In grade school, Orville was often mischievous and was once expelled. Their father travelled often as a Bishop of the Church and would bring the children souvenirs of his travels. In 1878 he brought home a toy “helicopter”. The toy was based on an invention of French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Penaud. It was made of paper, bamboo, and cork with a rubber band to twirl the “rotor”. The rotor was about a foot long. Orville and Wilbur played with the toy until it broke. Then they built their own. Over the next few years they built several and the bigger they built them, the less well they flew. Discouraged they turned to building kites. Years later both boys credited their experience with the toy helicopter as the initial spark of their interest in flying.

Wilbur and Orville both attended high school, but neither received diplomas. The Wright family moved abruptly in June 1884 from Richmond, Indiana back to Dayton, less than one month before Wilbur would have graduated from high school. The next year he attended Central High School in Dayton for additional studies in Greek and trigonometry. In the winter of 1885-86 Wilbur was hit in the face with a hockey stick while playing with friends. He lost his front teeth. Up until then he had been a vigorous athlete and although his injuries did not appear severe, he became withdrawn and did not attend Yale as planned. He spent the next few years instead mostly housebound caring for his mother who was terminally ill with tuberculosis and reading extensively in his father’s library.

Orville dropped out of high school after his junior year to start a printing business in 1889. He designed and built his own printing press from a damaged tombstone and buggy parts with Wilbur’s help. Working with his brother Orville on the printing business shook Wilbur out of his depression. Wilbur served as editor while Orville was publisher of the weekly newspaper the West Side News. A few months later they started a daily paper called Evening Item. They also printed the Dayton Tattler, a weekly newspaper. The printing business was the first time they officially referred to themselves as ”The Wright Brothers”.

Spurred by the invention of the safety bicycle and its substantial advantages over the penny-farthing design, the Wright brothers jumped on the national bicycle craze and capitalized on it. They opened a bicycle repair and sales shop, the Wright Cycle Exchange, later the Wright Cycle Company, in 1892. In 1896 they began manufacturing their own brand of bicycles. They built two models called the Van Cleve and the St. Clair. The Wright brothers used their bicycle endeavors to fund their growing interest in flight.

The year 1896 brought three important aeronautical events. Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel Langley successfully flew an unmanned steam-powered model aircraft. Chicago engineer and aviation authority Octave Chanute tested various types of gliders over the sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan. Otto Lilienthal of Germany, who had been test flying his gliders for a couple of years, was killed in a plunge of one of his gliders. These three events sparked the Wright brothers’ interest in flight even more. In May 1899, Wilbur wrote a letter to the Smithsonian requesting information and publications about aeronautics. Drawing on the works of Sir George Cayley, Chanute, Lilienthal, Leonardo da Vinci, and Langley, the Wright brothers began their mechanical aeronautical experimentation within a few months of writing to the Smithsonian.

Wilbur Wright defined the elements of a flying machine: wings to provide lift, a power source for propulsion, and a system of control. Of all the early aviation pioneers, Wilbur alone recognized the need to control a flying machine in its three axes of motion: pitch, roll, and yaw. His solution for control was “wing warping”. He came up with a system by twisting an empty bicycle tube box with the ends removed. Twisting the surface of each “wing” changed its position in relation to oncoming wind. Wilbur tested his theory on a small kite and it worked. The brothers also spent a great deal of time observing birds in flight. They noticed that birds soared into the wind and that the air flowing under their curved wings created lift. They also noted that birds changed the shape of their wings to turn and maneuver.

In August 1990, Wilbur built his first glider with a 17-foot wingspan. He contacted the U.S. Weather Bureau for information on windy regions of the country. From the list he chose a remote sandy area off the coast of North Carolina named Kitty Hawk. The winds averaged 13 mph. He and Orville traveled to Kitty Hawk and successfully tested the glider. The next year they again traveled to Kitty Hawk and tested a new glider with a 22-foot wingspan. They were disappointed by its performance. They returned to their bicycle shop and decided to construct a wind tunnel to test the effectiveness of a variety of wing shapes. They tested their 1902 glider at Kitty Hawk in October. They were successful. It glided a record 620 feet. They returned to Dayton determined to develop a propeller and an engine for their next project- a flying machine.

