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Margaret Sanger felt that "no woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body" — for her accessible birth control was a necessary part of women's rights. In the 1920s Sanger put aside earlier radical tactics in order to focus on getting mainstream support for legal contraception. She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921; two years later her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau opened its doors. The Bureau kept detailed patient records that proved the...

(CNN)Early in the pandemic, young people from all racial and ethnic minority groups had higher Covid-19 case rates than non-Hispanic White people under the age of 25, according to a study published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between January and April, case rates compared to young White people were about 1.5 times higher among young Asian people, about 2.5 times higher among young Black people and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, nearly 4 times higher...

After having a light cough for three days last spring, Miguel Mestiza Valderrabano called his partner Ana Maria Lorenzo to say that, when she got home from work, he planned to go to the hospital. He would never make it, and the mental image of his 32-year-old lifeless body on their living room floor still haunts her. “I couldn’t believe that had happened in minutes,” Lorenzo said. She had just arrived home from her cleaning job—her first assignment in weeks after she’d lost work during the...

An amazing must watch documentary. With unprecedented access over the course of a year this feature-length documentary, Love Them First — Lessons from Lucy Laney Elementary, follows the determination of a charismatic north Minneapolis elementary school principal, Mauri Melander Friestleben, as she sets out to undo history. Not only does the state have the largest achievement gap between black and white children in the United States, Friestleben faced another seemingly impossible obstacle,...

Can a school save a community? Oyler profiles how a "community school" helped fuel a dramatic turnaround in one of Cincinnati's most poverty-stricken neighborhoods, part of a growing national movement to help poor children succeed by meeting their basic health, social, and nutritional needs at school. Before 2006, very few kids from the Lower Price Hill area finished high school, much less went to college. The neighborhood is Urban Appalachian--an insular community with roots in the coal...

Born in New York City to Haitian immigrants and raised in Brooklyn and Irvington, Pierre-Louis graduated from Rutgers University and earned her law degree at Rutgers University Law School. After law school she clerked for associate Justice John Wallace, the last African - American to serve on the court and whose who's seat she'll fill (Timpone replaced Wallace). She spent nine years as a prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, where she was where was...

Mónica Ramírez has dedicated more than two decades to the eradication of gender-based violence and the promotion of gender equity, specifically on behalf of Latinas and farmworker and immigrant women. In 2003 she founded the first state-based legal project aimed at combating gender discrimination against women employed in agriculture in Florida. In 2006 she joined Southern Poverty Law Center where she founded the first national legal project to end workplace sexual violence and other forms...

Getting into college for disadvantaged students is only half the battle. Anthony Abraham Jack, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reveals how and why they struggle and explains what schools can do differently if these students are to thrive. He urges us to grapple with a simple fact: access is not inclusion. A nthony Abraham Jack is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1933. She married Martin D. Ginsburg in 1954, and has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959–1961. From 1961–1963, she was a research associate and then...

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Everyone makes assumptions about people they don’t know. Melanie will teach us to recognize these assumptions and work toward a common understanding. Ms. Melanie Funchess is currently employed by the Mental Health Association where she serves as the Director of Community Engagement. She is also involved in several community based coalitions and organizations such as the African American Leadership...

A progressive social reformer and activist, Jane Addams was on the frontline of the settlement house movement in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. She later became internationally respected for the peace activism that ultimately won her a Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, the first American woman to receive this honor. Born on September 6, 1860 in the small farming town of Cedarville, Illinois, Addams was the eighth of John Huy and Sarah Weber Addams’ nine children. Only five of the Addams...

Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart is known for developing a model of historical trauma, historical unresolved grief theory and interventions in indigenous peoples. Brave Heart earned her Master of Science from Columbia University School of Social Work in 1976. Brave Heart returned to school in 1990 after working in the field of social work, and in 1995, she earned her doctorate in clinical social work from the Smith College School for Social Work. The dissertation was entitled, "The Return to...