You might have heard of George Washington Carver and Neil deGrasse Tyson. But what about Mae Jemison? Or Percy Julian? Meet 10 African-American scientists who have made the world a better place for all people. Read on…
In order to be more accurate, DuVernay fleshed it out with the important women who bolstered the movement — the women who helped shape important world events, but get lost in the narrow, unforgiving filter of time.
Everyone knows the boldfaced icons of the civil rights movement: MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X. However, there are so many names deserving of praise.
While some women loom large in the canon — Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks among them — there are many whose voices and actions were just as powerful.
1. Dorothy Height
Dubbed the “godmother of the civil rights movement” by President Obama in 2010, Dorothy Height was a leader to be reckoned with. President of the National Council for Negro Women for 40 years, Height was a contemporary of Martin Luther King, Jr., even standing on the stage as he gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. She was also a staunch feminist, organizing workshops to assist freedom schools and provide for low-income families.
2. Diane Nash
Diane Nash was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960. She coordinated and monitored lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides. Nash was also one of the organizers who brought MLK, Jr. to Montogomery, Alabama to support the Riders.
Nash was prominently featured in Selma, played by actress Tessa Thompson.
3. Amelia Boynton
An iconic image from Bloody Sunday — the violent attack on civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery on Marcy 7, 1965 — is of a black woman beaten unconscious, laying in the street. That woman was Amelia Boynton. Before that day, Boynton and her husband, Samuel, sheltered young activists, such as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was one of the leaders who convinced MLK, Jr. to come to Selma in the first place (a plotline that’s also fleshed out in the film Selma).
She was also actually the first African-American woman to run as a Democratic congressional candidate in Alabama. Though she didn’t win, she managed to grasp 11% of the vote.
4. Daisy Bates
A leader who wanted to end segregation in Arkansas, Daisy Bates’ most high profile achievement was as the guiding light of the Little Rock Nine. She led the first nine African-American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957, after first taking the school to court in 1954 for denying black students, even after the Supreme Court called for an end to segregation. Bates was also the presidentof the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP.
5. Fannie Lou Hamer
Famous speeches from the civil rights era tend to begin and end with MLK, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. However, Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention was its own force of nature.
The civil rights activist fought for the right to vote, encouraging and recruitingpeople in her native Mississippi and all throughout the South. At one point, her activism got her arrested and thrown in Montgomery County Jail, where she and her comrades were viciously beaten. She continued on, helping to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which raised national attention on the deep discrimination in the South.
Her true spotlight came at the 1964 convention, where she spoke of her harrowing experiences in Mississippi and chastised leaders for ignoring the way black people were murdered for trying to exercise their rights. “Is this America?” she asked.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, not happy about her testimony’s potential to stir controversy, called a last-minute press conference that effectively distracted the press and any live TV coverage Hamer was getting. However, his attempt eventually backfired, and Hamer’s stirring speech was aired on news programs anyway, sparking big support for the MFDP. Listen to her speech here.
6. Jo Ann Robinson
After Rosa Parks was arrested for famously not giving up her bus seat, Jo-Ann Robinson jumped in to organize support for the Montgomery Bus Boycotts in 1955. She created thousands of flyers spreading the message of the boycotts to African-Americans all over Alabama. She was a crucial member of the movement, also assisting with the carpools that took people to and from work during the boycotts.
7. Yuri Kochiyama
Immortalized in a 1965 photo as the woman supporting Malcolm X’s head as he lay dying after being shot at a Harlem ballroom, Yuri Kochiyama was an ally and leader in her own right. The Japanese activist met X in 1963 after getting involved in the civil rights movement in Harlem, using her home as a hub for activists. “Our house felt like it was the movement 24/7,” her eldest daughter, Audee Kochiyama-Holman, told NPR.
8. Septima Clark
Once dubbed the “Mother of the Movement” by none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, Septima Clark was a teacher and leader in the education realm. The South Carolina native began volunteering for the NAACP in 1919, going on to lead civil rights workshops in Tennessee.
She worked with Thurgood Marshall on getting equal pay for black teachers, and even accompanied MLK (who simply insisted) to his Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.
So, get this: the Winchesters forgot that yarrow is used in summoning spells.
Does Mommy Dearest not want the Winchesters playing with her Fergus?
Yeah, I was wondering about this connection. Was it a purposeful call-back? Or if Adam Glass – who I understand admits he has not watched the first 5 seasons – didn’t know about the connection between yellow yarrow and demon summoning and deals.
If it was purposeful, then, yeah, I can definitely see a connection being drawn between deals-demons and witches-deals, and all associated with Rowena.
