Madam C.J. Walker

Today Tuesday May 29, 2012 the AWOD is Madame C. J. Walker, the wealthiest African American self-made millionaire. Before there was Oprah Winfrey there was Madame C. J. Walker! She ran a successful cosmetic company, which originated in her kitchen, where she invented a hair growth product that she sold to support her children after her divorce.

Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 on a Delta, Louisiana plantation, She was one of six children; she had a sister Louvenia and four brothers: Alexander, James, Solomon, and Owen, Jr. Her parents and elder siblings were slaves on Madison Parish plantation owned by Robert W. Burney. She was the first child in her family born into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Her mother died, possibly from cholera, in 1872. Her father remarried and died shortly afterward. This daughter of former slaves transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into one of the twentieth century’s most successful, self-made women entrepreneurs.

Orphaned at age seven, she often said, “I got my start by giving myself a start.” She and her older sister, Louvenia, survived by working in the cotton fields of Delta and nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi. At 14, she married Moses McWilliams to escape abuse from her cruel brother-in-law, Jesse Powell.

Her only daughter, Lelia (later known as A’Lelia Walker) was born on June 6, 1885. When her husband died two years later, she moved to St. Louis to join her four brothers who had established themselves as barbers. Working for as little as $1.50 a day, she managed to save enough money to educate her daughter in the city’s public schools. Friendships with other black women who were members of St. Paul A.M.E. Church and the National Association of Colored Women exposed her to a new way of viewing the world.

During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose most of her hair. She experimented with many homemade remedies and store-bought products, including those made by Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur. In 1905 Sarah moved to Denver as a sales agent for Malone, then married her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaperman. After changing her name to “Madam” C. J. Walker, she founded her own business and began selling Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, a scalp conditioning and healing formula, which she claimed had been revealed to her in a dream. Madam Walker, by the way, did NOT invent the straightening comb or chemical perms, though many people incorrectly believe that to be true.

To promote her products, the new “Madam C.J. Walker” traveled for a year and a half on a dizzying crusade throughout the heavily black South and Southeast, selling her products door to door, demonstrating her scalp treatments in churches and lodges, and devising sales and marketing strategies. In 1908, she temporarily moved her base to Pittsburgh where she opened Lelia College to train Walker “hair culturists.”

By early 1910, she had settled in Indianapolis, then the nation’s largest inland manufacturing center, where she built a factory, hair and manicure salon and another training school. Less than a year after her arrival, Walker grabbed national headlines in the black press when she contributed $1,000 to the building fund of the “colored” YMCA in Indianapolis.

In 1913, while Walker traveled to Central America and the Caribbean to expand her business, her daughter A’Lelia, moved into a fabulous new Harlem townhouse and Walker Salon, designed by black architect, Vertner Tandy. “There is nothing to equal it,” she wrote to her attorney, F.B. Ransom. “Not even on Fifth Avenue.”

Walker herself moved to New York in 1916, leaving the day-to-day operations of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis to Ransom and Alice Kelly, her factory forelady and a former school teacher. She continued to oversee the business and to work in the New York office. Once in Harlem, she quickly became involved in Harlem’s social and political life.

Madam Walker was a member of the 1917 Negro Silent Protest Parade committee.

In July 1917, when a white mob murdered more than three dozen blacks in East St. Louis, Illinois, Walker joined a group of Harlem leaders who visited the White House to present a petition advocating federal anti-lynching legislation. She donated $5,000 and joined leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in their efforts to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime.

As her business continued to grow, Walker organized her agents into local and state clubs. Her Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America convention in Philadelphia in 1917 must have been one of the first national meetings of businesswomen in the country. Walker used the gathering not only to reward her agents for their business success, but to encourage their political activism as well. “This is the greatest country under the sun,” she told them. “But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice. We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible.”

In 1918 at the biennial convention of the National Association Of Colored Woman (NACW) she was acknowledged for making the largest contribution to save the Anacostia (Washington, DC) house of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. She continued to donate money throughout her career to the NAACP, the YMCA, and to black schools, organizations, individuals, orphanages, and retirement homes.

