Black history month: February 4th
First off: it is the 103rd birthday of Rosa Parks.
It's funny: growing up I heard that she was a tired old woman who didn't want to get up at the end of a hard day of work. They somehow neglected to mention that she was 42 (hardly decrepit) and the presiding secretary of the Montgomery County NAACP chapter (fact checkers: was NAACP by city or county there? I've seen both.) She was not a "tired old woman" who was fed up; she was a fired up middle-aged woman who knew exactly when and where to strike with the most effect (she had been thrown off that bus line before).
Also today in black history:
In 1794 revolutionary France abolished slavery (and then conveniently forgot they did that).
In 1969 the MPLA in Angola declared an open armed struggle for liberation from Portugal.
Less felicitously, J. C. Watts became the first African-American to give the official response to a State of the Union Address.
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