Celebrating Women’s History Month

ALPHA’S DELTA’S WIVES ZETA’S SIGMA’S

Celebrating Women’s History Month

SENATE BEGINS WORK TO CONFIRM KETANJI BROWN JACKSON TO SUPREME COURT AS SEVERAL REPUBLICANS SIGNAL OPENNESS

Re-print by Derek Major, February 28, 2022

As President Joe Biden‘s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson prepares for what could be a contentious confirmation process, several Republicans have signaled they could back her. The confirmation process will first move to the U.S. Senate which has a 50-50 spilt between parties. Democrats will try to keep their members together for the former public defender. That would be enough for Jackson to be confirmed to the High Court since Republicans abolished the 60-vote filibuster rule for Supreme Court nominations in 2017. However, according to NBC News, White House and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, (D-IL) said they will try to lobby Republican votes for Jackson. One Republican that has already indicated he will support Jackson’s nomination is Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who called her nomination “historic.” “Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is an experienced jurist, and I know her historic nomination will inspire many,” Romney said in a statement Friday. “I look forward to meeting in person with Judge Jackson, thoroughly reviewing her record and testimony, and evaluating her qualifications during this process.” Durbin added he hopes to complete the confirmation process by April 9 and has sent the White House the traditional questionnaire for Supreme Court nominees. Once it is completed and sent back to the committee, Jackson will begin meeting with Senators. Durbin also said that Jackson has a distinct advantage when it comes to her confirmation. Last year, she sat before the committee when Biden promoted her to replace Attorney General Merrick Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The appeals court is considered a stepping stone to the high court with three current justices having served on it in the past. If Jackson is confirmed, she will replace Justice Stephen Breyer, who was pressured by many to retire from the bench so Biden could install a younger justice who could serve decades in the role. Former President Barack Obama pushed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to give up her seat, but she refused and died when former President Donald Trump was in office. Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett. Link: https://www.blackenterprise.com/ senate-begins-work-to-confirm-ketanjibrown-jackson-to-supreme-court-as-severalrepublicans-signal-openness/

Celebrating Women’s History Month

Nichelle Nichols was born as Grace Nichols on December 28, 1932 in Robbins, Illinois. Discovered by Duke Ellington at the age of 15, she began her career as a singer touring the country with his band. After the tour was over, Nichols worked in Los Angeles as a model, stage actress, and in small roles on television. In 1966, she landed her most famous role as Lieutenant Uhura in the Star Trek series.

As Lt. Uhura, she portrayed the communications officer in the popular series and shared the first interracial kiss on television with William Shatner. Nichelle Nichols planned to leave the show after the first season to return to the stage, but a meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led her to change her mind. King explained that her role was the first on television to show a black person as intelligent, proud, and beautiful, someone everyone needed to see and know. Nichols stayed in her role through the end of the series and in the movies that followed.

It was her role as Lt. Uhura that developed Nichols’s interest in space research and exploration. Nichols became involved in various space programs and was appointed to the National Space Institute. In 1977, NASA asked Nichols to be the spokesperson for their recruitment drive for astronauts, specifically to recruit more women and people of color. By the end of her campaign, which lasted into the late 1980s, the number of applicants was five times greater than before, with more than thirty percent of the applicants from their target group.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

A powerful photo of strength and courage taken of The Leading ladies of the civil rights movement.

Dr. Betty Shabazz (educator and widow of Malcolm X), Coretta Scott King (activist and widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) and, Myrlie Evers-Williams (activist and widow of Medgar Evans) sit for a portrait. Photo credit, James Van Evers (Son of Medgar and Myrlie Evers).

Celebrating Women’s History Month

Dorothy Counts, one of the first Black girls to attend an all white school in the United States, being teased and taunted by her white male peers at Charlotte’s Harry Harding High School, 1957. After four days of harassment that threatened her safety, her parents forced her to withdraw from the school.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

With beauty and flash Olympic gold medalist Florence Joyner brought style to track and field with form-fitting bodysuits, six-inch fingernails and amazing speed. She still holds the world records in the 100- and 200-meter events.

At the 1984 Summer Olympics, Florence Griffith- Joyner, also known as "Flo Jo," won a silver medal in the 200-meter run. She married fellow athlete Al Joyner, the brother of famed athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee. At the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, Joyner took home three gold medals and a silver. She and her coach, Bob Kersee, came under media speculation when rumors spread that she might have been using performance-enhancing drugs to improve her times. Joyner always insisted that she never used performance enhancers, and she never failed a drug test. In fact, according to CNN.com, Joyner took and passed 11 drug tests in 1988 alone.

Joyner died unexpectedly in September 1998, at age 38, after suffering an epileptic seizure. She still holds the world records in the 100- and 200-meter events.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

Actress Pam Grier is best known for her portrayal of tough and sexy crimefighters in the 1970s genre of “blaxploitation” films. Her later work in the 1998 film Jackie Brown earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

Pamela Suzette Grier was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on May 26, 1949. Her father was a mechanic with the U.S. Air Force, and when Pam was five the family transferred to a military base in Swindon, England. She recently revealed in her autobiography that during this time she was sexually assaulted, an event that left her traumatized and isolated throughout her childhood.

For the next eight years, the family moved around Europe, eventually settling in Denver, Colorado. At Denver’s East High School, Pam played organ and piano for the school’s Echoes of Youth Gospel Choir alongside Philip Bailey, Larry Dun, and Andrew Woolfolk, who would later form the R & B powerhouse Earth, Wind & Fire.

Grier enrolled in Denver’s Metropolitan State College in 1967, planning on a career in medicine. To earn tuition for her second year of college, she entered beauty contests, placing second runner-up in the 1967 Miss Colorado pageant. An agent encouraged her to pursue acting, and in 1968 she moved to Los Angeles where she lived with her aunt and cousin, pro football player and actor Brother Roosevelt (Rosey) Grier.

Celebrating Women’s History Month