The Wright brothers built their 1903 flying machine in sections in the back room of their cycle shop in Dayton. As they completed each section they shipped it down to Kitty Hawk. They designed a propeller based on the same principles they used to design their wings.  They built a 4-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine. The craft weighed 700 pounds and came to be known as the Flyer. The brothers built a moveable track to help launch the Flyer. The downhill track helped the aircraft gain enough airspeed to fly. On December 14, 1903, Wilbur won a coin toss and made the first attempt to fly the machine. He stalled the engine on takeoff, which resulted in minor damage. They repaired the machine and Orville made the next attempt on December 17, 1903. At 10:35 a.m. that morning he made the first heavier-than-air, machine-powered flight in the world. The flight lasted only 12 seconds and covered just 120 feet.

1904- Wilbur flew the Flyer II for more than five minutes.

1905- The Wright brothers built an airplane that could fly for more than half an hour.

1908- Orville made the world’s first flight of over one hour at Fort Myer, Virginia, in a demonstration for the U.S. Army.

1908- Wilbur made over 100 flights near Le Mans, France. The longest flight was a record at 2 hours, 19 minutes.

1908- Orville piloted a passenger flight that suffered a fatal crash. Orville survived but his passenger, Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, did not.

1909- The U.S. Government bought its first airplane, a Wright Brothers bi-plane.

1911- A Wright Brothers plane, the Vin Fiz, was the first airplane to cross the United States. The flight took 84 days, stopping 70 times.

1912- The first Wright Brothers airplane armed with a machine gun was flown in College Park, Maryland.

1914- The Aviation Section of the Signal Corps (part of the Army) was established. Its flying unit contained Wright Brothers airplanes.

1914- The U.S. Court decided in favor of the Wright Brothers in a patent suit concerning lateral control of aircraft.

Wilbur Wright became ill on a business trip to Boston in April 1912. When he returned to Dayton he was diagnosed with typhoid fever. He lingered in and out of consciousness for several weeks until he died at the age of forty five. Orville succeeded to the presidency of the Wright company upon his brother’s death. Never a fan of the business end of the Wright Brothers’ endeavors, Orville sold the company in 1915. Orville made his last flight as a pilot in 1919. He retired and became an elder statesman of aviation, serving on various official boards and committees, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). He served NACA for 28 years. In 1930 he received the first Daniel Guggenheim Medal established in 1928. In 1936 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Orville died on January 30, 1948. He had lived from the horse-and-buggy age to the dawn of supersonic flight.

Orville wrote of his childhood: “We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity.”                                                                                                     

Jody Victor

Binet spent much of his time reading psychology at the French National Library. His new-found interest in psychology became more important to him than his medical studies. He became a self-taught psychologist reading books by Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, and others. He published a psychology-related article in 1880. He wrote numerous other articles on hypnosis, animal magnetism, and the effect of magnets on emotions. Binet was an introverted loner and his self-educating suited him. Later he would realize that not attending a University and formally studying psychology would hinder him in his pursuits.

In 1883, Binet was introduced to Charles Fere, who introduced him to Jean Charcot. Charcot was the director of a clinic in Pariscalled La Salpetriere. Charcot became his mentor and Binet accepted a job offer at the clinic. He worked at the clinic for seven years. In 1887, he was honored by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences as laureate with a prize of 1,000 francs, which was a large sum of money in those days. For all those seven years Binet never questioned his mentor’s views. He uncritically accepted and vehemently defended Charcot’s methods. Without formal training in critical thinking at a university, Binet was not used to questioning opposing views. When he left the clinic he never mentioned it or his mentor again.

