In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Mary Lou Williams

Pianist and composer (1910 – 1981)
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• Known as the “First Lady of Jazz,” Williams wrote hundreds of arrangements and compositions and recorded over a hundred records
• Made major contributions to the Kansas City swing style of big band jazz
• Friend, teacher, and mentor to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie
• Later taught at Duke University and the University of Massachusetts

In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Carry Nation

Radical temperance movement leader (1846 – 1911)
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• Became an activist after her first husband died of alcoholism after a year of marriage
• Cofounder of her local Texas branch of the Women’s Temperance Movement
• Believed she was divinely ordained to destroy saloons and used a hatchet to smash bottles and kegs in saloons in what she called “hatchetations”
• Exerted force in response to the lack of agency and support women had in their marriages, where they were stuck in marriages with drunken husbands
• When Nation was imprisoned for her hatchetations, she raised bail money through speaking engagements and selling souvenir hatchets 

In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Fannie Lou Hamer

Voting and women’s rights activist, civil organizer, Civil Rights Movement Leader (1917 – 1977)
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• Became a voting rights activist after she attempted to vote in Mississippi in 1962 while working as a sharecropper
• While trying to register and vote, Hamer was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by police and white supremacists 
• Founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
• Gained national attention during the 1964 Democratic National Convention when the MFDP insisted on being seated with the all-white delegation

On Wednesday, February 21, 2018, students who survived the shooting at Marjorie Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida travelled seven hours to speak to state congressional leaders about passing gun control legislation. These students, unable to vote and appalled by the lack of action to reform laws concerning the purchasing, use, and ownership of guns, took bold, decisive leadership action to create change themselves. When they saw their elected and community leaders failing them, they decided to lead themselves.

No one thinks of youths as leaders; the claim is that they lack experience, and therefore don’t know what they’re talking about. But these kids were eyewitnesses to a mass shooting, saw their friends and teachers killed, and hid in closets to protect themselves. What better experience is there than that to understand the danger of assault weapons? What other kind of knowledge could these politicians be seeking?
The last several years have been defined by political rancor, the murders of people of color at the hands of police, and mass shootings. Immediately following these incidents comes what seems to be our defining cycle of violence: the feedback loop of thoughts and prayers versus calls for action by authentic leaders. Each time we bear witness to a shooting, we shudder, maybe hold our breath, wonder when this cycle will break, and when it might affect us directly, close to home. We look to our elected leaders to spearhead this change, and yet each time we are instead met with platitudes about the impossibility of reform. Instead, we hear that these deaths shouldn’t be politicized, and we feel stuck. It’s like the gas pedal and the brake are jammed at the same time. We are caught in the freeze response.

What do we do when we feel stuck in this cycle of violence? What do we do when we feel let down, deeply disappointed by our elected leaders?

When terrible things happen, our peace is stolen from us. Most people want to build peace back into their lives and communities. At the foundation of peacebuilding is the need for safety. In an emergency, the first priority is to get to a place of safety, and from this safe place we can assess the situation and begin to repair it. But we often feel unsafe after the emergency ends. It is then that we turn to others we trust for support to help us build peace back into or lives. This is when we turn to leaders, to ensure that we are protected from future harm.
These students from Parkland, Florida prepared speeches and talking points, met with state politicians from both parties, and asked them to consider legislation that would ban assault weapons like the one used in the shooting they witnessed. But in the initial session, Florida lawmakers voted against a bill that would outlaw assault rifles. These leaders chose to reject a measure that would play a part in restoring safety to their constituents’ lives.

There are, of course, different kinds of leaders. There are the leaders elected on the promise of representing the will of the voters; the leaders in our communities who listen to the needs of their neighbors; and the leaders in our spheres of influence who inspire us with confidence. And there is, of course, a plethora of ways to lead. We hope that our leaders are authentic: that they listen to our requests and value our input, that they represent our best interests. But there are times when our elected leaders fail us. When leaders value profit over input, or when they refuse to listen to those they represent, they are inauthentic leaders. This inauthenticity takes away our sense of safety, and we are once again stuck in the cycle.

