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The story behind Black History Month — and why it’s celebrated in February : NPR

Woodson envisioned a weeklong celebration to encourage the coordinated teaching of Black history in public schools. He designated the second week of February as Negro History Week and galvanized fellow historians through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which he founded in 1915. (ASNLH later became ASALH.)

The idea wasn't to place limitations but really to focus and broaden the nation's consciousness.

Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was an American historian, a scholar and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson was instrumental in launching Negro History Week in 1926. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

"Woodson's goal from the very beginning was to make the celebration of Black history in the field of history a 'serious area of study,' " said Albert Broussard, a professor of Afro-American history at Texas A&M University.

The idea eventually grew in acceptance, and by the late 1960s, Negro History Week had evolved into what is now known as Black History Month. Protests around racial injustice, inequality and anti-imperialism that were occurring in many parts of the U.S. were pivotal to the change.

Colleges and universities also began to hold commemorations, with Kent State University being one of the first, according to Kaplan.

Fifty years after the first celebrations, President Gerald R. Ford officially recognized Black History Month during the country's 1976 bicentennial. Ford called upon Americans to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history," History.com reports.

SMART PEOPLE… described by Kristen Kimball in the DIRTY LIFE. Good summer read, life goals, etc.

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SMART PEOPLE… described by Kristen Kimball in the DIRTY LIFE. Good summer read, life goals, etc.

“We were the only people in town who did not keep our lawn
neatly mowed. In Essex, even the scofflaws and the drunks,
the wife beaters and the serial unemployed mow their lawns.
On the outskirts, there might be cars up on blocks in the yard.
permanent fixtures, but the grass around them was cut on a
weekly basis. Our elderly neighbors, the Everharts, kept their
lawn both neatly trimmed and thoroughly decorated, with figu
rines, birdbaths encircled by pansies, and a kind of weather
proof slide projector set up to make a picture against the house
at night, a different image for every holiday, from a flag at the
Fourth of July to a snowman at Christmas.

Meanwhile, our lawn grew shaggy. I looked at it as I ran by
with my hands full of crates or tools or stakes, feeling a grow
ing self-loathing, knowing that it was a black mark against us
in the collective mind of our community, a civic failure. One
evening at the beginning of summer I’d grabbed the little elec
tric mower my parents had given us and made an attempt to
cut it, but by then the grass had grown so rank it was like trying
10
shear a sheep with nose hair clippers. I made one crushed,
chewed-up stripe of grass at the lawn’s periphery and was
defeated. By August the lawn was so overgrown it could swal
low dogs and small children. Our community has more than its
fair share of eccentrics, and it is tolerant of them, but I could
tell the lawn bothered our neighbors, because they didn’t tease
us about it. Others of our quirks-such as the pair of Highland
horns that Shane Sharpe helped Mark bolt onto the hood of
our Honda, making the car look like it’s sporting a handlebar
mustache-they would tease us about incessantly. About the
lawn, they were ominously silent.

Mark is immune to this kind of social pressure, and gener
ally contemptuous of lawns. In his mind, grass is for grazing.
And therein lay the solution. We might never find time to mow
the lawn, but if it looked fecund enough, and the cattle were
hungry, we could find the time to put up a fence. A few weeks
before our wedding, we ringed the lawn with electric fence and
moved the beef herd onto it. The dairy herd was recruited for
the smaller patch across the driveway.

For three days, the cattle mowed our lawn. We fell asleep
to Rupert calling to the dairy cows: a series of mournful, falling
bass notes, the sound of a monumental desire. Then a petu
lant trumpeting, the pitch rising to what passes for tenor in a
bull, the sound of desire thwarted by electric fence. We awoke
to the rip-rip sound of cows grazing right outside our window. “

Billie Sol Estes Has a Deal for You – Texas Monthly

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Billie Sol Estes Has a Deal for You – Texas Monthly

“I’ve always been able to make money,” says Billie Sol Estes as he picks over a plate piled high with lasagna, chicken cacciatore, and spaghetti. “If I put my mind to it, I could make a million in the next thirty days.” That’s just the sort of talk that has gotten Billie Sol in trouble for the last thirty years, a third of which he has spent in prison. In the eyes of the law his talent lies in being able to make money a little too easily – by a variety of schemes and cons that have made his name a national synonym for “swindler.” I have already experienced, in a small way, Billie Sol’s skill at separating people from their money. When I asked to meet him, he imposed one condition: I had to take him and his grandkids to dinner at a restaurant of his choice. And that is how I came to be seated at the Olive Garden Italian Restaurant in Abilene with Billie Sol, his daughter Pam, two of his granddaughters, and a nephew named Kerry who is a hairdresser in Los Angeles.

How JFK forced steel price roll back

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How JFK forced steel price roll back

The Democrat, after just a year in office, was concerned about potentially rising inflation. His administration set an informal but well-publicized target of having wage increases and price hikes match productivity increases. Meanwhile, Steelworkers’ bargaining over a contract with the nation’s steel companies was getting nowhere.

The administration intervened. It didn’t want a rerun of the 4-month steel strike of 1959 under GOP President Eisenhower. Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, a longtime union counsel, mediated the talks. The two sides reached agreement on March 31.

The pact, with ten of the nation’s 11 steel companies, called for an increase in fringe benefits worth 10 cents an hour in 1962, but no wage hikes that year. Then-AFL-CIO President George Meany said that in the pact, the union “settled on a wage increase figure somewhat less than the Steelworkers thought they would get.”

Kennedy praised the contract as “obviously non-inflationary” and said both the USW and the steel firms showed “industrial statesmanship of the highest order.” The agreement also implicitly said the companies would not raise prices, as that would be inflationary.

But on April 10, Roger Blough, CEO of U.S. Steel, the largest of the firms, with 25% of the market, met Kennedy in the Oval Office and told him the company was immediately raising prices by $6 a ton – and that other steel companies would follow. Six did. The 3.5% hike enraged the president. What he said in public was biting – but he was even more caustic in private.

In an April 11, 1962 press conference, Kennedy called the price hikes “a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.” He criticized “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility.” The execs had “utter contempt” for the U.S., Kennedy said.

In private, Kennedy added: “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now.” The line quickly became public.