<\/p>\n
Did you know that Black History<\/a> month started out as a week?<\/p>\n In 1926, Carter G. Woodson, the son of former slaves and a scholar who went on to get a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, created \u201cNegro History Week.\u201d February\u2019s theme honors Woodson, who, along with Jesse E. Moorland, co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History<\/a>. ASNLH\u2019s mission was to recognize and raise awareness of the importance of African Americans in history. Woodson\u2019s work with the ASNLH led to the creation of \u201cNegro History Week,\u201d which was extended to the entire month of February in its 50th year of observance, 1976.<\/p>\n \n Black History Month is a great time for our organization, the National Consumers League, to remember our own historical connections to the Civil Rights Movement. NCL supported racial equality from the beginning, as its first leader, Florence Kelley, was a founding member of the NAACP. During the New Deal, NCL called for including domestic and agricultural workers in labor laws and social security programs, and was alone among women\u2019s groups in demanding racial justice. Lucy Mason, head of the league during the 1930s, also served on the NAACP\u2019s board, and she cautioned against \u201cthat tendency to believe that the colored worker needs less than the white worker.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the great watershed events in African American history is the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka<\/a>. The Court found that \u201cseparate educational facilities are inherently unequal.\u201d The landmark case ended federally-sanctioned racial segregation in public schools. It\u2019s of unique interest to NCL not just for the role it played in the Civil Rights Movement, but because the winning side\u2019s legal arguments had roots in another human rights issue that NCL was closely involved in a few decades earlier.<\/p>\n The brief prepared by Thurgood Marshall (who went on to become a Justice of the Supreme Court) in Brown was a \u201cBrandeis Brief.\u201d This is a brief that\u2019s filled with more sociological data<\/a> than legal argument. Marshall\u2019s brief demonstrated the corrosive effects of segregated schools on African American students and that separate was not equal. The first Brandeis Brief, written by Louis Brandeis himself (who also went on to become a Supreme Court Justice), came about in the 1908 case of Muller v. Oregon. Brandeis, who successfully represented the interests of women laundry workers, was persuaded to write the brief by NCL\u2019s Kelley and Vice President Josephine Goldmark. Muller upheld workers\u2019 rights to work only 10 hours a day, and laid the groundwork for the Fair Labor Standards Act<\/a> of 1938.<\/p>\n NCL proudly acknowledges Black History Month, and we salute the accomplishments of all of the great historical figures and leaders who have paved the way for justice and equality for us all.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Did you know that Black History month started out as a week? In 1926, Carter G. Woodson, the son of former slaves and a scholar who went on to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3291"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11723,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291\/revisions\/11723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}