Thursday, April 26, 2012

So here is my Chart of Presidents during Mama's lifetime....


PRESIDENT Herbert Clark Hoover	Vice President Charles Curtis	PARTY Republican	Service Years 1929-1933
Franklin Delano Roosevelt	John Nance Garner Henry A. Wallace Harry S. Truman	1932 1936 1940 1944-Democratic	1933-1945
Harry S. Truman	Alben W Barkley	1948-Democratic	1945-1953
Dwight David Eisenhower	Richard Milhous Nixon	1952-Republican	1953-1961
John Fitzgerald Kennedy	Lyndon Baines Johnson	1960-Democratic	1961-1963
Lyndon Baines Johnson	Hubert Horatio Humphrey	1964-Democratic	1963-1969
Richard Milhous Nixon	Spiro T. Agnew Gerald Rudolph Ford	1968 1972-Republican	1969-1974
Gerald Rudolph Ford	Nelson Rockefeller	Republican	1974-1977
James Earl Carter, Jr.	Walter Mondale	1976-Democratic	1977-1981
Ronald Wilson Reagan	George Herbert Walker Bush	1980 1984-Republican	1981-1989
George Herbert Walker Bush	J. Danforth Quayle	1988-Republican	1989-1993
William Jefferson Clinton	Albert Gore, Jr.	1992 1996-Democratic	1993-2001
George Walker Bush	Richard Cheney	2000 2004-Republican	2001-2009
Barack Obama	Joe Biden	2008-Democratic	2009-

Harry D. Truman
Birth: May 8, 1884
Death: December 26, 1972
Term of Office: April 12, 1945 - January 20, 1953

Number of Terms Elected: 2 Terms; Succeeded Franklin Roosevelt after his death in 1945 and then elected to second term
First Lady: Elizabeth "Bess" Virginia Wallace

Harry Truman Quote: "I'm going to fight hard. I'm going to give them hell."

Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States. He succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his fourth term. Truman's presidency is best known for defeating Nazi Germany, founding the United Nations, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Truman Doctrine to contain communism.

Major Events While in Office:

Atomic Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945)
End of World War II (1945)
United Nations Created (1945)

Harry D. Truman may have been the first election my mother voted in --- 1948!!! .... the legal age of voting was 21 ---- in 1948 she would have been newly married in June in Chicago IL... @ 22 yrs of age... where was she that November... still in Chicago or had she moved back to Oklahoma... where was her residency.... and what were the USA's allowable voting for a young black woman (and her mother) .....in Chickasha, Oklahoma ???

Mama-Daddy and Big Mama and Lois and Warren -- should all have had a heightened awareness of political privileges as Ada Lois prevailed in her Supreme Court Case in January of 1948!!!

Germany invaded Poland, setting off the Second World War.

Incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to third term in office over Republican nominee Wendell Willkie

April 12, 1945:

Died of a cereberal hemmorhage 4 months into his fourth term as president

Franklin D. Roosevelt(January 30, 1882 - April 12, 1945)Personal:
• First Lady: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Wife
• Wife's Maiden Name: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
In 1905, Roosevelt married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, a distant cousin and the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. She would become Franklin's most influential ally and an active, beloved First Lady. The couple had six children, of whom five survived infancy. Roosevelt was a great companion to his children, especially enjoying outdoor sports with them.

• Number of Children: 5
• Education Level: College
• School Attended: Harvard University
• Religion: Episcopalian
• Profession: Lawyer

Public Service:
• Dates of Presidency: 3/4/1933 - 4/12/1945
• Presidency Number: 32
• Number of Terms: 4
• Why Presidency Ended: Death
• Party: Democratic
• His Vice President(s): John Nance Garner, Henry Agard Wallace, Harry Truman
• Cabinet Service: Ass't Sec. of Navy (Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1920)
• Governor of a State: New York (1929-1933)
• State Legislative Service: NY (1911-1913)

1932	Elected President of the United States.
1933	Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
1933	The New Deal began with the "Hundred Days."
1933	The 21st Amendment started, ending Prohibition.
1933	Roosevelt's first official act was the "Bank Holiday."
1933	"Good Neighbor Policy," proclaimed by Roosevelt.
1935	Congress passed the Social Security Act.

Roosevelt tried to "pack" the Supreme Court with justices of his own choosing, which caused a national controversy.

1939

World War II began with the invasion of Poland.

1940

Re-elected President.

1941

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor seven weeks after Hideki Tojo became premier.

1944	Allied armies landed in Normandy and began the assault on Hitler's "Fortress Europe."

Assuming the Presidency at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves. He brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and asserted in his Inaugural Address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Born in 1882 at Hyde Park, New York--now a national historic site--he attended Harvard University and Columbia Law School. On St. Patrick's Day, 1905, he married Eleanor Roosevelt.
Following the example of his fifth cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he greatly admired, Franklin D. Roosevelt entered public service through politics, but as a Democrat. He won election to the New York Senate in 1910. President Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1920.