In 1884, Binet married Laure Balbiani, the daughter of Edouard-Gerard Balbiani, an embryologist at the College de France. Together they had two daughters: Madeleine and Alice (two years apart in age). After leaving Charcot’s clinic, Binet concentrated his interest in the development of his daughters and used them as subjects for developmental testing by age. He became fascinated with the differences between the two girls. He concocted a number of tests for them and found that Madeleine, the older girl, learned and responded differently thanAlice. Binet also worked with his father-in-law who lectured on heredity. He wrote articles and papers on free will versus determinism and studied the psychology of courts of law.

Binet accidently met Dr. Henri Beaunis one day in 1891 on a railway platform. Binet asked Dr. Beaunis for a job at the Laboratory of Physiological at the Sorbonne. In spite of heated arguments that had been carried on between them previously on the subject of hypnosis, Beaunis agreed. Binet worked for one year without pay and by 1894, he took over as director. In 1895, Binet and Beaunis founded the first French journal of psychology, L’Annee Psychologique, which remains in press today.

In 1899, Binet was asked to be a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child.Francehad just implemented a law that made it mandatory for children six to fourteen to attend school. Binet and his fellow members were asked to study children and discern the learning disabled from the normal learners for assignment to special education. Binet took the challenge. L’Etude experimentale de l’intelligence (Experimental Studies of Intelligence) was the book he used to describe his methods. It was published in 1903.

More tests and investigations began soon after his book was published. With the help of a young medical student named Theodore Simon, Binet worked on the intelligence tests he is known for to this day. In 1905, they introduced a new test for measuring intelligence. It was simply called the Binet-Simon scale. In 1908, they revised the scale and arranged it according to age levels three to thirteen. Binet published the third version of the Binet-Simon scale right before he died in 1911. The Binet-Simon scale is still used today and is commonly known as the IQ Test.

Jody Victor

Jackie Robinson graduated fromWashingtonJunior High Schoolin 1935 and enrolled atJohnMuirHigh School(Muir Tech). Jackie’s older brothers Mack and Frank inspired him to pursue his interest in sports. Mack was an accomplished athlete at the time having won the silver medal at the 1936 Summer Olympics. At Muir Tech, Jackie played several sports at the varsity level and lettered in four of them: football (quarterback), basketball (guard), baseball (shortstop and catcher), and track. On the track team he won awards in the broad jump. Jackie also was a member of the tennis team. In 1936, he won the junior boys singles championship in the annual Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament. He earned a place on thePomonaannual baseball tournament all-star team, which included future baseball Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Lemon.

Following graduation from high school Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College (PJC). He continued his athletic career participating in football, basketball, baseball and track. In 1938, he was selected as the region’s Most Valuable Player in baseball. While attending PJC he also was elected to the Lancers, a student-run police organization that patrolled various school activities. Robinson was one of ten students named to the school’s Order of the Mast and Dagger, which was awarded to students who performed “outstanding service to the school and whose scholastic and citizenship record is worthy of recognition.”

Following graduation from PJC in the spring of 1939, Robinson transferred to UCLA. He became the school’s first athlete to win varsity letters in four sports: football, basketball, baseball, and track. He was one of four black players on the football team. At the time only a handful of black players existed in mainstream college football, making UCLA’s college football program the most integrated. In 1940, Robinson won the NCAA Men’s Outdoor Track and Field Championship in the Long Jump, jumping 24’ 10.5”. In his senior year Robinson met his future wife, Rachel Isum, a freshman who was familiar with his athletic career. In the spring semester of 1941 Robinson left UCLA just short of graduation due to financial difficulties, despite his mother’s and Rachel’s reservations. He took a job as an athletic director with the government’s National Youth Administration (NYA) inAtascadero,California. When the government ceased the NYA programs Robinson traveled toHawaiiin the fall of 1941 to play football for the semi-pro, racially integrated Honolulu Bears. After one season he returned toCaliforniato pursue a career as running back for the Los Angeles Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Football League. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended his football career.

