Happy 50th Independence Day, Jamaica!

Like me and many of my friends, 1962 is a special year for the island nation of Jamaica..  It was 50 years ago on this date that a ceremony occurred signaling that the Jamaican Independence Act was now in force, it was no longer a British colony after 307 years of British rule and from this day forward Jamaica would handle its business as an independent nation.
 
At a few moments before midnight on August 5, 1962 at the National Stadium in Kingston the Union Jack was lowered for the last time and replaced with the brand new black, gold and green flag of a newly independent nation.  .

It triggered several joyous days of celebration across the island before the day to day business of running their nation began with the August 7 opening of the first Jamaican parliament.

Like all nations in their post-independence day phase Jamaica has had their good times and bad times, but the 2.8 million people who live in the third largest Anglophone country in the Western Hemisphere and their people across the Jamaican Diaspora love their country, are proud of its accomplishments, and proud of their Jamaican heritage.

They wish to use this 50th Anniversary year to reflect on Jamaica's past half century, learn the lessons from them, dream of a better Jamaica and get to work building that nation for future generations. 

The people of Jamaica are also determined to imagine a better future for themselves and their country and work hard to achieve it.


And now, please rise for the Jamaican national anthem, a song we US track fans got way too familiar with during the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and are hearing again during these London Games.






Seriously, to all my TransGriot readers there, happy 50th Independence Day, Jamaica!.

Title IX 40th Anniversary

"While the impact of this amendment would be far-reaching, it is not a panacea. It is, however, an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs—an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work."

Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN), February 28, 1972 Senate floor remarks during the introduction of Title IX


Today is the 40th anniversary of a groundbreaking piece of legislation that opened doors for American women in education and most visibly in sports.  It is the Patsy T. Mink Equality in Education Act, better known as Title XI and it passed Congress and became law 40 years ago today..

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity   

In the second decade of the 21st century we take it for granted women getting advanced degrees, but in 1972 women only received 9% of all medical degrees earned nationwide, 7% of all law degrees and 25% of all doctoral ones. Title IX was designed to change that.

And it did. By 1994 those numbers exponentially increased to the point that American women received 38% of medical degrees, 43% of law degrees and 44% of all doctoral degrees earned at US collges and universities.
 
But it also had a profound effect on womens sports as we know by the WNBA now being in its 16th year of operation, the women's NCAA tournament getting the love that the guys do (at least from President Obama and ESPN), some of the pre-Olympic sporting spotlight being focused on female athletes and young girls growing up to compete in whatever sport they desire just as their male counterparts do.

Before Title IX, fewer than 300,000 high school girls played sports and there were less than 32,000 female athletes at the collegiate level. By 1974, just two years after the passage of Title IX, the number of high-schoolers participating in sports had skyrocketed to 1.3 million.

By the time I entered high school in 1977, HISD high school sports programs for girls such as basketball, track and volleyball were not only established down to the junior high school level, but starting to get some of the media attention the guys got.

Now there are more than 3 million high school girls who play sports and more that 191,000 females played NCAA sports in 2010-11. And unlike their mothers or grandmothers who often were limited to basketball, track and softball if they did get a chance to play, women now are participating in everything from squash to tennis, skiing, rugby to wrestling.  

Young boys post Title IX have grown up watching their mothers, sisters, female cousins, aunts and in some cases grandmothers competing in or coaching sporting events.  They don't have that distinction in their minds like my parents generation and some in mine did of male and female athletes.   

And yes, even the president's daughters are competing in sports with the proud POTUS and FLOTUS watching them do so.

“Title IX was the second-most important piece of civil rights legislation passed in this country,” said Debbie Yow, athletics director at N.C. State. “Had it not passed, the options and opportunities for women in this country and the world would be vastly different.”


Title IX changed life for American women not only in collegiate and professional sports, but there was a dramatic rise in the numbers of women who received college degrees post Title IX.  

Title IX was also the building block that set the stage for American women to enter corporate boardrooms, the media, politics, science, engineering and technology careers, be college professors,  become entrepreneurs, and even blast off into space  

Happy anniversary to Title IX, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that changed the lives of American women in my lifetime and made our country a better place for 51% per cent of the population.

Watergate 40th Anniversary

The next time someone gets the urge to rag on a person who is working as a security guard to pay their bills or derisively call them a 'rent a cop', point out that it was an African-American security guard that got the ball rolling 40 years ago today on the scandal that eventually took down the Nixon presidency.

Then 24 year old Frank Wills was working his midnight to 7 AM shift at the Watergate Office Complex on the night of June 17, 1972  when he discovered at 1 AM that someone had taped the latches on several doors (That allows the doors to close but remain unlocked.)  Wills removed the tape on those doors and when he returned an hour later to discovered those same doors were retaped he called the police which resulted in five people being busted inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters offices..

The five men busted in the DNC office burglary, Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis, were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications and convicted on January 30, 1973.

However, when it was discovered that one of the burglars was a Republican Party security aide and money the burglars had been paid for expenses was traced by the FBI back to a fund tied to the aptly named CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect The President), the scandal widened throughout the summer of 1973 and into 1974 as more troubling details emerged.

