“Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ”-Zuckerberg’s Facebook status on Friday, May 18, 2012

“The thing I really care about is making the world more open and connected.” That was Mark Zuckerberg’s motto behind creating what is now the world’s largest social network. Judy Hasday, author of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, wrote that Mark “has always contended that he will stay with the company he founded as long as it is changing people’s lives.” Today, he gets to see his company make history, again.

Today, Facebook shares will be publicly traded for the first time. According to the New York Times, “Facebook is the third biggest initial public offering in U.S. history, but no other market debut has matched the frenzy created by Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site.”

Facebook employees have been celebrating by hosting an all-night-hack-a-thon at the Facebook offices in Menlo Park, California, Thursday night, according to Forbes.

This morning, when the stock market opened, it was Zuckerberg who rung the bell. The Washington Post reported, “Zuckerberg opened the tech index trading while outside the company’s headquarters… in front of a cheering crowd of Facebook employees on a stage that looked like it was set up for a rock concert.”

The New York Times reported that “Facebook’s offer price will be $38 a share, giving the company a valuation of $104 billion.”

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information on Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, check out Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg by Judy Hasday. (ISBN 9781599351766)

~*~

Update: Tuesday, May 22, 2012:

Even after all of the hubbub surrounding Facebook’s first day as a publicly traded company, the company’s shares have dropped in dollar value since the opening bell Friday.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Facebook shares recently traded 7 % lower at $31.65, 17% below their IPO price of $38. The stock fell as low as $30.98 Tuesday. The fresh bottom comes after the social network’s stock tanked 11% Monday as more investors and analysts began to question the size of the company’s public debut, which initially valued the company at $104 billion. The company is now worth about $86.7 billion based on the stock price Tuesday.”

The value of Facebook will most likely continue to fluctuate as traders try to grasp an idea of just how much the company is worth.

 

“I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight…”-Harvey Milk

A gay rights demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in New York City in 1976

This week, tensions have been high as the state of North Carolina voted for Amendment 1, which defines marriage as solely a union between a man and a woman, stopping progress for homosexual couples in the state looking for equal rights.

A day after the amendment passed, President Obama announced that he endorses same-sex marriage, according to the New York Times. Obama said in an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

If civil rights activist Harvey Milk were alive, he would most likely be celebrating, as he is known for his fight for gay rights in the 1970s.

Wrote David Aretha, author of No Compromise: The Story of Harvey Milk, “[Harvey] Milk, the outspoken voice of the gay community, was a lightening rod for bigotry. In 1977, he had been elected as a city supervisor in San Francisco, making him one of the first openly gay Americans elected to public office in a major U.S. city.”

As Aretha put it, Milk “fought for the have-nots and left-outs, especially gays and lesbians,” and in 2009, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.

And today, the president has made history regarding the issue of gay rights. The New York Times reported, “A sitting United States president took sides in what many people consider the last civil rights movement, providing the most powerful evidence to date of how rapidly views are moving on an issue that was politically toxic just five years ago.”

It has also been reported that younger generations are slowly taking over the voting booths, and they are in favor of gay rights, for the most part. And so, more and more voters are flipping the script on something that has until recent years been looked at as a non-issue, something that was just never going to happen: giving homosexuals equal rights.

Harvey Milk once said, “We have to make up for hundreds of years of persecution. We have to give hope to that poor runaway kid from San Antonio…. They need hope!”

With younger generations taking the helm and the president’s endorsement, the LGTB community can maintain hope that one day they will receive the same rights that their heterosexual counterparts enjoy.

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information on Harvey Milk and his work, check out No Compromise: The Story of Harvey Milk by David Aretha (ISBN 9781599351292)

Today in History

On May 1, 1486, Christopher Columbus persuaded the Spanish queen, Isabella I, to fund an expedition to what would become known as the West Indies. Columbus believed that venturing westward would prove to be a shortcut to Asia.

Wrote Don Nardo, author of The European Exploration of America ,”the Spanish queen and king were hesitant to believe that a westward route to Asia was shorter and to fund Columbus’s expedition. However, Columbus was drawing attention to himself, and Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand were fearful that another nation, specifically France, would eventually support Columbus. If this happened, Spain’s dominance over the seas would be at risk. With this in mind, the Spanish throne decided in 1486 to support Columbus by offering him a salary and residence in their kingdom.”

In 1492, after years of negotiating with the Spanish crown, Columbus sailed west with three small ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.  In October of that year, Columbus’s ships reached San Salvador, an island in the Bahamas.

Although Native Americans and Vikings had already come to America, Columbus’s exploratory voyage triggered the European immigration to the New World.