In 1942, Robinson was drafted and assigned to a segregated Army cavalry unit inFort Riley,Kansas. He and several other black soldiers applied for Officer Candidate School (OCS). Even though the OCS guidelines had been drafted as race-neutral few black applicants were admitted until directives from Army leadership enforced them. Robinson and his colleagues’ applications were delayed for several months. Heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis (stationed atFortRiley) and Truman Gibson (aide to the Secretary of War) protested the delay and got their applications moving. Upon finishing OCS Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in January 1943. Soon after, Robinson and Rachel Isum were formally engaged.

Robinson was reassigned to Fort Hood, Texasand joined the 761^st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion. On July 6, 1944, Robinson’s military career was abruptly derailed. While waiting for hospital tests on the ankle he had injured in junior college Robinson boarded an Army bus with a fellow officer’s wife and although the Army bus was un-segregated the bus driver ordered Robinson to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The driver backed down, but after reaching the end of the line he summoned the military police. They took Robinson into custody. Robinson confronted the investigating duty officer for his racist questioning. The officer recommended Robinson to be court-martialed. After Robinson’s commanding officer refused to authorize the court-martial Robinson was quickly transferred to the 758^th Battalion. The commander there quickly consented to the court-martial and charged him with more offenses, including public drunkenness- even though Robinson did not drink. By the time of the court-martial in August 1944 the charges against Robinson were dropped to two counts of insubordination during questioning. Robinson was acquitted by an all-white panel of nine officers. Although his former unit, the 761^st Tank Battalion, became the first black tank unit to see combat in World War ll, Robinson’s court-martial proceedings kept him from being deployed overseas and he never saw combat action. After his acquittal Robinson was sent toCamp Breckinridge,Kentucky, where he served as a coach for army athletics. He received his honorable discharge in November 1944.

Robinson returned briefly to his old football club, the Los Angeles Bulldogs. He then accepted an offer from his old friend and pastor, Reverend Karl Downs, to be the athletic director at Sam Houston Collegein Austin, Texas. The job included coaching the fledgling basketball team. The team was so new that he even had to insert himself into the lineup for exhibition games. And even though his team was outmatched by its opponents, Robinson gained respect as a disciplinarian coach. He drew the admiration ofLangstonUniversitybasketball player Marques Haynes, a future member of the Harlem Globetrotters.

In early 1945, while Robinson was at Sam Houston College, the Kansas City Monarchs sent him an offer to play professional baseball in the Negro leagues. Robinson accepted a contract for $400 dollars a month ($5,164 in today’s money). Robinson was frustrated playing for the Monarchs with the hectic travel schedule, the disorganization, and the embrace of gambling. He was used to the structured playing environment of college. In all, he played 47 games for the Monarchs, with five home runs and 13 stolen bases. During the season Robinson pursued major league interest. The Boston Red Sox held a tryout for Robinson and other black players. The tryout was essentially a farce designed to assuage the desegregationist sensibilities of powerful Boston City Councilman Isadore Muchnick. The fans in the stands subjected Robinson and the other black players to racial slurs. He left the tryout humiliated. It was more than 14 years later that the Red Sox became the last major league team to integrate.

Other teams had real interests in signing a black player. Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, began to scout the Negro leagues to add black players to their roster. Rickey selected Robinson from a list of promising black players and interviewed him forBrooklyn’s International League farm club, the Montreal Royals. Rickey was especially interested in finding a black player who could weather the inevitable racial abuse. In the now-famous three-hour interview Rickey asked Robinson if he could face the racial animus without taking the bait and reacting angrily. Rickey told Robinson he needed a black player “with guts enough not to fight back.” Robinson made the commitment to “turn the other cheek” and signed the contract. Their arrangement was kept secret for a time. On October 23, 1945 it was publicly announced that Jackie Robinson would be assigned to the Royals for the 1946 season. In what was later referred to as “The Noble Experiment”, Robinson was the first black player signed to baseball’s minor leagues.