In the summer of 1921, when he was 39, disaster hit-he was stricken with poliomyelitis. Demonstrating indomitable courage, he fought to regain the use of his legs, particularly through swimming. At the 1924 Democratic Convention he dramatically appeared on crutches to nominate Alfred E. Smith as "the Happy Warrior." In 1928 Roosevelt became Governor of New York.
He was elected President in November 1932, to the first of four terms. By March there were 13,000,000 unemployed, and almost every bank was closed. In his first "hundred days," he proposed, and Congress enacted, a sweeping program to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and to those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

By 1935 the Nation had achieved some measure of recovery, but businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt's New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor. Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.
In 1936 he was re-elected by a top-heavy margin. Feeling he was armed with a popular mandate, he sought legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating key New Deal measures. Roosevelt lost the Supreme Court battle, but a revolution in constitutional law took place. Thereafter the Government could legally regulate the economy.

Roosevelt had pledged the United States to the "good neighbor" policy, transforming the Monroe Doctrine from a unilateral American manifesto into arrangements for mutual action against aggressors. He also sought through neutrality legislation to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, yet at the same time to strengthen nations threatened or attacked. When France fell and England came under siege in 1940, he began to send Great Britain all possible aid short of actual military involvement.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt directed organization of the Nation's manpower and resources for global war.

Feeling that the future peace of the world would depend upon relations between the United States and Russia, he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations, in which, he hoped, international difficulties could be settled.
As the war drew to a close, Roosevelt's health deteriorated, and on April 12, 1945, while at Warm Springs, Georgia, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

FDR on racial discrimination, 1942 .

On June 25, 1941, almost six months before the United States’ entry into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination by government defense contractors. The order, which required defense contracts to include a “provision obliging contractors not to discriminate against any worker regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin,” was challenged in January 1942, when a US merchant ship refused to take on twenty-five African American sailors. Roosevelt responded with a strongly worded letter stating that “questions of race, creed and color have no place in determining who are to man our ships. The sole qualifications for a worker in the maritime industry, as well as any other industry, should be his loyalty and his professional or technical ability and training.”
The changes Roosevelt initiated in June 1941 and January 1942 came to fruition with President Truman’s 1948 order desegregating the US Armed Forces.

U.S. Voting Rights

: 1790 Only white male adult property-owners have the right to vote. Nineteenth Century; 1810 Last religious prerequisite for voting is eliminated.; 1850 Property ownership and tax requirements eliminated by 1850. Almost all adult white males could vote.; 1855 Connecticut adopts the nation's first literacy test for voting. Massachusetts follows suit in 1857. The tests were implemented to discriminate against Irish-Catholic immigrants.; 1870 The 15th Amendment is passed. It gives former slaves the right to vote and protects the voting rights of adult male citizens of any race.; 1889 Florida adopts a poll tax. Ten other southern states will implement poll taxes.; 1890 Mississippi adopts a literacy test to keep African Americans from voting. Numerous other states—not just in the south—also establish literacy tests. However, the tests also exclude many whites from voting. To get around this, states add grandfather clauses that allow those who could vote before 1870, or their descendants, to vote regardless of literacy or tax qualifications.
Twentieth Century: 1913 The 17th Amendment calls for members of the U.S. Senate to be elected directly by the people instead of State Legislatures.; 1915 Oklahoma was the last state to append a grandfather clause to its literacy requirement (1910). In Guinn v. United States the Supreme Court rules that the clause is in conflict with the 15th Amendment, thereby outlawing literacy tests for federal elections.
: 1920 The 19th Amendment guarantees women's suffrage.; 1924 Indian Citizenship Act grants all Native Americans the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections.; 1944 The Supreme Court outlaws "white primaries" in Smith v. Allwright (Texas). In Texas, and other states, primaries were conducted by private associations, which, by definion, could exclude whomever they chose. The Court declares the nomination process to be a public process bound by the terms of 15th Amendment.; 1957 The first law to implement the 15th amendment, the Civil Rights Act, is passed. The Act set up the Civil Rights Commission—among its duties is to investigate voter discrimination.; 1960 In Gomillion v. Lightfoot (Alabama) the Court outlaws "gerrymandering."; 1961 The 23rd Amendment allows voters of the District of Columbia to participate in presidential elections.; 1964 The 24th Amendment bans the poll tax as a requirement for voting in federal elections.; 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., mounts a voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama, to draw national attention to African-American voting rights.; 1965 The Voting Rights Act protects the rights of minority voters and eliminates voting barriers such as the literacy test. The Act is expanded and renewed in 1970, 1975, and 1982.; 1966 The Supreme Court, in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, eliminates the poll tax as a qualification for voting in any election. A poll tax was still in use in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia.; 1966 The Court upholds the Voting Rights Act in South Carolina v. Katzenbach.; 1970 Literacy requirements are banned for five years by the 1970 renewal of the Voting Rights Act. At the time, eighteen states still have a literacy requirement in place. In Oregon v. Mitchell, the Court upholds the ban on literacy tests, which is made permanent in 1975. Judge Hugo Black, writing the court's opinion, cited the "long history of the discriminatory use of literacy tests to disenfranchise voters on account of their race" as the reason for their decision.; 1971 The 26th amendment sets the minimum voting age at 18.; 1972 In Dunn v. Blumstein, the Supreme Court declares that lengthy residence requirements for voting in state and local elections is unconstitutional and suggests that 30 days is an ample period.; 1995 The Federal "Motor Voter Law" takes effect, making it easier to register to vote.
Twenty-first Century: 2003 Federal Voting Standards and Procedures Act requires states to streamline registration, voting, and other election procedures.