Adam and Eve were standing on the bank of a brook, and before them lay the corpse of Abel, who had been killed by Cain. As they sat there, not knowing what they should do with the corpse, suddenly a little bird fell from a nearby tree. The little bird was still very young and could not fly. The fall killed it. Adam and Eve looked at the dead bird and saw that it was a raven. Soon the old raven flew by, and when he saw that his young one was dead, he scratched a hole in the ground with his feet, and laid it inside. Then he scratched the hole full and flew away. Adam and Eve observed all this and followed the raven’s example. They made a hole in the earth, laid Abel’s corpse in it, and covered it with earth. This was the first human grave. (source)
In the Qur’an, it was Cain who buried Abel, and he was prompted to do so by a single raven scratching the ground, on God’s command. The Qur’an states that upon seeing the raven, Cain regretted his action. Instead of cursing Cain, God chose to create a law against murder since he had not done so before (source)
I thought that these were all the colors I’d needs. Ha!
This is what I ended up with:
So, you may remember Sam’s Blue Period.
What I discovered with this piece is that jagged, overlapping, loose herringbone stitches worked best. I could lay down stitches one color section at a time and go back and fill in overlapping stitches to soften the transitions between sections. There’s not a whole lot of color range so that seemed to create the best transition between colors and convey that sense of three dimensionality.
I’m finding that each piece has it’s own subtleties of what stitches and approach to layering work best.
Brothers Embrace
Here’s the screen cap I was working off of.
Manipulated in photoshop like Sam’s Blue Period to emphasize specific areas. For this one I wanted bright, warm, sun-like gold colors.
Which I promptly covered up with flat, boring, loose herringbone-ish stitches.
Yuck.
I also discovered that this was such a large “canvas” that just suggesting form made the stitched area just look like a big ole blob. Layering color on top of the base stitching it to capture the sense of dimension and scattered colors was problematic. It worked, eventually, but only after breaking and bending needles and drawing blood. :))
So, an approach that’s organized around laying down color first and not organized around creating form from the beginning didn’t work. I hope this makes sense.
So, instead, smaller x-stitches and working within a smaller subset of areas when laying down the first layer seemed to be much more effective.
This was what I ended up with and it just wasn’t quite right.
Nothing like another eye on a project. I got a beta from Meesasometimes and she noted that some strategic use of contrast would help punch up the image.
Here’s a pic of my setup for working. If you’re not watching Mark Watches Supernatural, you should be. 🙂
I’ve been enjoying reading fic written for this year’s SPNJ2BB when it caught my attention that this submission (A Little Bear and His Wolf) was accompanied by embroidered artwork by Meesasometimes. What followed was a brain implosion that derailed all other projects.
First step, photo manipulation:
Here’s the base photo:
With a darkened background and addition of lighting and contrast. I can’t tell you how long that took. Let’s just say that Photoshop and I are not friends and leave it at that.
And then many and various attempts to manipulate color:
Nope.
Nope.
Eegads. Just, no.
Before settling on:
Finally!
On to putting it in fiber.
I ran into Lauren DiCioccio’s work while looking for inspiration.
All kinds of fun things happening with color and texture. You can find more of her work here.
I thought I might give her approach of doing a segment at a time a try.
Rejected embroidery attempt #1:
Yuck. This attempt was printed on card stock fused to black silk. I’ve rejected it for a variety of reasons, one of which is because it’s just flat and uninteresting without the variety of color DiCioccio uses, but also, so not worth the effort of trying to push a needle through cardboard.
Completely forgot just how sheer silk is and promptly attempted fusing it to an underlying fabric to give it strength. Ha! No pictures of that failure. There’s definitely a loss of definition when printing on fabric to begin with. This just looked like I dropped it in a mud puddle.
So, on to my next attempt, which involved lots of very fine pins and a steady hand sewing the sheer printed charmeuse onto a more solid raw silk weave background.
Looked around for other inspiration for embroidered portraits and rediscovered Cayce Zavaglia’s work:
That led me to embroidery attempt #3, currently in process here:
Sam’ Blue Period
Zavaglia has a painterly approach to her work which I can in no way match. I know absolutely nothing about using layers of color in that way. My medium usually involves taking two dimensions and manipulating them into a third, like ceramics, silver-smithing/jewelry making, and many and various forms of fiber. I suck at drawing and painting. My attempts are far too literal and bound to the concrete when I attempt to work in one set of dimensions to pull it off.
That said, I’m learning a ton about the kinds of stitches that work best to get the texture I want (a very loose and random herringbone, btw). The glow of silk contrasted with how the stitching catches both light and shadow is growing on me. The material is a joy to work with. I am also growing more confident in my ability to layer colors atop each other rather than relying on a paint by numbers kind of an approach.
