first African-American child

The Presidential Citizens Medal was established on November 13, 1969, by Executive Order 11494. The medal is awarded by the President of the United States in recognition of U.S. citizens who have performed exemplary deeds of service for our nation. The medal may be bestowed by the President upon any citizen of the United States and may be conferred posthumously. 

Monday, January 8, 2001

 President Clinton  presented  the Presidential Citizens Medal to  Ruby Bridges-Hall.

On November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges made history as she was flung into the vortex of a war she hadn’t started, and was too young to even comprehend. But she was certainly old enough to feel it. A pawn in the game of civil rights, and a pivotal image marking the start of the desegregation of public schools in the US, Ruby bravely walked through a crowd of raised fists and jeering faces pelting her with insults, to become the first African-American child to attend a public school in Louisiana.

The mob mentality escalated as the little 6-year-old girl was escorted by federal marshals up the steps into the school. She didn’t flinch. She later said that the noise was, to her, no louder than Mardi Gras.

She spent that entire first day in the principal’s office with her mother listening to the mob outside, and watched as the other mothers grabbed their childrens’ hands and took them from the building in protest.

father of the American Civil Rights Movement

Vernon Johns (April 22, 1892 – June 11, 1965) African- American minister and civil rights leader who was active in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans from the 1920s. He is considered the father of the American Civil Rights Movement, having laid the foundation on which Martin Luther King, Jr. and others would build. He was Dr. King’s predecessor as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama from 1947 to 1952, and a mentor of Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt Walker, and many others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The three great pushes for civil rights in the United States were the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. campaign against Jim Crow in the North, the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. attack on segregation in the South. Few people realize this, but the one man who influenced all three events was Vernon Johns.

Vernon Johns himself was a victim of a politically correct code. After all, he was constantly violating the code. He was a man who said what others were afraid to say. While inspiring the few, his words made most of his listeners uncomfortable, and this in turn would anger them. After all, people don’t like to feel uncomfortable. But it was Vernon Johns’s mission to break this sense of comfortableness

Justice Samuel Alito

 Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito didn’t like hearing President Barack Obama publicly criticize the high court’s ruling removing corporate campaign spending limits — and he didn’t try to hide it. Alito made a dismissive face, shook his head repeatedly and appeared to mouth the words “not true” or possibly “simply not true” when Obama assailed the decision Wednesday night in his State of the Union address. The president had taken the unusual step of publicly scolding the high court, with some of its members in robes seated before him in the House. “With all due deference to the separation of powers,” he said, the court last week “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”President Obama told justice Alito to: