Child Poverty
In 2020, when the start of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a holy season like no other, Pope Francis published an Easter Sunday letter directed to movements and organizations working for justice for people with low incomes and those experiencing poverty.
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act."
The night before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his prophetic final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a speech he almost didn’t give.
As Women’s History Month draws to a close, there’s been one more broad attack on methods of sharing our nation’s history: on March 27, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order affecting the 21 museums and 14 education and research centers that are part of the Smithsonian Institution, including the American Women’s History Museum, which is still years away from breaking ground on its official site, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Zoo.
An Idaho middle school teacher recently made headlines for refusing to take down a classroom poster she said she was told was “controversial” and “an opinion.”
Forty-five years ago, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation designating March 2-8, 1980, as National Women’s History Week.
Sixty years ago, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams set out on a nonviolent march with a group of 600 men, women, young people, and children headed from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery.
Harvard Medical School scholar Dr. Alvin Poussaint, who passed away February 24, was a renowned psychiatrist and educator whose research included studying the ways racism and discrimination impact African Americans’ self-esteem and mental health, including Black children and young people.
As a child, the great theologian Howard Thurman treasured spending time alone under a beloved oak tree in his yard: “I could sit my back against its trunk, and feel the same peace that would come to me in my bed at night.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, “the Father of Black History,” was born in Virginia in 1875 to parents who had both formerly been enslaved. When his family moved to Huntington, West Virginia, they were close to Frederick Douglass High School, one of the rare high schools open for Black students, but he remained largely self-taught while working in the local coal mines to help support his family first.