Madam C.J. Walker died at Villa Lewaro on Sunday, May 25, 1919 from complications of hypertension. She was 51. By the time she died at her estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, she had helped create the role of the 20th Century, self-made American businesswoman; established herself as a pioneer of the modern black hair-care and cosmetics industry; and set standards in the African-American community for corporate and community giving. . Her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, became the president of the Madam C.J Walker Manufacturing Company

Tenacity and perseverance, faith in herself and in God, quality products and “honest business dealings” were the elements and strategies she prescribed for aspiring entrepreneurs who requested the secret to her rags-to-riches ascent. “There is no royal flower-strewn path to success,” she once commented. “And if there is, I have not found it for if I have accomplished anything in life it is because I have been willing to work hard.”

Donna Summer

Today Tuesday May 22, 2012 the AWOD is Donna Summer “Queen of Disco”, born LaDonna Adrian Gaines on December 31, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts, she passed last Thursday May 17, 2012, in Florida of breast and lung cancer.

**note: although her immense talent and accomplishments certainly qualify her for a AWOD I am disturbed by something I discovered about her…she denied that she felt that way in her heart and that her remarks were misconstrued. I however, am still offended…you be the judge…

Donna Summer was the Queen of Disco in the 1970s with a pop/dance/rock sound that was a hybrid of American soul and European synthesizer based music. She grew up in Boston's Mission Hill section. Part of a religious family, she first sang in her church's gospel choir, and as a teenager performed with a rock group called the Crow. After high school, she moved to New York to sing and act in stage productions, but her musical career was launched on stage in Munich, Germany, in productions of Hair and Porgy & Bess. She moved to Europe around 1968-1969, and spent a year in the German cast, after which she became part of the Hair company in Vienna. She joined the Viennese Folk Opera, and later returned to Germany, where she settled in Munich and met and married Helmut Sommer, adopting an Anglicized version of his last name. Summer performed in various stage musicals and worked as a studio vocalist in Munich, recording demos and background vocals.

Her first solo recording was 1971's "Sally Go 'Round the Roses," but success would not come until 1974, when she met producers/songwriters Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte while working on a Three Dog Night record. The three teamed up for the single "The Hostage," which became a hit around Western Europe, and Summer released her first album, Lady of the Night, in Europe only. In 1975, the trio recorded "Love to Love You Baby," a disco-fied reimagining of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's lush, heavy-breathing opus "Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus." Powered by Summer's graphic moans, "Love to Love You Baby" became a massive hit in Europe, and drew the attention of Casablanca Records, which put the track out in America. It climbed to number two on the singles charts, and became a dance club sensation when Moroder remixed the track into a 17-minute, side-long epic on the LP of the same name. The orgasmic "Love to Love You Baby" brought her worldwide fame.

Her 1979 double-LP Bad Girls featured more of her songwriting contributions than ever, and went straight to number one, as did the lusty singles "Bad Girls" and the rock-oriented "Hot Stuff," which made Summer the first female artist ever to score three number one singles in the same calendar year. Her greatest-hits package On the Radio also topped the charts, the first time any artist had ever hit number one with three consecutive double LPs. Summer was the first female artist to garner back-to-back multi-platinum double albums and the first female artist to incorporate synthesizers as well as the first artist to create an extended play song.

Musically, she diversified into pop and rock, while career-wise, she appeared in the disco dud, Thank God It's Friday (1978), for which the song, "Last Dance" won an Academy Award for Best Song, as well as numerous American TV music specials.

