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Feb 28
Pauli Murray’s exemplary career as a civil rights lawyer began with a seat on a bus in the whites-only section and a subsequent arrest. The experience of being arrested drove her to begin work with the Workers’ Defense League, which propelled her dream of law school, resulting in a law degree from Howard University, a…
Feb 21
A cowboy hat, pink sunglasses and fake eyelashes…those were the trademark accessories for Florynce Kennedy, a woman who was recognized equally by her staple uniform as she was by her activism. Growing up in Missouri during a time when the Ku Klux Klan was locally operating, she was no stranger to local prejudice and her…
Feb 16
Recognizing that abortions had been illegally performed in hospitals under the guise of “therapeutic abortions” but always attached to a large check, Dr. Edgar Bass Keemer, Jr. was the sole Detroit physician who provided abortions to poor black and white women who were welfare recipients or Medicaid card holders. The son of a doctor and…
Feb 08
“Intersectionality.” The term, coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, has become a hot topic and a rallying cry for those on the front lines of the fight for human rights. With an undergraduate from Cornell, a JD from Harvard Law School, and an LLM from University of Wisconsin, she began her career at the UCLA School of…
Nov 30
Our final feature for #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth honors the resistors fighting for their sacred land in North Dakota. After centuries of displacing and murdering the indigenous people of the United States, the U.S government have come into two different agreements with members of different tribes under the Treaty of Fort Laramie: 1851 and 1868. In 1851, the…
Nov 24
Our third feature for Native American Heritage Month is the Rosebud Sioux, queer activist, writer, and speaker Coya White-Hat Artichoker. Born and raised on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, activism came naturally for Coya, as she has been involved since the age of 15. A lifelong feminist, Coya delves into unlearning sexuality and bridging…
Nov 17
Our second feature for #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth is the environmental and Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke. Growing up, she was raised in a town in Oregon where neither Jews (her mother’s heritage) nor Native Indians surrounded her, and began to understand what it meant to be “othered”. She wasn’t enrolled in the Ojibwe Nation (her father’s tribe) at the…
Nov 10
RHAP’s first feature of #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth is the resilient Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010), the first woman principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, which is the second largest tribe in the United States. Born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to a Cherokee father and Dutch-Irish mother, her family relocated to San Francisco under the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Relocation Program.…
Oct 13
Sylvia Rivera was an Afro-Puerto Rican and Venezuelan pioneer of the modern-day LGBT movement. Along with longtime friend and mentor Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera was one of the individuals leading the charge the night the Stonewall Riots began on June 28, 1969 (though her presence on the first night is still heavily disputed, her contributions…
Oct 03
October 3rd marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Rosie Jimenez, a young working class Chicana woman from McAllen, Texas who was the first victim of the Hyde Amendment. A few months prior, the legislation was enacted, barring federal funding from paying for abortion through Medicaid, except for cases of rape, incest, or when the…