Nardo wrote, ”… he opened up the largest and longest age of exploration, discovery, and colonization the world had ever known…. The settlement of the Americas marked a crucial development in history and gave rise to the culture that is still prevalent on those continents today.”

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information on the discovery of America, check out The European Exploration of America by Don Nardo (ISBN 9781599351414)

“If a man carefully examines his thoughts, he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People have been fascinated with the unknown for thousands of years, and curiosity has led many to seek advice from fortune tellers, mystics, psychics, and others who claim to possess a ‘sixth sense,’ or extrasensory perception,” wrote Joanne Mattern, author of Mystics and Psychics. “To constantly look toward the future is very much human nature. In the course of any day, people are thinking about the next instant, the next hour, the next day.”

Today, many people are still curious about the unknown, whether it be their deceased loved ones or their own futures, and the entertainment industry has monopolized on their desire to know more. Recently, there are even reality television shows that feature self-proclaimed psychics, such as Long Island Psychic, starring Theresa Caputo, who talks to the dead. During it’s first season, the show averaged 1.3 million viewers per episode. New episodes of Caputo’s show aired last night on TLC.

Other psychic reality television shows that have been popular in recent years include America’s Psychic Challenge, Psychic Kids, and Mary Knows Best. 

Mattern wrote, “We have always wanted to see into the future, to know the unknown, to predict the unpredictable. And because this desire to know what might happen is so strong, there has always been a place in history for mystics and psychics.”

Now, it seems, not only is there a place in history for psychics, there is also a place on television, right up there with American Idol and Jersey Shore.

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information on some of the world’s most famous clairvoyants, check out Mystics and Psychics by Joanne Mattern (ISBN 9781599351483)

“Residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, called it ‘Magic City.’”-Calvin Craig Miller

Buildings went up in flames during the riot of 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma

On Friday, April 6, two men, one white and one Native American, drove into north Tulsa and gunned down five black people, killing three and wounding two.

The two men responsible for Friday’s massacre, Jacob England and Alvin Watts, were arrested on Sunday and confessed to shooting the victims. Controversy on whether this was a hate crime has developed and created chaos among native Tulsans.

According to NPR, racial hostilities “whipped up overnight after the shootings…. In Tulsa, with its tortured racial history, old wounds can reopen easily.” Tulsa was the site of a terrible race riot of a terrible race riot at the start of the last century, and the aftershock of the riot is still present in the minds of many black Tulsans today.

Calvin Craig Miller wrote in Backlash: Race Riots in the Jim Crow Era, “In the decades following the end of the Civil War in 1865, African Americans sought to make their way forward as a free people…. But the rage of the Jim Crow era often followed in their footsteps. They faced antebellum racist stereotypes in the South, an invisible color line in the North, and mob violence in both…. Black populations would gain a foothold, only to face a backlash from the white majority.”

NPR reported, “The race riot of 1921, arguably the worst in U.S. history, occurred in Tulsa and destroyed one of the South’s most prosperous black neighborhoods, later known as Black Wall Street. Tulsans, black and white, refused to speak of that bloody chapter for decades…”

The riot was a face off between whites and blacks in Tulsa. A black man, Dick Rowland, was accused and arrested for raping a white girl in an elevator. A crowd of angry whites gathered around the courthouse where he was held, talking of lynching him. Throughout the evening, more and more black residents arrived at the courthouse, many of whom had been World War I veterans.

Miller wrote, “The idea of fighting for their country, only to come home to violence against their race, angered these former soldiers. Soon there were two crowds at the courthouse, one white and one black. It did not take long for the initial spark that triggered the riot. Someone fired a single shot. An eruption of gunfire lit up the faces in the crowd, and everyone cleared the streets to take cover.”

By the end of the riot, the black neighborhood of Greenwood, in north Tulsa, was completely demolished after having been looted and set on fire.

Today, Tulsa is still no stranger to hate. According to the Chicago Tribune, the city has seven “hate groups,” including the Ku Klux Klan, black separatist groups, a neo-Confederate ministry, a white nationalist organization, and a neo-Nazi group.

According to the Washington Post, “Oklahoma law enforcement agencies reported an average of 51 hate crimes per year from 2008 to 2010, according to the most recent data from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The most common hate crime during those years was anti-black vandalism committed by white offenders.”

During the riot of 1921, racial tensions were high, and, as the Chicago Tribune reported, “the Tulsa shootings… come at a time of rising racial passions in the wake of the shooting death of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.” Will people separate into two groups as they did in 1921, or will they form a united front against hate?

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information on the Tulsa riot and other race riots of the time, check out Backlash: Race Riots in the Jim Crow Era by Calvin Craig Miller (ISBN 9781599351834)

“The success we are having is the success of the people.”-Aung San Suu Kyi

“In late 2010, Burma’s leading pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, walked free after… years of house arrest imposed by Burma’s military rulers,” wrote Kem Sawyer, author of Champion of Freedom: Aung San Suu Kyi.