Her career continued into the 1980s with the release of the album "The Wanderer", a diverse fusion of rock and dance. Soon afterward, Summer announced that she was a born-again Christian. Like the Queen of Disco title, Summer's status as a gay icon might not bave exactly fit her right. Her devout born-again Christian beliefs caused Summer to get into some hot water in the mid-'80s after she was reported to have made inflammatory anti-gay remarks during several of her concerts. Summer became public enemy number one among certain gay activists for, among other things, trotting out Anita Bryant's old "Not Adam and Steve" routine. Although Summer later claimed that she had been misquoted, thousands of her records were returned to her record companies by angered fans and there was a worldwide boycott of her music in dance clubs. Though Summer did issue a sincere-sounding apology, she never quite reconciled herself with perhaps the most passionate core of her fan base

However, Summer was of course more than a simple disco queen from a bygone era. At root a deeply talented mezzo-soprano who sang with symphony orchestras and rock bands alike, Summer deserves a pretty prominent place on the mantle among great music acts of her generation. She may have been the queen of the discotheques instead of the "respectable" artsy venues, but that's a pretty significant kingdom to rule.

Katherine Forrest

Awesome Woman of the day, May 17, 2012 - federal judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York. Amazing & great: federal court enjoins the indefinite detention powers of the NDAA on grounds of unconstitutionality http://t.co/toRTLqrM

see:

Federal court enjoins NDAA

www.salon.com

Joanna Johnson

The Awesome Woman of the Day for Wednesday, May 16, 2012 is Joanna Johnson (US actress, writer, and producer) born December 31, 1961. She is best known for her work on the Bold and the Beautiful, a television soap opera in the United States, but she just did something very very brave: she came out as gay and married in an industry - and a particular subset of that industry - in which conventional wisdom counsels performers to stay closeted.

Soap operas, in particular, are an intergenerational media outlet, and, by coming out, Ms. Johnson is reaching people of all ages who have been having her into their homes every day for years. And she does it at no small risk to her. This is a brave and helpful thing she has done. Awesome.

http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/soap-opera-star-joanna-johnson-im-gay-2012155

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Johnson

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0425394/

Soap Opera Star Joanna Johnson: Iâ m Gaywww.usmagazine.comThe Bold and the Beautiful star worried she wouldn't "be employable as an actress" if people knew she was a lesbian

Joanna Johnson

The Awesome Woman of the Day for Wednesday, May 16, 2012 is Joanna Johnson (US actress, writer, and producer) born December 31, 1961. She is best known for her work on the Bold and the Beautiful, a television soap opera in the United States, but she just did something very very brave: she came out as gay and married in an industry - and a particular subset of that industry - in which conventional wisdom counsels performers to stay closeted.

Soap operas, in particular, are an intergenerational media outlet, and, by coming out, Ms. Johnson is reaching people of all ages who have been having her into their homes every day for years. And she does it at no small risk to her. This is a brave and helpful thing she has done. Awesome.

See:

Soap Opera Star Joanna Johnson: I'm Gay 
www.usmagazine.com 
The Bold and the Beautiful star worried she wouldn't "be employable as an actress" if people knew she was a lesbian...


See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Johnson 
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0425394/

Anna Coleman Watts Ladd

Today Tuesday May 15, 2012 the AWOD is the portrait and architectural sculptor Anna Coleman Watts Ladd (1878 – June 3, 1939). Born Anna Coleman Watts in Philadelphia, Pa., raised in Paris and lived and studied in Rome for twelve years. She Founded the Studio for Portrait Masks in the American Red Cross in Paris during WWI, where she collaborated with surgeons to fit disfigured soldiers with sculpted faces.

Anna moved to Boston in 1905 when she married Dr. Maynard Ladd, and there studied with Bela Pratt for three years at the Boston Museum School. Her Triton Babies piece was shown at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. (It is now a fountain sculpture in the Boston Public Garden.) In 1916 she was a founder of the Guild of Boston Artists, where she held a one-woman show.

Toward the end of 1917, her husband had been appointed to direct the Children's Bureau of the American Red Cross in Toul and serve as its medical adviser in the dangerous French advance zones. That is where Anna discovered the work of Francis Derwent Wood. She was presented with the possibility of furthering the work begun by Wood through making masks for wounded soldiers in France.