It eventually ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency on August 9, 1974 when he was facing an almost certain overwhelming Senate vote to impeach and remove him from office and the Democrats in a Watergate induced 1974 midterm backlash picking up five Senate seats to add to their majority there and 49 seats in the House.  There was also an overhaul of American Bar Association  regulations to stave off federalizing that responsibility from the various state bar associations, amendment of the 1974 Freedom of Information Act, campaign finance reform and the enactment of the Ethics In Government Act. 

68 people were charged and 49 convicted of various offenses including members of the Nixon administration.  The pardon of Nixon by President Gerald Ford is cited as one of the factors that led to Jimmy Carter being elected president in 1976.

The House Judiciary Committee Impeachment hearings on July 25, 1974 also resulted in a freshman Democratic House representative from Texas named Barbara Jordan making one of the most memorable and still quoted speeches of those hearings



And as for Frank Wills, the African-American security guard who discovered the burglary that brought down the Nixon Administration?  

Sadly while other people including the Nixon Administration folks who instigated the scandal got paid with their best selling books and speaking tours, Wills' life was never the same. 

He quit his $80 a week job after the security company refused to give him  raise for his role in breaking the Watergate scandal.  Washington business and organizations dependent on federal funding refused to hire him for fear their federal funding would be cut off in retaliation.  He later died in poverty from a brain tumor in Augusta, GA on September 27, 2000.

But the Watergate scandal is a lesson to ponder going into this 2012 presidential election (that we liberal progressive never should have forgotten) that the Republifools will go to any lengths including violating the law and the Constitution they claim to reverently respect to win an election and cling to power.

The 20th Anniversary Of The LA Riots

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the LA Riots that broke out for several days across the city in reaction to the acquittal of four LA police officers accused of beating Rodney King during a March 1991 videotaped traffic stop

The epicenter was the then predominately Black South Central LA neighborhood (now called South LA) where the anger and frustration at the LA po-po's policing tactics was at the highest along with anger over the acquittal.

The riots that lasted until May 4 resulted in 53 deaths, with 10 of those deaths being people shot and killed by the LAPD.and caused and estimated billion dollars in property damage.

Once order was restored, it led to major changes and reforms in the Los Angeles Police Department..

But the 'a riot is the language of the unheard' Dr. King quote from his March 1968 The Other America speech  is echoing through my mind as I think about what happened in LA twenty years ago.   

Twenty years later the structural inequalities and negativity aimed at African-Americans still hasn't been addressed, is continuing to be ignored, and we still have to deal with a 'just-us' system that negatively impacts us.   Combine that with a Republican Party so bankrupt of ideas their only play is to exacerbate racial tensions to win an election against an African-American president, increasing tension over the Trayvon Martin case and sadly, we may see another manifestation of the 'language of the unheard'  breaking out in some American city in the near future. . 

Titanic Sinking 100th Anniversary

Today is the 100th anniversary of a tragic event that still captures the world's imagination and interest 100 years after it happened.  

It was the impetus for several movies about it including the blockbuster 1997 James Cameron produced film and diving expeditions to find the sunken liner that was eventually discovered in 1985.

The sinking of the British passenger liner RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912 several hours after colliding with an iceberg caused the deaths of 1,514 people and was the worst peacetime maritime disaster in world history.   The passenger list on that maiden voyage included some of the world's wealthiest people at the time and immigrants to the United States and Canada from Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and other parts of the world.

One of the facts that has come out about the Titanic sinking in recent years is there was one family of African descent traveling on the ill-fated liner, the Laroches

25 year old Haitian native Joseph Laroche, his pregnant French wife Juliette, and daughters Simonne and Louise, were onboard and in the process of moving from their former home in Paris to Haiti to escape the racial discrimination he'd encountered in France while trying to find a job as an engineer.  Laroche's uncle Cincinnatus Leconte was president of Haiti at the time and arranged a job for him as a math teacher.

Laroche's mother had booked first class passage on the liner LaFrance for them but after the Laroche's heard about the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique line's policy of children not being allowed to dine with their parents, they exchanged the tickets for second class passage aboard the Titanic.  

Juliette, Simonne and Louise managed to be placed on a lifeboat by Joseph and were picked up later by the RMS Carpathia  Joseph did not survive and his body was never recovered   Juliette Laroche returned to France with her daughters and later gave birth to a son.   Louise died in 1998 as one of the last eight survivors of the disaster. 
 

The disaster involving the 'unsinkable' ship which was the largest built in the world at the time led to improvements in maritime safety.   The Titanic remains on the seabed of the North Atlantic gradually disintegrating in 12,415 feet (3794 m) of water. 

Since the discovery of the wreck site, thousands of artifacts from arguably the most famous ship in the world have been recovered, have been displayed in museums around the world and the ship still holds the world's collective attention a century later.

MLK Jr Assassination Anniversary 2012

Once again the calendar flips to April 4 and we have to mark the sad occasion of the now 44th anniversary of the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.in Memphis,TN.

2012 America, just like it was in 1968 is a cauldron of raging racial tensions.  We're once again fighting a foreign war that increasing numbers of people in the US want us to bring our troops home from.   African Americans are asking themselves in the wake of another senseless shooting if this country will ever get over its all too easy propensity to hate us, and a contentious course changing presidential election that promises to be just as close and potentially ugly because the Democratic president occupying the White House is African American.

The best way to close this post is to leave you with the words of the Good Doctor, his April 3, 1968 'I've Been to the Mountaintop' speech.




 
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