From Dr. King’s anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

Kai Wright has written a good article about the whitewashing of Dr. King’s politics. The radicalism of his vision, against racism but also against poverty and against war, is too often forgotten.

From an essay by Cathy Coghlan: “Sophonisba Breckinridge was a scholar and academician committed to the idea that social research could be used to improve society. She conducted comprehensive research on the pressing social issues of her day and provided rich documentation on these issues not only for her contemporaries, but also for future generations. Future generations of social workers can thank Sophonisba Breckinridge for capturing those moments in history with her extensive documentation of the effects of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization on society in the United States in the early twentieth century thereby preserving that time for future study. Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge is a scholar, social worker and social scientist worthy of emulation. Social workers today are privileged to count her as one of their own.”

Curtsy to Aaron.

April 14

1866: (Birthday) Anne Mansfield Sullivan, educator best known as the teacher of Helen Keller, born in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts.

1910: (A First) Dr. Elinor McGrath graduated from the Chicago Veterinary College to become the first woman veterinarian in the United States.

1975: Madine Steele of Tallahassee was suspended from her teaching position for participating in ERA activities (marching in a parade).

April 13

1854: (Birthday) Lucy Craft Laney born in Macon, Georgia. Laney, a free black woman, opened what became the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia, that grew from five students in a basement to a four-acre campus of almost 1,000 students.

1919: (Birthday) Madalyn Murray O’Hair, atheist lawyer who won an American citizen’s rights to be free FROM religion as well as free to be for the religion of one’s choice in Murry v. Curlett which outlawed prayer in public schools (1963) after her son Bill had objected to being forced to participate in school prayers. The day after the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, Madolyn was dismissed from her welfare department job as incompetent. Since 1975, she has been the subject of a never-ending urban legend claiming that she is ” is trying to get religious broadcasting banned from American airwaves.” Recent versions of this urban legend claim that her efforts would ban shows like Touched by an Angel from the airwaves.

1933: (A First) Ruth Bryan Owen is appointed minister to Denmark by President Franklin Roosevelt, becoming the first woman to lead a U.S. diplomatic mission.

April 11

1865: (Birthday) Mary Ovington, cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), born in Brooklyn, New York.

1881: Spelman Seminary (later Spelman College) for Black women opens in Atlanta, Georgia.

1953: Oveta Culp Hobby is sworn in as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare as the second woman to ever hold a U.S. President’s cabinet post.

April 10

1862: the New York State legislature (while people’s attention was centered on the Civil War) took away a mother’s right of equal guardianship over her children and the control of minor children’s person and property on the husband’s death that had been granted for the first time in history a few years before. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had campaigned for the reform, succeeded in having it reinstated soon afterwards.

1882: (Birthday) Frances Perkins, first woman appointed to a cabinet position (Secretary of Labor), born in Boston, Massachussetts.

1930: (Birthday) Dolores Huerta, Chicana cofounder of the United Farm Workers Union, born in Dawson, New Mexico.

1960: (A First) Women are ordained as pastors in Sweden’s Evangelical Lutheran Church for the first time in the Church’s history.

1970: (A First) New York State legislature passes into law unrestricted abortion rights during the first six months of pregnancy.

April 9

1923: The U.S. Supreme Court holds in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital of Washington, D.C. that the freedom of contract applies to women as well as men.

1939: Marian Anderson sings before 75,000 people from the Lincoln Memorial after having been refused the right to sing in the Constitution Hall of the Daughter’s of the American Revolution (DAR). First lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned the DAR and suggested the Lincoln Memorial site to protest racial bigotry. Relatively recently the DAR has tried to change history by claiming they did not refuse Anderson, the hall was all ready rented.

April 8

1865: (Birthday) Albion Fellows Bacon, housing reformer, born in Evansville, Indiana. Bacon was instrumental in drafting and getting passed a model state law in Indiana which regulated tenement dwellings and allowed the condemning of unsafe or unsanitary dwellings.

1918: (Birthday) Betty Ford, U.S. First Lady acknowledged as a working partner to U.S. President Gerald, born in Chicago, Illinois. Ford went public with her mastectomy to bring the procedure out of the closet as well as admitting to drug and alcohol addiction.

April 6

1882: (Birthday) Rose Schneiderman, trade union organizer, member of the Women’s Trade Union League, and leader in the 1909 strike of 20,000 women in the garment trades of New York City, born in Saven, Poland.

April 5

1885: (Birthday) Fannia Mary Cohn, organizer for the ILGWU, born in Kletzk, Minsk, Russia. Cohn led the first successful strike in Chicago’s thread trade.

1984: (A First) the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints with a membership of a quarter of a million votes to permit the ordination of women priests.

1990: U.S. Roman Catholic bishops announce the hiring of a large public relations firm to wage a nationwide, multi-million dollar continuing campaign to persuade Catholics and non-Catholics to oppose abortions.

April 4

1802: (Birthday) Dorothea Lynde Dix, pioneer in the establishment and improvement of homes for the mentally ill and organizer of the Army Nursing Corps (1861), born in Hampden, Maine.

1837: (Birthday) Abbie Park Ferguson, American educator, born in Whately, Massachusetts. Together with lifetime companion Anna Elvira Bliss, she opened and operated schools in South Africa. In spite of social opposition, they developed the only women’s college in that nation Huguenot University College.

1887: (A First) Susanna Medora Salter becomes the first elected woman mayor in America in Argonia, Kansas.