When he was too old (at 41) to enlist in the Army at the onset of World War I, Wood volunteered in the hospital wards and his exposure to the gruesome injuries inflicted by the new war's weapons eventually led him to open a special clinic: the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department, located in the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth. Instead of the rubber masks used conventionally, Wood constructed masks of thin metal, sculpted to match the portraits of the men in their pre-war normality. Anna was intrigued and wanted to put her talents to use helping the disfigured soldiers retain their dignity.

In late 1917, after consultation with Wood, now promoted to captain, Ladd opened the Studio for Portrait Masks in Paris, administered by the American Red Cross. "Mrs. Ladd is a little hard to handle as is so often the case with people of great talent," one colleague tactfully cautioned, but she seems to have run the studio with efficiency and verve.

The journey that led a soldier from the field or trench to Ladd's studio was lengthy, disjointed and full of dread. For many, it began with a horribly traumatic battle injury, stage by stage, from the mud of the trenches or field to first-aid station; to overstrained field hospital; to evacuation, whether to Paris, or, by way of a lurching passage across the Channel, to England, the wounded men were carried, jolted, shuffled and left unattended in long drafty corridors before coming to rest under the care of surgeons. Multiple operations inevitably followed. Once the physical injuries were healed, they were left less then whole. When there was nothing more the doctors could do, that is when they went to see Anna.

Groups of wounded soldiers began arriving at the artist’s studio on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Moving haltingly and sometimes guided by helpers, they entered an attractive courtyard overgrown with ivy and peopled with statues, climbed five flights, and found themselves in a large room illuminated by tall windows and banks of skylights. Ladd and her four assistants had made a determined effort to create a cheery, welcoming space for her patients; the rooms were filled with flowers, the walls hung with posters of French and American flags and rows of plaster casts of masks in progress. They gave them dominoes and checkers to occupy them, refreshed them with chocolates and white wine, and offered them newspapers.

As the men laughed and smoked, Ladd examined them. She studied their shot-off jaws, missing noses, and scarred and empty eye sockets. Doctors could not restore these soldiers to handsomeness, or even to ordinariness. But as a sculptor, Ladd could apply talents that the doctors lacked. She could make new faces—masks—for the men, beautifully crafting them of copper, metallic foil, and paint. And wearing their prosthetic masks, the soldiers could return to the families, fiancées, and friends they had been afraid to allow in their unsightly presence.

The volunteer work of this intrepid artist has vanished from our memory of World War I. During the year and a half she spent directing the work of the Red Cross Studio for Portrait Masks—a division of the French Bureau for Reeducation of the Mutilated—Ladd saved nearly 100 French soldiers, as well as several of other nationalities and civilians, from the deep isolation of disfigurement.

Her services earned her the Légion d'Honneur Crois de Chevalier and the Serbian Order of Saint Sava. After World War I, she depicted a decayed corpse on a barbed wire fence for a war memorial commissioned by the Manchester-by-the-Sea American Legion. In 1936, Ladd retired with her husband to California, where she died in 1939.

Here is a silent film of Ladd working in her studio and fitting masks on soldiers.

Ursula Sladek

The incredible Awesome Woman of the Day is Ursula Sladek, who started a successful cooperatively-owned  green energy company.

After the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant it was revealed that radioactive isotopes had landed in the Black Forest region in western Germany where she lives. Children could not play outside for two weeks (and even 25 years later mushrooms from the forest are not considered safe to eat). Sladek and her husband Michael formed "Parents for a Nuclear Free Future"and began researching alternative forms of energy. When the local power company's lease was coming up for renewal Sladek launched a nationwide campaign and raised 6 million DM (about 3 million Euros) and bought the power grid so that she could break the monopoly of the energy companies.

Her company, Schönau Power Supply, uses decentralized power that is produced by local people's wind turbines, streams, solar panels, and other sources that feed the grid. Thus she pioneered a pattern of energy production that enables citizens to become private sellers of their electricity surplus.

