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Gwen’s Take \| Happy 100th Birthday, Rosa Parks Gwen's Take We know instinctively that not everything we come to believe as history is true. But we want it to be. We want to believe that a timid seamstress sat down on a city bus in December, 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man because she was just too tired. We want to believe that she was a solitary heroine who single-handedly desegregated public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama overnight. And we want to believe that she spent the rest of her days comfortably, secure in the knowledge that her meek, nonviolent approach to injustice made all the difference.
“The Best Medicine I Know” Essential Reads Exactly 48 years ago this week, the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate, after overcoming the longest filibuster in history. Nearly 100 years after the Civil War ended, the bill at last promised to deliver legal equality for all Americans, and though it aroused enormous controversy and sliced straight into the nation’s original sin, it won lopsided approval by a vote of 73 to 27, with overwhelming Republican support.
PBS NewsHour: Obama, Civil Rights Leaders Formally Dedicate MLK Memorial Web content Tens of thousands of people gathered Sunday in Washington to formally dedicate the National Mall's newest destination, a memorial honoring the life of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Gwen Ifill reports.
Remembering Dorothy Height Gwen's Take I was always thoroughly intimidated in Dorothy Height's presence. It's not because she was regal or holier-than-thou. It's that she was neither of those things. And somehow, she should have been. Could easily have been.

Gwen’s Take | Happy 100th Birthday, Rosa Parks

Gwen's Take

We know instinctively that not everything we come to believe as history is true. But we want it to be.

We want to believe that a timid seamstress sat down on a city bus in December, 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man because she was just too tired.

We want to believe that she was a solitary heroine who single-handedly desegregated public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama overnight.

And we want to believe that she spent the rest of her days comfortably, secure in the knowledge that her meek, nonviolent approach to injustice made all the difference.

“The Best Medicine I Know”

Essential Reads

Exactly 48 years ago this week, the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate, after overcoming the longest filibuster in history. Nearly 100 years after the Civil War ended, the bill at last promised to deliver legal equality for all Americans, and though it aroused enormous controversy and sliced straight into the nation’s original sin, it won lopsided approval by a vote of 73 to 27, with overwhelming Republican support.

PBS NewsHour: Obama, Civil Rights Leaders Formally Dedicate MLK Memorial

Web content

Tens of thousands of people gathered Sunday in Washington to formally dedicate the National Mall's newest destination, a memorial honoring the life of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Gwen Ifill reports.

Remembering Dorothy Height

Gwen's Take

I was always thoroughly intimidated in Dorothy Height's presence.

It's not because she was regal or holier-than-thou. It's that she was neither of those things. And somehow, she should have been. Could easily have been.