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.

(Bean returns from her trip to the tropical forests and alpine peaks of London, Canada tonight, and so “On this day” will return to its regular host tomorrow.)

February 18

1851: (Birth) Ida Husted Harper, official publicist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA, see below) and collaborating author of History of Women’s Suffrage, born in Fairfield, Indiana. In 1897, she moved into the home of Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, NY after Anthony requested that Husted become her official biographer. The first two volumes of the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony appeared in 1898; a third was published in 1908. She also collaborated with Anthony on the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage in 1902 (the first 3 volumes were written by Anthony). In 1916 Carrie Chapman Catt asked Harper to head the newly formed Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education within the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1922 she published the fifth and sixth volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, bringing the coverage up to 1920. A prolific writer and supporter of women’s rights, Husted edited columns for the New York Sunday Sun and Harper’s Bazaar and was a correspondent for major newspapers in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York City and served as chair of the press committee of the International Council of Women in 1899-1902 and was a delegate to council conventions in London in 1899 and Berlin in 1904.

1874: (Birth) Mary Dewson, economist and activist. Dewson helped establish the US’s first minimum wage law, in Massachusetts in 1913.

1878: (Birth) Blanche Ames, artist, women’s rights activist, botanist, author, inventor, and political cartoonist, among other achievements.

1890: The National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association combine to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president.

1931: (Birth) Toni Morrison, nobel and pulitzer prize-winning author.

1934: (Birth) Audré Lorde, black lesbian poet and activist. Lorde, a wonderful public speaker, had a knack for telling quotes: “Silence has never brought us anything of worth.” “Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.” “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

edited by bean to add a few important events not mentioned earlier

February 17

1870: (A First): Esther Hobart Morris, suffrage pioneer and later delegate to the National Suffrage Convention in Cleveland, Ohio (1895), is appointed justice of the peace of South Pass City, Wyoming Territory, becoming the first woman the first woman to hold judicial office in the modern world. Mrs. Morris served 8½ months and handled 26 cases, none of which were ever overturned on appeal.

1897: (birth) Pioneering vocalist Marian Anderson, the first African-American to break through the “glass ceiling” keeping non-whites off opera stages. Anderson was known for her dignity, for her courage in breaking barriers, and for one of the greatest singing voices ever heard. Singer Jessye Norman described first hearing Anderson sing: “I listened, thinking, ‘This can’t be just a voice, so rich and beautiful.’ It was a revelation. And I wept.”

In 1955, rather late in her career, Anderson was the first African-American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. As Rosalyn Story wrote:

edited by bean for additional event not previously included

Februrary 15

1820: (Birth) Susan B. Anthony, women’s rights leader, who with Elizabeth Cady Stanton led the fight for votes for women for many years.

1859: (A First) Federal Law, promoted by Belva Lockwood, gives women who practice law access to the Supreme Court bar.

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February 14

1847 : (Birth) Reverend Anna Howard Shaw, suffragette leader, one of the first woman ordained as a Methodist minister, and president of the American Woman Suffrage Association for many years. “Nothing bigger can come to a human being than to love a great Cause more than life itself, and to have the privilege throughout life of working for that Cause.”

1920: The League of Women Voters is formed.

1985: The U.S. Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Jews votes to accept women as rabbis.

edited by bean for correction

1870: (A First) Wyoming’s Esther Morris is appointed a Justice of the Peace - the first woman to serve in that capacity in the USA. Morris was also an active women’s rights campaigner.

1906: (Birth) Pauline Frederick Robbins, pioneering female TV and radio journalist. Among other firsts, she was the first woman to moderate a presidential debate.

1943: (Birth): Feminist scholar and theologian Elaine Pagels.

1945: (Death) Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah Women, the largest Jewish organization in American history. As the founder and director of the Youth Aliyah Agency, Szold was responsible for the rescue of over 22,000 Jewish children from the Nazis.

1962: (A First) Eleanor Roosevelt becomes first chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women.

edited by bean for corrections

(Bean’s away this week, enjoying the tropical sunshine and the palm trees of London, Canada, so I’m subbing for her - Amp.)

February 12

1855: (Birthday) Fannie Williams, co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women born in Brockport, NY. The NACW still exists today.

1909: (A First) The first meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is held; members include Mary Church Terrell, Jane Addams, and Ida B. Wells Barnett, Joesphine Ruffin, and Inez Millholland Boissevain.

1992: Following a seven-year court battle, Sharon Kowalski is finally brought home by her life partner (and now legal guardian), Karen Thompson. Kowalski, who had been severely injured in an accident, was the subject of a custody suit between Thompson and Kowalski’s estranged father.

2004: (A first) City officials in San Francisco issued a license and performed a wedding ceremony for a lesbian couple. This appears to be the first legal same-sex wedding in the United States. The couple, Phyllis Lyon, 79, and Del Martin, 83, are longtime lesbian-rights activists, who have been together for over half a century.

edited by bean to add previously missing information and to make one correction.