Wednesday, March 16, 2022
Women's History Month Profile in Courage: Betty Marion White Ludden
Betty Marion White Ludden
January 17, 1922 – December 31, 2021
Entertainment Tonight Tribute to Betty White
Betty Marion White Ludden was an American actress and comedian. A pioneer of early television, with a career spanning seven decades. White was noted for her vast work in the entertainment industry and being one of the first women to work both in front of and behind the camera.
Betty was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on January 17, 1922. She was the only child of Christine Tess (née Cachikis), a homemaker, and Horace Logan White, a lighting company executive from Michigan. White's family moved to Alhambra, California in 1923 when she was a little over a year old, and later to Los Angeles during the Great Depression. She initially aspired to a career as a forest ranger, but was unable to accomplish this because women were not allowed to serve as rangers at that time. Instead, White pursued an interest in writing. She wrote and played the lead in a graduation play at Horace Mann School, and discovered her interest in performing.
After the United States entered World War II, White volunteered for the American Women's Voluntary Services. While volunteering with the American Women's Voluntary Services, White met her first husband Dick Barker, a United States Army Air Forces P-38 pilot. After the war, the couple married and moved to Belle Center, Ohio, where Barker owned a chicken farm; he wanted to embrace a simpler life, but White did not enjoy this. They returned to Los Angeles and divorced within a year. In 1947, she married Lane Allen, a Hollywood talent agent. They divorced in 1949 because he wanted a family but she wanted a career rather than children. On June 14, 1963, White married television host and personality Allen Ludden, whom she had met on his game show Password as a celebrity guest in 1961, and her legal name was changed to Betty White Ludden. He proposed to White at least twice before she accepted. Allen Ludden died from stomach cancer on June 9, 1981, in Los Angeles. White never remarried. When asked the reason for this in an interview with Larry King, White responded by saying "Once you've had the best, who needs the rest?".
White earned a Guinness World Record for "Longest TV career by an entertainer (female)" in 2014 and in 2018 for her lengthy work in television. White received eight Emmy Awards in various categories, three American Comedy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Grammy Award. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and was a 1995 Television Hall of Fame inductee. On the morning of December 31, 2021, White died in her sleep at her home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles from a stroke she had on Christmas Day.
Article paraphrased from Betty’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_White
January 17, 1922 – December 31, 2021
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Black History Month: Profile in Courage - Mari Copeny
Mari Copeny
Mari Copeny was born July 6, 2007 in Flint, Michigan. She has become known globally as “Little Miss Flint.” Entering the public spotlight, she sent a letter to then President Obama to highlight the water crisis in Flint and the lack of viable solutions from the city or state. On receiving the letter, President Obama visited Flint to witness the issues firsthand. After his visit, he would approve $100 million dollars in relief for the city of Flint. When Mari grows up she plans on running for president in 2044.
Mari has never let her age prevent her from making a significant impact on the dialogue around environmental racism. She bravely stands up and confronts the entire country on the reality of what her state’s negligence has done to her community. She is a voice of the unheard hardships of Americans trapped by a collapsing and toxic infrastructure.
Mari serves as a social justice warrior. In 2017, she was a national youth ambassador to the Women’s March on Washington. She works with the anti-bullying group Trendsetters Productions. In 2019, she was chairwoman of the board of Kid Box. She works with Eighteen by 18, a youth organization founded by her mentor, Yara Shahidi. She sits on the Flint Youth Justice League and the MDE Anti-Racism Student Advisory Council.
Mari has brought the spotlight to Flint in numerous ways. She has raised over $600,000 for her Flint Kids projects including giving out over 17,000 backpacks stuffed with school supplies, a yearly Christmas event with thousands of toys, easter baskets, movie screenings, and lots of other events centered around the kids in her community. She began a book project wherein she gets books by authors of color into the hands of the children in her community. She raised over $250k and gave away over a million bottles of bottled water. She takes the most pride in pivoting away from single-use bottled water to partnering with a company (Hydroviv) to produce her very own water filter, that is shipped all over the country to those that are facing toxic drinking water, to date she has raised over $600,000 to produce and distribute her filters.