Robinson’s first season with the Royals was challenging, starting with spring training. His presence was controversial in racially chargedFlorida. He was not allowed to stay with the team. Instead he stayed with a local black politician. At the time the Dodgers did not own a spring training facility. The scheduling of training games was subject to the whim of area localities. InSanford,Florida, the police chief threatened to cancel games if Robinson did not cease training there. InJacksonville, the stadium was padlocked shut without warning on game day. In DeLand, a scheduled game was called off due to the excuse of faulty electrical lighting. After much lobbying by Rickey himself the Royals were allowed to host a game inDaytona Beach. Robinson made his debut on March 17, 1946. Robinson thus became the first black player to openly play for a minor league team and against a major league team since the first de facto baseball color line had been implemented in the 1880s. Robinson proceeded to lead the International League that season with a .349 batting average. He was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. More than one million people went to games involving Robinson in 1946. Also in 1946, Jackie Robinson married Rachel Isum, his college sweetheart. Rachel and their three children helped to provide Jackie with emotional support and a sense of purpose all through his challenging early baseball career.

The following year, just six days before the start of the 1947 season, the Dodgers called Robinson up to the major leagues, bringing an end to sixty years of segregation in professional baseball. At the end of his rookie year he had become National League Rookie of the Year with 12 home runs, 29 steals, and a .297 average. In 1949, he was selected as the National League’s Most Valuable Player of the Year. Having started playing late (at the age of twenty-eight), Robinson played only ten seasons, all for the Brooklyn Dodgers. During his career the Dodgers played in six World Series. Robinson played in six All-Star Games. Robinson exhibited the combination of hitting ability and speed, which marked the beginning of the post-“long ball” era in baseball. Raw power-hitting gave way to balanced offensive strategies to create runs through aggressive base running. Robinson was one of only two players during the span of 1947 to 1956 to accumulate at least 125 steals. He accumulated 197 steals in total, including 19 steals of home. Jackie Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

“I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me…all I ask is that you respect me as a human being.”- Jackie Robinson

Jody Victor

In 1878, at the age of sixteen, Ida B. Wells’ life changed forever. She was visiting her grandmother in theMississippiValleywhen she received word that her hometown ofHollySpringshad suffered a yellow fever epidemic. Both her parents and her youngest brother, who was 10 months old, had died in the epidemic. Ida was encouraged to remain in the country with her grandmother until the epidemic subsided. Despite the warnings of doctors Ida returned home right away saying, “I am going home. I am the oldest of seven living children. There’s nobody but me to look after them now.” After the funerals, relatives and friends decided that the remaining six Wells children should be sent to various foster homes. But Ida resisted the decision. To keep her younger siblings together she dropped out ofShawUniversity. She changed her appearance to look older than her mere sixteen years and passed the qualifying exam for a teacher’s position, finding work six miles away in a black elementary school. Her grandmother, along with other relatives and friends, stayed with the children during the week while Ida was away teaching. “I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.”

Wells resented that white teachers were paid $80 a month while she was paid only $30 dollars. This discrimination made her even more interested in racial politics and improving the education of black children. In 1883, she took three of her younger siblings toMemphis,Tennessee, to live with their aunt and to be closer to other family members. She discovered that she could earn a higher wage there as a teacher. She was soon hired inWoodstockfor theShelbyCountyschool system. During summer vacations, Wells attended summer sessions atFiskUniversity, a historically black college inNashville. She also attended LeMoyne Institute. By the fall of 1884 Ida had qualified to teach in the city schools and was assigned a first grade class.

Ida B. Wells continued to hold strong political opinions and spoke up everywhere she went for women’s rights. Her career as a writer was sparked by an incident that occurred on May 4, 1884. A train conductor on theChesapeakeand Ohio Railroad ordered Wells to give up her seat in the ladies’ car and move to the smoking car, which was already crowded. When she refused, the conductor attempted to physically remove her from her seat. It took three men to remove her from her seat and rather than move to the smoking car, she got off at the next stop to the cheers of the white passengers on the train. When Wells got back toMemphisshe immediately hired a lawyer to bring suit against the railroad company. The court returned a verdict in her favor. The presiding judge stated that the railroad company violated the separate but equal clause by forcing her to ride in the smoking car that was separate but not first class, which Wells had paid for. Heartened by her victory and eager to share her story Wells wrote an article for The Living Way, a black church weekly. It was so well received that the editor of the church weekly asked her to contribute more articles. She began her own weekly column under the pen name “Iola”. She wrote her articles in a plain and simple way so that the people who had little or no school training could find help with their problems. Soon her articles were appearing in prominent black newspapers across the country.