Sladek pioneered a pattern of green, decentralized energy production. She enables citizens to become private green energy producers and to sell their electricity surplus back into the grid, and to share in the profits. Most of the revenues, which reached 67 million Euros in 2009, are reinvested in renewable energy sources. Sladek also has become a speaker and educator, and has a share-alike ethic when it comes to spreading information about how others can embark on the same type of initiative in their locale. 


In 2011, Sladek won the notable Goldman Environmental Prize (the world's largest prize for honoring grassroots environmentalists) for Sustainable Energy in Europe, and is a fellow of the Ashoka "Innovators for the Public" institute that brings together social entrepreneurs, experts, and policy makers to inspire and support a new generation of local changemakers.

Nancy Welsh

Today Tuesday May 8, 2012 the AWOD is Nancy Welsh Chairwoman, Founder and CEO of Builders of Hope. A former ad and Coca-Cola executive, Welsh started Builders of Hope after her father’s death. This mother of four was inspired after learning through local volunteer work that local firefighters, nurses, teachers and police couldn’t afford to live in the cities whose taxpayers they protected and nurtured.

With her inheritance, Welsh bought land, created 24 lots, acquired houses slated for demolition, moved them to the site and renovated them. “I learned from the ground up, I own my own Bobcat, which meant the kids wanted their birthday parties on the jobsites.” Indeed, her children love what she does and have volunteered for the organization.

After creating the first neighborhood, Barrington Village, Builders of Hope has created many more, often getting municipal or federal funding to do the retrofits. Houses are sold below market rates to encourage mixed income housing. BOH keeps costs low, managing to renovate derelict homes for $79 to $100 per square foot -- and keeping 65% of the original structure. The City of New Orleans called on the group to rescue 74 houses from the site of a future hospital, and the homes were placed in neighborhoods ruined by Katrina. Builders of Hope’s work has been recognized with an award from the National Housing Conference for “Pioneering Housing Strategies.”

The non-profit recycles houses slated for demolition, making it possible for lower-income families to step into homeownership. It also develops affordable rental housing in multi-unit buildings and is building what it calls Heros Village to help solve the housing and homelessness of returning vets. Even better, Builders of Hope retrofits these structures with the latest in environmental and sustainable technologies. It brings environmental building to the masses with “Extreme Green Rehabilitation,” a patent-pending construction process. When restoring derelict housing, the non-profit uses green-building strategies, including adding insulation and using passive solar orientation, energy efficiency and low VOC paint. Hardwood floors are restored. Not only does this improve indoor air quality, but houses that have undergone “Extreme Green Rehabilitation” produce half as much carbon dioxide per unit as traditional new construction, according to a study by North Carolina State University.

Decrying what she sees as a tear-down epidemic, Welsh says, “Single family housing is one of this country’s greatest assets. Environmentally it’s one of the worst things to just tear them all down. What we do is the best way to get people back into affordable houses.” Builders of Hope wants to help the millions of Americans who have been foreclosed or affected by the housing crisis. It is estimated that 70% of the workforce makes below the median income, and approximately 250,000 houses are destroyed every year. Through her efforts with Builders of Hope, she has subtracted 11 million pounds of construction debris from landfills. She has added 175 homes and 250 rental units to the affordable housing stock. 

Builders of Hope also runs Hope Works, a job-mentorship program for hard-to employ men and women -- ex-offenders, former addicts and the like. The participants work on construction sites and learn in-demand construction skills. One of the participants has worked with the group ever since its founding. The program has employed some 200 at-risk youth or ex-offenders who’d have a hard time finding jobs. 

Builders of Hope creates entire new neighborhoods and helps create community with homeowner associations and covenants, as well as training people how to hold office in an associations. Then of course, each neighborhood kicks off with a picnic to join the residents of mixed race and ages; says, Welsh, “It’s cool to see everyone come together.” The community building continues: the first resident of Barrington Village now sits on the board of Builders of Hope. 

