On July 16

On this day in ...
... 1862, in the middle of the Civil War and half a year before issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Ida B. Wells was born to a couple held in slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Ida attended Freedmen's School Shaw University, but dropped out of school and started working as a teacher at age 16 in order to keep her siblings together after their parents and an infant brother died from yellow fever. Eventually she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where her refusal to sit in the train car designated for blacks gave rise both to a high-profile court case and to her career as a crusading journalist. She became a co-owner and editor of a leading antisegregation newspaper and an investigative reporter who focused on the crime of lynching. She settled in Chicago, where she helped to organize an African-American boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, married and raised a family, and worked to improve the lot of the city's ever-growing African-American population. Wells traveled as far as Europe to speak in favor of racial equality before her death in Chicago in 1931. She is an IntLawGrrls transnational foremother, thanks to guest/alumna Lynne Henderson. As posted at Legal History blog, Wells also is the subject of a new biography, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (2008) (above left), by Smith College Professor Paula J. Giddings.
... 1945, about 6 weeks after Nazi Germany's surrender, leaders of 3 victorious Allied states -- Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union -- convened at Potsdam "to decide the future of a defeated Germany." Their conference (right) concluded on August 2 with issuance at this city southwest of Berlin of the Potsdam Declaration. It contained not only provisions for the division of Germany into 4 occupied zones, but also a warning, issued on July 26, which warned Japan that if it did not surrender the Allies would resort to

'[t]he full application of our military power, backed by our resolve,' which 'mean[t] the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.'

No surrender ensued, and atomic bombs were dropped on Japan on August 6 and 9. (photo credit)

(Prior July 16 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: Lynne Henderson

It's IntLawGrrls' great fortune to feature Lynne Henderson (left) as today's guest blogger.

Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Lynne teaches in the areas of criminal law, constitutional law, feminist jurisprudence, and violence against women. She's an expert on victim’s rights, rape and feminist jurisprudence, all of which she's examined in her publications. She earned her bachelor's and law degrees from Stanford, where she was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. She's active in the the Society of American Law Teachers. Her work on a SALT committee dealing with human rights issues post-9/11 dovetails with the subject of her guest post below: accountability for interrogation and detention abuses. (It's a topic I broached a while back in this post.)

Lynne dedicates her contribution to Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). "Her courage in publishing, speaking out, and battling for civil rights for Black women and men was huge," Lynne writes of Wells. "In the face of threats, violence, fires, etc. she published as long as she could before having to flee Tennessee to Washington, D.C., but she never gave up educating and trying." Wells (left) campaigned tirelessly, but in vain, for a federal anti-lynching law. Author of an autobiography entitled Crusade for Justice (1928), Wells joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!