshoreman.

Patterson was able to put his college degree to use, finding employment as a clerk in a law office, helping to write briefs and studying to take the New York State Bar Examination, which he passed in 1924. During this time he married his first wife, the former Minnie Summer, and made numerous personal acquaintances associated with the booming Harlem Renaissance.

<more>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Patterson