Builders of Hope has developed a solution that addresses both the shortage of affordable housing and the tear-down epidemic. With a growing trend toward urban living, creating affordable neighborhoods in depressed urban communities has endless potential. Builders of Hope seeks to increase the availability of high-quality, safe, affordable and workforce housing options. Through innovative reuse and rehabilitation they incorporate economic benefits, environmental stewardship and social solutions. As social entrepreneurs, Builders of Hope sustainably revitalizes at-risk communities — one home, one family, one life at a time.

In places where there had been prostitution and violence Welsh says, “By the time we’re finished, it will get down to a few incidents per quarter. It’s amazing how giving people safe healthy homes will give them something to protect. It changes their lives and the whole community.”

Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz

The Awesome Woman of the Day for Wednesday, May 2, 2012 is Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, who was an amazing scientist/naturalist, but who is mostly known for being the first president and one of the primary forces behind the founding of Radcliffe College (her initial push had been to allow women to attend Harvard itself). Bouteloua: Women in Science Before the Civil War, Catherine Creed. http://www.catherinecreed.com/book/agassiz.html

She was born in Arlington Heights, MA, USA on December 5, 1822 and was one of seven children. She met her husband, Louis Agassiz, at the home of her sister, who was married to a Harvard professor. Louis was already a famous Swiss scientist and was teaching at Harvard. Elizabeth worked as a homemaker and (step)mother, but she also collaborated with Louis and established herself as both an educator and a naturalist. See http://www.women-philosophers.com/Elizabeth-Cabot-Cary-Agassiz.html
for a timeline of her accomplishments.

Biography appears below, from the Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database

 Elizabeth Cabot (Cary) Agassiz (b. December 5 1822 in Boston, d. June 27, 1907 in Arlington Heights, Mass.)First President of Radcliffe College, educator, science writer Elizabeth Cabot Cary was the daughter of Mary Ann Cushing (Perkins) and Thomas Graves Cary, a Boston business man. Through her sister, who had married a professor of Greek at Harvard, she met the Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, who had begun a brilliant career teaching at Harvard and who founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology . The two married in 1850 and she took on the role of stepmother to his three children by his first marriage. Five years later, she opened a girls’ school in their home at 36 Quincy Street Cambridge where Louis Agassiz and a number of other Harvard professors lectured. The school provided a small income and addressed the need for the education of young women until 1863 when the school closed. Elizabeth Agassiz took notes on her husband’s lectures and published introductory texts on natural history with her stepson, the oceanographer and natural historian, Alexander Agassiz.. In 1865, she co-authored a record of her husband’s expedition to Brazil, A Journey in Brazil. Later, she served as scribe for the Hassler Expedition (1872), providing the only account of her husband’s last theories on glaciation. After Louis Agassiz’s death in 1873, Elizabeth joined six other women in an attempt to persuade Harvard to open its doors to women. The result was the Harvard Annex, founded in 1879, which later became Radcliffe College. She threw her influence to those who believed that women students should be offered the same courses as the men and be taught by the same professors. At the age of 72, she accepted the first presidency of Radcliffe and remained at its head until 1902. Shortly before her death she moved from Cambridge to Arlington Heights where she died in 1907 at the age of seventy-five.References: Notable American Women (1609-1950) Vol I; Dictionary of American Biography, (1928). http://www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/cwhp/bios_a.html

Betty Williams

Today Tuesday May 1, 2012 the AWOD is Betty Williams a Nobel laureate born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on May 22, 1942. She was baptized a Roman Catholic, despite the fact that 3 of her 4 grandparents were not Catholic (two were Protestant and one was Jewish). When Betty was only 13 years old, her mother suffered a massive stroke. Betty dropped out of school to take on the role of caring for her mother and raising her younger sister.

Like many families in Northern Ireland, Betty’s family was touched by violence. Her Protestant grandfather, a riveter in a Belfast shipyard, was thrown down the hold of a ship that was under construction simply because his son was marrying a Catholic woman. Her cousin Daniel, a pre-med student, was killed at the age of 18, when Protestant extremists shot him as he stood at the front door of his house. Another cousin was killed when a booby-trapped car abandoned by members of the IRA exploded as he was driving past it. In Betty’s words, “The Protestants killed one of my cousins, and the Catholics killed the other.”

