Daily Archives: October 7, 2011
Rev. Jesse Jackson Honors the Late Civil Rights Stalwarts Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell
This week, the Civil Rights movement lost two of its torch-bearers. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth died at the age 89 and Derrick Bell died at the age of 80. Rev. Shuttlesworth led the struggle to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. He was the last of the civil rights movement’s “Big Three,” founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy. A legal scholar and civil rights activist, Derrick Bell sought to expose American racism through his books, articles and career sacrifices. As the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, Bell gave up his position in protest of the school’s allegedly discriminatory hiring practice. For more on the lives and legacies of Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell, we’re joined by Rev. Jesse Jackson, president and founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
Watch Interview at DemocracyNow.org.
Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman – NYTimes.com
LONDON — The Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 was awarded on Friday to three women from Africa and the Arab world in acknowledgment of their nonviolent role in promoting peace, democracy and gender equality. The winners were President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia — the first woman to be elected president in modern Africa — her compatriot, the peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner.
They were the first women to win the prize since Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who died last month, was named as the laureate in 2004.
