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Dorothy Height: Fighting for Rights on Two Fronts

On August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, Dorothy Height sat on the speakers’ platform and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. She had helped organize the rally that brought about 250,000 people to the National Mall. In fact, she’d been in the forefront of the civil right struggle for decades as the president of the National Council of Negro Women.

Arizona Legalizes Racial Profiling

Hundreds of high school and college students gathered around the state capitol in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday. They were there to convince Gov. Jan Brewer to veto Senate Bill 1070. These young protesters were disappointed though. Brewer signed the bill and instantly set back relations between whites and Latinos in Arizona and other parts of the country.

A Time to Honor “The Children”

On February 27, 1960, about 300 college students marched into downtown Nashville to confront Jim Crow segregation. Each of the marchers understood that they belonged to a larger movement of young people. Just three weeks earlier, in Greensboro, N.C., four college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth store. That action desegregated the lunch counter and triggered waves of copycat protests—like the one in Nashville.

Time to Bury the “Lost Cause”

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has declared April Confederate History Month. His original seven-paragraph proclamation was full of paeans to grey-clad heroes but nowhere mentioned the agonies of slavery. This understandably offended African Americans, and McDonnell spent a day or so getting beat up in the media.

The Great Fulton Fake-Out

Remember Constance McMillen? She’s the lesbian teen in Fulton, Miss., who fought to take her date to the prom and wear a tuxedo. Her case drew national attention after she and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Itawamba County School District. The district had banned same-sex prom dates and decreed that only male students could wear tuxedos.