April 3

1972: (Court Ruling) Unwed fathers have the right to prove their fitness as parents and custody under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

1984: (Court Ruling) A Federal Judge ordered the U.S. government to pay women in the U.S. Civil Service the same amount that they were paying men when they had the same duties and responsibilities. There had been as much as a 30 percent differential.

April 1

1866: (Birthday) Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge born in Lexington, Kentucky. Breckinridge was the first woman to pass the bar exam in Kentucky. She was also a welfare worker who led the social work education movement in the United States favoring economic equality for women and blacks.

1872: (Birthday) Kerstin Hesselgren, Swedish sociologist, first woman factory inspector and first woman to be a member of both houses of the Swedish Riksdag (1921) born in Sweden. In 1931 when she introduced the subject of the legal status of women in the League of Nations, it “caused no little amusement among the men.” She prevailed, however, and the committee studied such things as women’s right to vote, education, access to professions as well as the state of a married woman’s right to her earnings, a separate name, ability to sign contracts - none of which were (and some of which are still not) universal.

1872: (Birthday) Aleksandra Mikhaylovna Kollontai, Soviet diplomat, born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Kollontai became the first woman to formally serve as a minister or ambassador to a foreign country. She was an original Bolshevik leader. Her public affairs with a several men caused the United States to formally refuse her passage through this country on her way to Mexico in the 1930’s.

1895: (Birthday) Alberta Hunter, one of the great ladies of the golden age of jazz, singer and composer, gave up a very successful career to become a nurse. She practiced for 20 years and then made a show business comeback at age 82 packing them into New York nightclubs.

1902: (Birthday) Gladys Anderson Emerson born in Caldwell, Kansas. Emerson isolated vitamin E from wheat germ oil, authority on vitamin E functions, pioneer explorer of relationship between nutrition and cancer.

1905: (Birthday) Clara Hale, social activist; known as Mother Hale at Harlem’s Hale House, born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

1931: (A First) Virne “Jackie” Mitchell signs to pitch for the Chattanooga Baseball Club in Tennessee, becoming the first woman with a professional baseball contract.

1940: (Birthday) Wangari Maathai, Kenyan human rights and enviornmental activist, born in Nyeri. Maathai organized victims of violence in the Kenyan war, organized the planting of trees in the Green Belt movement, first woman to earn a Ph.D. and chair a department at the University of Nairoba.

1986: In Washington State 35,000 employees in female dominated jobs began receiving $41 million in pay equity payments.

March 31

1776: Abigail Adams wrote her husband when he was in Philadlphia helping plan the Declaration of Independence. Her “Remember the Ladies” letter was but one of the now famous letters sent by Adams to her husband:

1889: (Birthday) Muriel Hazel Wright, historian and writer, born. Wright helped organize the Choctaw Advisory Council in 1934 and fought for just recompense for Native Americans following Oklahoma’s statehood.

1895: (Birthday) Lizzie Miles, popular black singer in New Orleans and Los Angeles in the 1920’s and 30’s, born in New Orleans, Louisianna. Miles developed a style known as “gumbo French” jazz.

1966: (A First) The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare approves distribution of contraceptives and birth control information under a number of federal programs.

March 30

1867: (Birthday) Jessie Donaldson Hodder, prison reformer, born. When her common-law husband rejected her and their two children, found work in the New York State prison system and developed reforms that became the model for the nation by giving women prisoners dignity, a chance to reform, education, etc.

1882: (Birthday) Melanie Klein, pioneer child psychologist, born in Vienna, Austria. Klein believed cruelty against the mother affected the child much more than Freud and his school of followers had thought.

March 29

1843: (Birthday) Frances Wisebart Jacobs born in Kentucky. Jacobs began the kindergarten movement in Colorado. She is the only woman among the 16 Colorado pioneers recognized in stained glass portraits at the state capitol.

1932: (A First) Theodora Chan Wan is elected president of the newly formed Chinese Women’s Association.

March 28

1515: (Birthday) Saint Teresa of Avila, first women doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, mystic, writer, and originator of the Carmelite Reform born in Avila, Spain.

1743: (Birthday) Princess Ekaterina Dashkova born. She is best known for helping the coup d’etat that seated Catherine II the Great and supervising the writing of the first Russian dictionary.

1841: Dorothea Dix tours a Boston prison and decides to devote her life to prison and poorhouse reform.

1979: (A First) Margaret Thatcher of the Conservative Party becomes England’s first woman prime minister.

March 27

1868: (Birthday) Patty Smith Hill, kindergarten pioneer, first woman named professor emeritus at Columbia University. Inventor of the Patty Hill construction blocks with which children can build structures large enough to play in. Introduced flexible, natural methods and by teaching teachers caused extensive permanent change in our educational system.

March 26

1930: (Birthday) Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to be appointed an associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, born in El Paso, Texas. O’Connor was an Arizona lawyer and judge and served in the state Senate from 1969 until 1974, becoming majority leader - the first woman to hold such a position. She was elected an Arizona Superior Court judge 1974, and appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals 1979. President Ronald Reagan, under great pressure from women’s groups as well as his own party, appointed O’Connor and she was sworn in 09-25-81. Expected to be a strict Republican right-winger and seen as the deciding anti-choice vote, she amazed everyone by being the deciding vote to uphold a woman’s right to choose and confirm that an embryo or fetus is not a child.

1985: the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a lower court decision that an Oklahoma law allowing a teacher’s firing for speaking on gay rights is unconstitutional.

March 25

1911: Fire breaks out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, killing 145 women workers; some leap to their death from factory windows because the doors are locked.

1934: (Birthday) Gloria Steinem, author, feminist activist, and editor and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, born in Toledo, Ohio.