But we are not stuck with inauthentic leaders.
In explaining his lack of support for banning assault weapons, a prominent state politician told Parkland students that the AR-15 should be accessible as it is occasionally used to hunt boar, and that “being in elected office, you have to be very, very, very careful how much authority and power you bring to government. The greatest atrocities known to mankind have been committed by governments.”

There is an inherent dishonesty in this leader’s statement: we understand that the defense of the AR-15 is not about hunting boar. We understand a different meaning of being careful with the authority and power of government. We see the deep irony in claiming that taking action would be an atrocity, while being called upon by the very people who have survived the atrocity of seeing their friends and teachers killed by the weapon in question. The trust in these leaders is broken when they fail to listen to the requests of future constituents before them. This broken trust renders this type of leadership inauthentic.

By confronting lawmakers over why they support the sales of assault weapons, the youth of Parkland are forcing politicians to give dishonest, inauthentic answers. Through persistence and using their voices, by stepping up when no one else does, by using their knowledge and experience as nonviolent power to confront inauthentic leadership, these young people are the authentic leaders in the push for gun control legislation. This is peacebuilding.
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When terrible things happen, peacebuilding happens when authentic leaders speak truth, demonstrate mercy, demand justice, and build peace. We at Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute instigate, train, support, and stand with authentic leaders who engage in nonviolent direct action to transform individual and collective traumas into nonviolent power with positive, productive alternatives to revenge. Peacebuilding is authentic leadership. We call upon all leaders to examine themselves and choose the authentic way.

​In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.

Today we’re celebrating:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Writer (1860 – 1935)
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• Became a writer and lecturer in her mid-thirties despite receiving four years of erratic education
• Her mother forbade her from reading fiction as a child, but later received a list of books to read from her absent father
• Perkins’ most famous work, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is a semi-autobiographical short story based on her experience with post-partum depression and dismissive attitude men had toward post-partum women as being ill or hysterical
• Perkins divorced her husband in 1894, a rare practice in the 19th century
• Her book “Women and Economics” argued for women’s economic independence 

In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Edith Spurlock Sampson
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Lawyer and judge (1907 – 1979)

• First black female judge in the United States
• First black United States delegate to the United Nations
• Said that she spoke “from the heart and let the law take care of itself”
• Became an advocate for more people of color to enter into the practice of law, and was an inspirational leader to Barbara Jordan

In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Virginia Apgar

Physician (1909 – 1974)
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• Obstetrician and pioneer of anesthesiology
• Director of clinical anesthesiology at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center
• Developed a protocol for checking infants’ vital signs in the delivery room called the Apgar numerical score
• Led research in birth defects for the March of Dimes
• Lifelong music enthusiast who built her own string instruments

In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Chien-Shiung Wu

Physicist (1912 – 1997)
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• Conducted research that overturned parity conservation, a basic law of physics
• Her research won a Nobel Prize in physics for her two male colleagues, but not for Wu herself
• Born in China and studied at the University of California, Berkeley
• Worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, studying uranium enrichment and researching neutrons
• Became a professor at Columbia and developed an apparatus to study symmetry in nuclear structure

In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Editor, writer, and civil rights activist (1882 – 1961)
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• Literary editor of the NAACP’s magazine “Crisis”
• Among those credited with ushering in a new wave of African-American literature
• One of the first African-American people to graduate from Cornell University
• Wrote four novels focusing on the theme of human relationships in the midst of racial and sexual barriers

In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
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Today we’re celebrating:

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

Labor agitator (1830 – 1930)
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• Born in County Cork, Ireland and emigrated to the United States as a child
• Became a labor organizer after her husband and children died of yellow fever and losing her dressmaking business in the Chicago fire
• A founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, Jones traveled to organize garment workers, steelworkers, and miners
• Child labor abolitionist who led a march of child textile workers to Theodore Roosevelt’s home in 1903
• Motto: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”