Those who seek temporary security rather than basic liberty deserve neither...My bones are tired. Not tired of struggling, but tired of oppression.Our purpose in life is to leave a legacy for our children and our children's children. For this reason, we must correct history that at present denies our humanity and self-respect.–Queen Mother MooreQueen Mother Moore was born Audley Moore in New Iberia, Louisiana, and acquired the appellation Queen Mother on her first trip to Ghana, where she attended the funeral of Kwame Nkrumah in 1972. She was in the forefront of the struggle for 77 years.Her family was scarred by virulent racism. Her great-grandmother was raped by her slave master and her grandfather was lynched. Forced to quit school in the fourth grade, she studied to be a hairdresser to take care of her sisters. In the 1920's, she traveled around the country only to learn that racism was not confined to the South. She finally settled in Harlem where she organized, mobilized and demonstrated against racist oppression and imperialism directed towards Africa and people of African descent. She was locked into perpetual struggle against black oppression at all levels, joining numerous groups and founding a number of her own.Initially inspired by Marcus Garvey's emphasis on African pride and culture, she waged battle on the Black Nationalist, Communist and Pan-Africanist fronts. In keeping with her credo, "There was nothing left to do but struggle," her list of activities defy enumeration.Impressed by the Communist Party's role as the vanguard in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, she joined the party. However, she left when she realized that the party could or would not translate its ideas about black self-determination into action.In 1955, she joined a small band of activists demanding reparations for slavery and its insidious legacy which has permeated black lives up to this day. During Black History Month 2002, on February 6, the Queen Mother Moore Reparations Resolution for Descendants of Enslaved Africans in New York City bill was submitted to the City Council.March 2,We SaluteIda B. Wells-BarnettSade Turnipseed as Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a newspaper editor and journalist who went on to lead the American anti-lynching crusade. Working closely with both African-American community leaders and American suffragists, Wells worked to raise gender issues within the "Race Question" and race issues within the "Woman Question." Wells was born the daughter of slaves in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. During Reconstruction, she was educated at a Missouri Freedman's School, Rust University, and began teaching school at the age of fourteen. In 1884, she moved to Memphis, Tennesee, where she continued to teach while attending Fisk University during summer sessions. In Tennessee, especially, she bristled at the poor treatment she and other African-Americans received. After she was forcibly removed from her seat for refusing to mov e to a "colored car" on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, her suit against the railroad for violating her civil rights was rejected by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1877. This event and the legal struggle which followed it, however, encouraged Wells to continue to oppose racial injustice toward African-Americans. She took up journalism in addition to schoolteaching, and in 1891, after she had written several newspaper articles critical of the educational opportunities afforded African-American students, her teaching contract was not renewed. Effectively barred from teaching, she invested her savings in a part-interest in the Memphis Free Speech newspaper.In 1892, Wells wrote a scathing series of editorials following the lynching of three prominent African-American Memphis businessmen, friends of Wells's. In the aftermath of the lynching and her outspoken criticism of it, her newspaper's office was sacked. Wells then moved to New York City, where she continued to write editorials and exposés against lynching, which was at an epidemic level in the years after Reconstruction. Joining the staff of The New York Age, Wells became a much-sought-after lecturer and organizer for anti-lynching societies made up of men and women of all races. She travelled throughout the U.S. and went to Britain twice to speak about anti-lynching activities.In 1895 Wells married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer, public official, and publisher of the Conservator. She settled in Chicago and adopted as her married n ame Ida Wells-Barnett. After 1895 she limited her activities to Chicago, but she was quite active in Chicago's rapidly-growing African-American community. In Chicago she wrote for the Conservator, published a book-length expose of lynching (The Red Record, 1895), and organized Chicago women regarding several causes, from anti-lynching to suffrage. From 1898 to 1902, Wells served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council, and in 1910 she founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League. Throughout her life, Wells was militant in her demands for equality and justice for African-Americans, and insisted that the African-American community must win justice through its own efforts. She attended the 1909 meeting of the Niagara Movement, but she would not take part in the less radical National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which grew out of the conference. After a life of organizing and writing, she died in Chicago on March 25, 1931.March 3We SaluteHarriet Tubman
Reverently called "Moses" by the hundreds of slaves she helped to freedom and the thousands of others she inspired, Harriet Tubman became the most famous leader of the Underground Railroad to aid slaves escaping to free states or Canada.Born into slavery in Bucktown, Maryland, Tubman escaped her own chains in 1849 to20find safe haven in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She did so through the underground railroad, an elaborate and secret series of houses, tunnels, and roads set up by abolitionists and former slaves. "When I found I had crossed the [Mason-Dixon] line, I looked at my hands to see if I were the same person, " Tubman later wrote. ". . . the sun came like gold through the tree and over the field and I felt like I was in heaven." She would spend the rest of her life helping other slaves escape to freedom.Her early life as a slave had been filled with abuse; at the age of 13, when she attempted to save another slave from punishment, she was struck in the head with a two-pound iron weight. She would suffer periodic blackouts from the injury for the rest of her life.After her escape, Tubman worked as a maid in Philadelphia and joined the large and active abolitionist group in the city. In 1850, after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it illegal to help a runaway slave, Tubman decided to join the Underground Railroad. Her first expedition took place in 1851, when she managed to thread her way through the backwoods to Baltimore and return to the North with her sister and her sister's children. From that time until the onset of the Civil War, Tubman traveled to the South about 18 times and helped close to 300 slaves escape. In 1857, Tubman led her parents to freedom in Auburn, New York, which became her home as well.
Tubman was never caught and never lost a slave to the Southern militia, and as her reputation grew, so too did the desire among Southerners to put a stop to her activities; rewards for her capture once totaled about $40,000. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse , scout, and sometime-spy for the Union army, mainly in South Carolina. She also took part in a military campaign that resulted in the rescue of 756 slaves and destroyed millions of dollars ' worth of enemy property.After the war, Tubman returned to Auburn and continued her involvement in social issues, including the women's rights movement. In 1908, she established a home in Auburn for elderly and indigent blacks that later became known as the Harriet Tubman Home. She died on March 10, 1913, at the approximate age of 93.Harriet Tubman Art PrintThe Official Million Woman Movement Continuing the LegacyBuilding the first global Movement for Women and Girls of African descent, worldwide.Become a part of Herstory, Join TodayMWM National Membership Drive Feb. 28 - March 31, 2009officialmwm@yahoo.com
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