In March 1892, racial tensions were rising in Memphis. Violence was common place. The KKK established a “reign of terror”, murdering and lynching innocent blacks. Their white neighbors looked the other way. Once again tragedy struck Ida B. Wells in what became known as the “Lynching at the Curve”. Three of her close friends opened the People’s Grocery Store. The store was directly across the street from a white-owned store, which had enjoyed a monopoly up until then. The People’s Grocery Store was successful. A white mob gathered to run the black grocers out of town. Warned by the building mob, the black men armed themselves and in the ensuing confrontation wounded three white men who had invaded their store. The next day white newspapers exaggerated accounts of the previous day, claiming that “Negro desperados” had shot white men. The paper’s depiction gave rise to another mob that stormed the jail cells of the three black men and killed them. The Lynching at the Curve marked the beginning of Wells’ anti-lynching campaign. Wells spoke out against the lynching in an editorial in the Free Speech. She urged blacks to “save our money and leave town”. In two month’s time, six thousand black people leftMemphis. Wells remained and continued to write scathing editorials against lynching. She gave public speeches on the subject and organized blacks in an effort to abolish the practice. Wells also began a comprehensive study of lynching. At a conference of black women’s clubs she was given $500 to investigate and publish her findings. Wells found that many blacks were hung, shot, and burned to death for trivial things, such as not paying a debt, testifying in court, stealing hogs, and public drunkenness. Her findings caused outrage in the white community. A mob destroyed the office of her newspaper and threatened to kill her. At the time Wells was speaking inPhiladelphia. Unable to return to her home, she re-settled inChicagoand continued her anti-lynching campaign.

In 1895, Ida B. Wells married Ferdinand L. Barnett, aChicagolawyer, activist, and editor. She set an early precedent by keeping her last name along with her husband’s. Barnett was the owner and founder of the first black newspaper in Chicago, the Chicago Conservator. Ida Wells Barnett bought the Conservator from her husband and took over the duties of editor. Her marriage caused quite a stir. Many were concerned she would give up her cause and retire to home and children. Wells gave birth to their first child in 1896. Throughout her son’s infancy, Ida continued to travel, write, and encourage women to organize. The following year she gave birth to another son. She gave up public work and retired to give her attention to “the training of my children”. Ida had two more children, both girls.

Ida B. Wells returned to public life to continue her organizing efforts. In 1910, she formed the Negro Fellowship League (NFL). The NFL was housed in a three-story building inChicago. It served as a fellowship house for new settlers from the South. It also provided a space for religious services, an unemployment office, and as a homeless shelter for men. She became one of the founders of the NAACP. In 1913, she established the first black women’s suffrage club. She marched in a suffrage parade and met with President McKinley about a lynching inSouth Carolina. Following World War I she covered various race riots and published her reports in pamphlets and in newspapers nationwide. In 1930, she began her autobiography, A Divided Duty. She never finished it; the book ends in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word. She died in Chicago on March 25, 1931.

“The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” – Ida B. Wells

Jody Victor

Susan B. Anthony was an intelligent child. She learned to read and write at the age of three. When she was six years old, the Anthony family moved fromMassachusettstoBattenville,New York. Susan attended a local district school where a teacher refused to teach her long division because of her gender. When her father learned of the poor education she was receiving he promptly placed her in a group home school, where he taught Susan himself. Another teacher at the group school, Mary Perkins, conveyed a progressive image of womanhood to Susan, which fostered her growing belief in women’s equality. The Quaker society in which Susan grew up was anti-slavery well before the Civil War. In 1836, at the age of 16, Susan collected two boxes of petitions opposing slavery in response to the gag rule prohibiting such petitions in the House of Representatives.