My next challenge is to fill in a whole section with one base color and add other colors atop it to highlight and shade. I think I’ll do that with Sam’s forehead. It’s a smooth and broad enough plane to be rather forgiving, I think. 🙂
This is something that I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, and I think I’m finally in a place where I can express it specifically.
I came to Supernatural in late Season 1 because it was a story about two brothers who saw family and each other through the lens of their father’s values. John defined the family and the roles that were served in it. In the first few seasons we saw two brothers discovering that they weren’t quite what they had thought, that there was more to them that they could discover about each other once they were out from under John’s authority. They were starting to reconnect. It gave me hope in the belief that we can heal each other. That we can remain true to who we are, be valued for it; that we don’t have to sacrifice large parts of ourselves in order to be accepted and loved.
Whether or not you agree that Dean’s behavior has been abusive, at some point in the last season his behavior tipped over a very scary line. While I can sympathize with his heat of the moment decision to more or less violate Sam’s DNR wishes, I have a much harder time with the gas lighting, ongoing violation of Sam’s body and memory, assumption of control over Sam’s will by not allowing him to decide, and only looking for a way to overpower Gadreel’s control when DEAN decided it that what he wanted out of the situation wasn’t enough to justify the escalating risk. That’s just far too much of a pattern of treating Sam like an object and less like a person.
And that assumption that you are something that belongs to me, that it is okay to ask you to sacrifice your autonomy to preserve this relationship is one of the primary beliefs that lay the foundation for abuse. Ironically, it’s also the belief that underlies what John asked Dean to do, to sacrifice essential parts of who he was in order to preserve the family. It’s how John defined family for Dean and why Dean defines family the way he does. It is both why Sam and Dean have survived this long and why they are as broken as they are. So many images of double-edged swords in this season. I can only hope this is the reason why we’re seeing them.
But at this point, two things have happened that discourage me. In the past couple seasons some of the lessons have been quite the opposite of what we were being shown early on.
Sam experienced the one thing that so many of us who have been physically or emotionally abused fear. That if we speak up and insist on our right to be ourselves, to not allow ourselves to be violated to meet someone else’s needs, it will destroy the family. What happened in season 9, is that essentially Sam sticks up for his autonomy, his right to hold people responsible for facilitating his physical and psychological violation, and his family is destroyed. Dean goes off the rails, spirals off into despair, shuts Sam down and out, and puts himself in a situation with no support and gets himself killed.
As well, whether the writers intended it or not, now we have season 10 where Sam’s POV, his willingness to fight for the right to not be lied to, to call Dean out when Dean needs someone to call him out, in the same way that every other female character this season has called Dean out, has essentially disappeared. In it’s place, Sam is being incredibly emotionally supportive of Dean. That’s lovely, in it’s way, but it’s coming of the cost of Sam’s autonomy, again.
It’s like we’re rehashing the message that the best way to heal someone who has done awful things to you is to just accept them and love on them. WHICH IS SO WRONG. This is exactly the message that someone who has been abused gets all the time. It’s the message that YOU are the one who is responsible for the relationship and the psychological state of the other person in it. That hope that maybe you can do something about it and heal the other person. Maybe if I could just love you enough, put aside my needs, thoughts, and feelings enough, you’ll be healed. It’s essentially the very belief that John reinforced as being the foundation of family that lead to where we are. You must sacrifice essential parts of yourself in order to be in this relationship. And if you don’t, the family will be destroyed.
Does Dean need to forgive himself? Oh yes, very much so. But he also needs to be held responsible. Does Dean have a huge emotional hole that needs healing because he sacrificed so much of who he was for so long? Yep, but if it comes at the cost of someone else’s autonomy, then we’ve just robbed Peter to pay Paul and changed nothing of significance.
I found it to be kinda “meh.” It didn’t really move the plot forward. Didn’t really have anything interesting to add to characterization. Not a terribly interesting MOTW. A couple moments for Dean-fans, but that’s about it, really.
Boo that’s unfortunate. This season is pretty disappointing 😦
BUT I’M REALLY HAPPY YOU RESPONDED 🙂
Yer welcome. 🙂
Yeah, I feel like Carver’s show running shifted Supernatural from the heart to the head. Lots of complex interweaving references in the narrative. There are so many parallels, symbols, and references to cultural icons that it keeps us meta writings hopping. But it feels like an intellectual exercise. A superficial display of what should, intellectually, be very powerful themes, but in execution feels emotionally shallow.
Hearseeno 