Since Suu Kyi’s release, Burma has undergone some major changes, most notably progress toward a democratic government.

Yesterday, a historic by-election was held in Burma, also known as Myanmar, for 45 vacant seats in parliament.

“Burma election officials confirmed Monday that Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party won a landslide victory,” CBC reported. ”The victories for Suu Kyi’s party included all four seats up for grabs in the administrative capital, Naypyidaw, which is populated by civil servants, in an embarrassing sign of defeat for the government.”

The National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi’s party, will hold 6 percent of the seats in parliament, according to CBC.

According to USA TODAY, after claiming her victory, Suu Kyi spoke to thousands of her supporters, “The success we are having is the success of the people. It is not so much our triumph as a triumph of the people who have decided that they have to be involved in the political process in the country. We hope this will be the beginning of a new era.”

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information about Aung San Suu Kyi, check out Champion of Freedom: Aung San Suu Kyi by Kem Sawyer (ISBN 9781599351681)

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”-President Obama

To say that the case of Trayvon Martin’s death has stunned the nation would be a gross understatement. News outlets nation-wide have reported non-stop on the case for the past month.

NPR summarized the night Martin died:

Seventeen-year-0ld Trayvon Martin of Miami, was walking from a convenience store to the home of family friend in a gated community in Sanford on Feb. 26th. He was confronted by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman called police to report a suspicious person but before police arrived, the two struggled and Zimmerman shot and killed the teenager. Community members are demanding Zimmerman’s arrest but Sanford police say they don’t have sufficient evidence to dispute his claims of self defense.

Zimmerman has not been arrested because of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which states that “As long as you are somewhere you have a lawful right to be, if someone attacks you, the words of the statute are you can meet force with force, including deadly force, if you reasonably believe that that is necessary,” law professor Jeffrey Bellin told NPR.

President Obama spoke on Friday about the tragedy, the Washington Post reported, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.” And he’s not alone. Christy Oglesby of CNN wrote, “My son knows he could be Trayvon.”

Many people have compared Martin’s death to the case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who was murdered in 1955 for flirting with a white woman in Mississippi.

David Aretha, author of The Murder of Emmett Till, wrote, “Emmett Till was a bright and confident African American boy growing up with his single mother in Chicago. An offer to spend a few weeks with his great-uncle and cousins in Mississippi seemed like a fun way to spend his summer. His mother warned him about the racism and the violence aimed toward blacks down South, but Emmett paid little heed to her words. Then, just a few days after arriving in Mississippi, Emmett…innocently flirted with a white woman…. Three days later, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s body was found in a river, badly mutilated with a bullet wound in the skull.”

Till was kidnapped and murdered by two white men, the white woman’s husband and his brother in law.

Aretha pointed out that both cases gained national attention in large part because of the media. “[Mamie] Bradley had insisted upon an open casket so that the whole world could see what the murderers had done to her son.” And so it did, thanks to television and newspapers. Martin’s case has been elevated to national status thanks to social media and news channels.

Aretha reported to CNN’s John Blake, “The murders [of Till and Martin] themselves were appalling, but what really angered the general public was the injustice – highly questionable laws and customs that allowed for whites to freely murder blacks in the Jim Crow South and for someone to almost randomly shoot anyone in the Martin case. “

Actress Angela Bassett told an audience in Chicago, according to the Chicago-Sun Times, “Trayvon Martin adds another name to the terrible legacy of young black men like… Emmett Till and countless others who were judged, sentenced and executed for the crime of being young and black. An innocent young man walking home from getting a snack, and by virtue of race, accused of being a trespasser and predator just steps away from his father’s home.”

Emmett Till’s murderers were tried and acquitted, even though they admitted to kidnapping Till. Zimmerman has not yet been arrested, even though he admitted to shooting a minor. Whether he’ll ever face charges remains to be seen.

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information about Emmett Till, please check out The Murder of Emmett Till by David Aretha (ISBN 9781599350578)

Twitter Turns Six

“Just six years ago… co-founder Jack Dorsey published the very first public tweet to the world. But little did Dorsey know that the 24-character snippet of text would be just the beginning of a worldwide revolution,” reported International Business Times.

Since then, “The social network has garnered 300 million users that are collectively tweeting one billion tweets every 4-5 days.”

Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday this past Wednesday. Chris Smith and Marci McGrath, authors of Twitter: Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, wrote, “Twitter filled a basic human need to communicate and feel connected.”