In 1837, Susan was sent to Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary, a Quaker boarding school inPhiladelphia. She was not happy at the school but did not have to stay there for long because her family was financially ruined during the Panic of 1837. The Anthony family lost so much that they tried to sell everything they had in an auction. Susan’s uncle, Joshua Read, saved them at the last minute by bidding on their personal belongings and restoring them to the family. Two years later the Anthony family moved to Hardscrabble,New Yorkin the wake of the depression that followed the panic. That same year Susan left home to teach and pay off her father’s debts. She taught at Eunice Kenyon’s Friends’ Seminary for five years.

In 1845 the Anthony family moved toRochester,New York. The family was active in the anti-slavery movement. Anti-slavery Quakers met at the Anthony farm every Sunday. On several occasions Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison joined them. Susan’s brothers, Daniel and Merritt, were anti-slavery activists inKansas. In 1846 Susan began to teach at theCanajoharieAcademy, where she rose to become headmistress of the Female Department. Susan’s first occupation as teacher inspired her to fight for wages equivalent to those of male teachers. At the time, men earned roughly four times more than women for the same duties. Headmistress Anthony made $110 a year atCanajoharieAcademy.

In 1849, Anthony quit teaching and moved back to the family farm inRochester. In 1853, at the state teachers’ convention she called for women to be admitted to the professions and for better pay for women teachers. She also asked for women to have a voice at the convention and to be allowed positions on the committee. In 1859 she spoke before the state teachers’ convention at Troy,New York and at the Massachusetts teachers’ convention. She argued for coeducation, claiming there were no differences between the minds of men and women. Anthony called for equal educational opportunities for all schools, colleges, and universities regardless of gender or race. She also campaigned for the rights of children of former slaves to be able to attend public schools. In the 1890s Anthony served on the board of trustees of Rochester’s State Industrial School once again campaigning for equal treatment and opportunity for boys and girls. She raised $50,000 in pledges to ensure the admittance of women to the Universityof Rochester. In a last minute effort to meet a deadline, she put up the cash value of her own life insurance policy and the University was forced to make good on its promise to admit women.

In 1849 when Anthony returned toRochestershe was elected president of the Rochesterbranch of the Daughters of  Temperance by her fellow Quakers and raised money for the cause. In 1851 Anthony attended her first women’s rights convention inSyracusewhere she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two women believed the Republicans would reward women for their work in building support for the Thirteenth Amendment by giving them the vote. In 1853 she was refused the right to speak at the state convention of the Sons of Temperance inAlbany. She left the convention and called her own. She and Stanton founded the Women’s State Temperance Society. They petitioned the State legislature to pass a law limiting the sale of liquor. The legislature rejected the petition because most of the 28,000 signatures were from women. That was when she decided that women needed the vote so politicians would listen to them. Anthony and Stanton were criticized by the Society for speaking out too much for women’s rights so they resigned.

In 1866 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association, which fought for both blacks’ and women’s rights to suffrage. Two years later they began publishing a newspaper called The Revolution. The paper’s masthead read: “The true republic- men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” The paper advocated for an eight-hour work day and equal pay for equal work. It promoted a policy of purchasing American-made goods. The Revolution brought Anthony in contact with women in the printing trades. Women in the printing and sewing trades were excluded from men’s trade unions. The paper encouraged women from the trades to form Workingwomen’s Associations. In 1870 she was elected president of the Workingwomen’s Central Association. During the 1890s, while president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Anthony emphasized the importance of gaining the support of organized labor.