Betty joined the Irish Republican Army in 1972, but “didn't remain a member long.” After witnessing a British soldier shot in front of her in 1973, she knelt and prayed beside him. She was criticized by Catholic neighbors for showing sympathy for “the enemy.”

On August 10, 1976, a runaway car driven by an IRA member, Danny Lennon, crashed into a family of four who were out for a walk. (Lennon had been fatally shot while fleeing from British soldiers.) All three children, Joanne, John, and Andrew, were killed. Their mother, Anne Maguire, was critically injured and later committed suicide in 1980. Betty Williams had been driving home from visiting her mother, heard the crash, and was the first to arrive on the scene.

Betty immediately began to circulate petitions against the violence and, in less than forty-eight hours, had over six thousand signatures. When Mairead Corrigan, the children's aunt, heard what Betty Williams had done, she invited her to the children's funeral. On August 13, 1976, the day of the Maguire children's funeral, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan met with journalist Ciaran McKeown, who joined the two women in co-founding the Peace People, an organization dedicated to nonviolence in Northern Ireland and throughout the world.

Betty and Mairead organized a peace march to the graves of the children, which was attended by 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women. The peaceful march was disrupted by members of the Irish Republican Army, who accused them of being influenced by the British. The following week, 35,000 people marched with Williams and Corrigan to show their support for ending the violence in their country.

In recognition of their extraordinary action to end the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and for their dedication to building a foundation for a peaceful future, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.

In her acceptance speech, Betty said, “That first week will always be remembered of course for something else besides the birth of the Peace People. For those most closely involved, the most powerful memory of that week was the death of a young republican and the deaths of three children struck by the dead man's car. A deep sense of frustration at the mindless stupidity of the continuing violence was already evident before the tragic events of that sunny afternoon of August 10, 1976. But the deaths of those four young people in one terrible moment of violence caused that frustration to explode, and create the possibility of a real peace movement... As far as we are concerned, every single death in the last eight years, and every death in every war that was ever fought represents life needlessly wasted, a mother's labor spurned." She also said that, “The Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded for what one has done, but hopefully what one will do.”

True to those words, since receiving the Nobel Prize, she has traveled the world, working tirelessly with fellow Nobel Laureates wherever peace, and especially the safety and well-being of children, is at risk.

William's vision is to save the world's children by creating safe havens where they will be fed, sheltered, nurtured, and encouraged to grow to their fullest potential. This vision is becoming manifest through the work of World Centers of Compassion for Children, a non-profit organization she founded in 1997.

Betty Williams currently serves as the president of World Centers of Compassion for Children, whose mission is to provide a strong political voice for children in areas afflicted by war, hunger, social, economic or political upheaval. The aim of the centers will be to respond to their material and emotional needs by creating safe and nurturing environments. The focus of the WCCC's is to take the first substantial steps toward the creation of a program which will provide a strong political voice for children. In her travels over the past twenty years and more, Williams has often heard the testimonies of children who are clever, articulate and courageous in expressing their own needs and concerns. It is WCCC's intent to enable children to address the United Nations General Assembly on a regular basis, and to establish a system within the United Nations Court of Human Rights whereby children will have their own voices heard alongside those of their adult counterparts.

The WCCC has recently announced that they will be building their first “City of Compassion” in southern Italy. This city will be a safe haven for children who are most at risk to the horrors of war, hunger, disease and abuse. In it they will find homes, food, education, health care, love and compassion. This city is meant to serve as a model for others that can provide health and healing to suffering children throughout the world.

“We have to create a world in which there are no unknown, hostile aliens at the other end of any missiles, and that is going to take a tremendous amount of sheer hard work. The only force which can break down those barriers is the force of love, the force of truth, soul-force...” --Betty Williams