This week, Piers Morgan, an avid Twitterer himself, told his audience during his “Only in America” segment, “In a maximum of 140 characters, people anywhere can communicate with each other instantly, and in real time, about anything they want. It’s used by astronauts in orbit, explorers deep under water, and even presidents.”

But in the six years it has existed, Twitter has done more than simply connect people. It has become a tool for change. Jack Dorsey once said, “I’m really excited about what technologies like this can do for government and getting more of the citizens engaged into public action and public policy and into that conversation of how we structure our societies, how we structure our cultures, and what we want to see in the world.”

And that’s exactly what Twitter has done. Throughout the unrest in the Middle East and even in our own backyard with the Occupy movement, Twitter was spitting out thousands (maybe even millions) of tweets informing citizens about what was going on, why, and how to get involved.

International Business Times reported:

While the micro-blogging platform has helped activists around the world organize, the real revolution–The Twitter Revolution–has only just begun…. The ability to dispatch information on a whim has come to represent much more than the ability to express one’s self. It has also given people the ability to share and exchange ideas at a faster rate than ever before. On Twitter’s sixth birthday, it’s evident that the infant company has already grown into a colossal force…. Not only will the revolution be tweeted, the revolution is tweeting.

There is no doubt that Twitter will play a major role in the coming election year, as a campaign board for candidates and a discussion forum for citizens. Revolution, indeed.

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information about Twitter and its founders, check out Twitter: Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams by Chris Smith and Marci McGrath (ISBN 9781599351797)

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”-Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart in 1928

 

“Amelia Earhart flew for the fun of it, she always said,” wrote Wanda Langley, author of Women of the Wind: Early Women Aviators.

In 1937, Amelia Earhart took her plane, the Electra, on a round-the-world flight, a trip that was considered incredibly dangerous at the time. Earhart had made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean after flying over the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and Asia when her plane went missing.

“Numerous rumors circulated about what happened to Amelia Earhart,” Langley wrote. “Some people said she landed on an uninhabited island and starved to death. Others thought the aviator set down on an island occupied by Japanese soldiers who imprisoned her…. Most aviation experts think that her plane simply ran out of fuel and sank into the ocean.”

This week, Good Morning America reported that, “A renewed effort to determine what happened to aviator Amelia Earhart’s plane when it disappeared over the Pacific 75 years ago is expected to be announced today as a recently discovered photo taken months after she vanished is believed to show her plane’s landing gear.”

The search, which will begin in July, has been sanctioned by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

According to Good Morning America, the State Department said in a statement, “The event will underscore America’s spirit of adventure and courage, as embodied by Amelia Earhart, and our commitment to seizing new opportunities for cooperation with Pacific neighbors founded on the United States’ long history of engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Amelia Earhart, according to fellow aviator Louise Thaden, “talked more people into the air than any other individual in aviation” in her day, wrote Langley.

In her last letter to her husband, Earhart wrote, “I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information about Amelia Earhart and other early women aviators, check out Women of the Wind: Early Women Aviators by Wanda Langley (ISBN 9781931798815)

“When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”-Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin in 1963

Tomorrow is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader who is perhaps best known –if known at all–as the key organizer of the famous 1963 March on Washington.

Rustin, along with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph made that August day in 1963 one that went down in history books. However, after the march was over, Rustin did not join his comrades to celebrate the march’s success. Calvin Craig Miller, author of No Easy Answers: Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement, wrote:

As the day wound to a close, King, Randolph, and other march leaders met at the White House with President John F. Kennedy. Bayard was not among them. Instead, he attended to the inglorious details that had fallen to him during his many years as a social activist. There was a simple, brutal reason for Rustin’s absence at the White House that historic day. In addition to being black, Rustin carried another stigma in America of 1963: he was an acknowledged homosexual who had to labor in the shadows while others enjoyed the limelight. While the marchers returned home and a select few talked with the president, Bayard supervised the litter crews, making sure that the streets were as clean as the March on Washington had found them.

Rustin fought for equality his whole life, and Miller wrote, “Today, Bayard Rustin is remembered as a tireless force, a man who gave his life and his work to the cause he so fervently believed in, and who struggled to bear two crosses–being black and being gay–at a time when one was more than enough.”

This sentiment is echoed by the Bayard Rustin Coalition, which calls Rustin “one of the leading advocates and examples for gay equality.”

In its obituary of Bayard Rustin, the New York Times reported, “Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: ‘The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.’”

Rustin’s life is certainly one worth both praise and study, and to that end, the University of Illinois at Chicago is one of many institutions across the country that will hold tributes during this one hundredth anniversary year.

Adrianne Loggins
Associate Editor

For more information about Bayard Rustin, check out No Easy Answers: Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement by Calvin Craig Miller (ISBN 9781931798435)