In the 1870s Anthony campaigned tirelessly for women’s suffrage. One day a U.S. Deputy Marshal arrested Anthony for voting in the 1872 Presidential Election two weeks earlier. Anthony’s pending trial gave her the opportunity to spread her arguments to a wider audience than ever before. She undertook an exhaustive speaking tour. In her speeches she asked the question, “Is it a crime for a Citizen of theUnited Statesto Vote?” She made stirring and eloquent arguments that the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed to “All persons born or naturalized in theUnited States….are citizens of theUnited States. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of theUnited States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” She argued that the privileges of citizenship contained no gender qualification thus giving women the constitutional right to vote. The Judge refused to allow Anthony to testify on her own behalf, allowing her statements at the time of her arrest to be her “testimony”. The Judge explicitly ordered the jury to return a guilty verdict and read an opinion he had written before the trial even started. The sentence was a $100 dollar fine, with no imprisonment. Susan B. Anthony stated, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” She never paid the fine for the rest of her life and the U.S. Government took no collective action against her.

Before retiring, Susan B. Anthony was asked if all women in the United States would ever be given the vote. She replied, “It will come, but I shall not see it. It is inevitable. We can no more deny forever the right of self-government to one-half our people than we could keep the Negro forever in bondage. It will not be wrought by the same disrupting forces that freed the slave, but come it will, and I believe within a generation.”  “Failure is impossible” are the words she left her “girls” to encourage them to keep striving for equality in all things. Women were given the vote by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution on August 26, 1920, fourteen years after her death.

Jody Victor

Determined to educate himself  Booker set out in 1872 for Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (now Hampton University), a teachers’ college established to educate freedmen. He traveled hundreds of miles under great hardship to get there. When he arrived at Hampton he took his stepfather’s first name-Washington-as his surname. Washington worked as a janitor to pay his expenses. Washington became a star pupil under the tutelage of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the head of Hampton. He graduated from Hampton in 1875. In 1876 Washington returned to Malden, where he taught children in the daytime and adults at night for two years. He also taught Sunday school at African Zion Baptist Church.

In 1878 Washington studied for six months at Wayland Seminary inWashington, D.C.and then joined the teaching staff of Hampton. General Armstrong, still the head of Hampton, approached Washington one day after chapel. He told Washington he had received a letter from some “gentlemen in Alabama”. They were asking General Armstrong to recommend a white principle for a colored school they wanted to open in the town of Tuskegee.

In 1881 Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama. He started with two small run-down buildings, no equipment and very little money. He used his ability to win the trust of white Southerners and Northern philanthropists to make Tuskegee into a model school of industrial education. His cooperative nature helped to raise funds to establish and operate thousands of small community schools and institutions of higher education for the betterment of African-Americans throughout the South. Washingtonbelieved that the best interests for African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction era would be realized through education in the crafts and industrial skills. He cultivated in his students the virtues of patience, enterprise and thrift. Tuskegee was a monument to his life’s work. By the time of his death thirty-four years later,Tuskegee had more than 100 well-equipped buildings, 1,500 students, and 200 faculty members teaching 38 trades and professions.

On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington became a national hero. He was invited to speak to a racially mixed audience at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. He urged his fellow freedmen, most of whom were poor and illiterate, to set aside their efforts to win full civil rights and concentrate their energies instead on education. He said that he believed education was the path to economic success and economic success would bring social justice. With his life’s work Booker T. Washington did much to improve the working relationship between the races. He became friends with such self-made men as Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers; Sears, Roebuck and Company President Julius Rosenwald; and George Eastman, inventor and founder of Kodak. He enlisted his philanthropic network to create matching funds programs to stimulate numerous rural public schools for African-American children in the South. The Rosenwald Fund helped support the construction and operation of more than 5,000 schools and supporting resources. The local schools were a source of communal pride and were priceless to African-American families. In 1900 he founded the National Negro Business League and in 1901 he published his autobiography, Up From Slavery, which was translated into many languages. In all, he wrote fourteen books.  Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft used Washington as an advisor. He went on to receive honorary degrees from Harvard Universityand Dartmouth College.

Jody Victor

“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.” …. “Character is power.”- Booker T. Washington