What is gerrymander???

gerrymander

gerrymander (jer'ēmăn"dur, ger–) [key], in politics, rearrangement of voting districts so as to favor the party in power. The objective is to create as many districts as possible in areas of known support and to concentrate the opposition's strength into as few districts as possible. Extremely irregular boundary lines are sometimes necessary to obtain the results desired. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has placed (1964) the vague limit of “compact districts of contiguous territory” on such apportionment schemes. The origin of the term, though by no means the origin of the practice, was in such an arrangement made by the Massachusetts Jeffersonians when Elbridge Gerry was governor.

See E. C. Griffith, The Rise and Development of the Gerrymander (1907, repr. 1974).

My Mother's Election Year... 1944 to 2012

As I brush up on my reading....... Here are various authors, writers and source data... I googled ASK... When did Black gain the right to vote?

.........Local and state authorities never funded black education equally nor did African Americans have equal access to public accommodations. To make matters worse, after the 1890's: nearly all southern blacks lost their right to vote through measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the white primary. For the next fifty years racial segregation prevailed, reinforced by disfranchisement, official coercion, and vigilante terror. In addition, starting in 1913 with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who had close ties to the South, the federal government imposed racial segregation in government offices in Washington, D.C. (a policy that would not be reversed until the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s).

The bedrock of Jim Crow began to crack after World War II.

Only when the federal government took action after World War II in what has been called “the Second Reconstruction” did segregation fall, thereby highlighting the critical position Washington, D.C. played in preserving and then dismantling Jim Crow.

The war had exposed the horrors of Nazi racism....In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces, thus reversing a longstanding practice. In 1954, the Supreme Court justices in Brown v. the Board of Education reversed Plessy (1896) and decided that legally sanctioned racial segregation was inherently unequal and a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, the Brown ruling signaled only a first step, and it took another decade and a mass movement for civil rights for African Americans to tear down the racist edifices of segregation in the South.

Although the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) provided Blacks with suffrage, southern states enacted legislation, which used such things as the poll tax and literacy test to prohibit Blacks from actually capitalizing on their right to vote. Poll taxes survived until the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964).......the poll tax and literacy tests geared toward restricting certain groups, the voting age remained 21 until 1971

Segregation was intended to debase African Americans, strip them of their dignity, reinforce their inequality, and maintain a submissive agricultural labor force.

In addition, Jim Crow can be viewed as a system of “disease control.” Segregation quarantined blacks to prevent them from infecting whites with the social and cultural impurities associated with “inferior” African Americans. White men established segregation to keep black men from having sexual relations with white women. Viewing miscegenation as the ultimate threat to the perpetuation of their superior racial stock, they often resorted to lynching black men for allegedly raping white women. In doing so, white men not only reinforced their control over blacks but also white women. They sought to maintain the virtue and chastity of their wives and daughters, reinforcing their patriarchal roles as husband, father, and ultimately guardian of their communities. However, it can be debated whether the real issue was sexual purity or power, for many white southern men both during slavery and Jim Crow actively pursued clandestine sexual relations with black women.

Blacks confronted Jim Crow to defeat white supremacy and obtain political power—the kind that could result in jobs, affordable housing, satisfactory health care, and evenhanded treatment by the police and the judicial system. Rather than erasing their pride in being black or expressing a desire to be like whites, African Americans gained an even greater respect for their race through participation in the Civil Rights Movement and their efforts to shatter Jim Crow.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Writing Anew... My Family Sipuel History

I intend to explore and update my family history in 2012. I have decided to interview to my mom in order to record her experiences. I think I'll do it geographically... and by her life stages.

It's a part of her generational upbringing that mom didn't seem to question her parents and she finds it odd that I ask so many questions about our past.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Longevity.....

....

The word "longevity" is sometimes used as a synonym for "life expectancy" in demography - especially when it concerns someone or something lasting longer than expected

Evidence-based studies indicate that longevity is based on two major factors, genetics and lifestyle choices

. . . LEST WE FORGET