Article paraphrased from Mari’s “About” page: https://www.maricopeny.com/about
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Premier: The American Diplomat Film
The film will premiere on Tuesday, February 15, 2022!
The American Diplomat tells the story of three African-American ambassadors — Edward R. Dudley, Terence Todman and Carl Rowan — who pushed past racial barriers to reach high-ranking appointments in the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Asked to represent the best of American ideals abroad while facing discrimination at home, they left a lasting impact on the Foreign Service.
Official Website: https://to.pbs.org/3zYUZhD | #AmericanDiplomatPBS
Subscribe to the American Experience | PBS channel for more clips: https://www.youtube.com/AmericanExper...
Enjoy full episodes of American Experience anytime, anywhere with the free PBS Video App: https://to.pbs.org/2QbtzhR
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
"Educated" by Tara Westover: Reflections and Discussion Questions
January: Poverty Awareness Month
Book Club Reading:
Educated by Tara Westover
Personal Reflections by Ruth Lindner-Merkley
Educated by Tara Westover was the book that was chosen by popular vote for the month of January for our Diversity and Inclusion Book Club. The theme for January was Poverty Awareness. While this memoir does touch on poverty and how it can affect social outlooks, it is not necessarily the primary theme of the book. Educated covers issues of formal education vs. folk education; religion vs. fundamentalism; mental health; physical and mental abuse; and so many more.
For myself, I was raised in a Mormon household. My parents were both converts to the church; they converted before they were married and five years before I was born. I was their first child. I have three younger siblings, and each and every one of us was blessed and baptized in the church. Myself and my sister were both married in the temple. However, my upbringing within the church was vastly different from Tara’s. Many of the ideas and experiences she had were what were referred to as those “crazy Utah Mormons” when I was growing up. I was brought up with a dichotomous view of the church. There were us and there were the “Utah Mormon.” Tara may have been from Idaho, but a “Utah Mormon” did not necessarily originate from Utah. Their ideas were just more rigid, more fundamental. However, in reading Educated, it really shows you that faith and religion are not always black and white. There is not a dichotomy within the Mormon faith, there are so many shades within. As such, it made me reflect on how we are raised within a family. How our parents' ideas become our own, and that the path to our own ideas is not always an easy one. It's also not something that everyone achieves. There are many who live a life of generational thought. Their parents' ideas and beliefs are their own, going back generations. How do we step out of this generational thought? How does one determine what is their own idea as to the one they were raised to believe in?
As for now, only my youngest sister is still active in the church. For myself, I formally left right before my oldest child would have been baptized. There are many reasons for why we chose, as a family, to leave the Mormon faith. We have never sought another. Nor are we interested in following organized religion in any manner. Finding my own path meant leaving that part of my life behind me. However, it is something that will always be there. It's a stamp on me that I still struggle with. There are things I was taught growing up that have inherently shaped who I am and what I have done with my life. I forge my own path, but it is still a struggle. A struggle between who I am, who I want to be, and who I was.
As to the primary theme for January, and the discussion of poverty: in all honesty, I did not feel like this was a primary theme for this book. While her family seems to definitely live below the poverty line, at least while she is young, it is not money that defines the boundaries of their lives. They have a roof over their head, electricity, plumbing, food on the table, and I never felt like there was ever a great concern within Tara’s life of not having enough to survive. While she did struggle with paying for school, she was able to do it, especially once she got over her aversion to government assistance. The poverty in her life is not primarily financial. I felt more that her life was defined by a poverty of understanding and freedom of thought. Most of her family never saw a need to understand her, to allow her to be herself, and to truly love WHO she was. Their love, their attention was only given so long as she towed the line of their thoughts. Her desire to seek education allowed her to finally be free to think for herself, to find that path that was her own, to embrace herself as worthwhile.
Honestly, I could go on and on when it comes to this book. I am very thankful it was chosen, even if it didn’t align with the theme as much as I had hoped. I related to it. I felt her pain, her journey, acutely. It’s a book that will stick with me for a very long time.
The link below are some discussion questions which were collected and adapted from several resources. They are provided here only to assist you, if you wish, in your reflections. I hope you find them helpful.
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
February 1: DEIA in Action: Profiling Courage - The Legacy of Ambassador Terence A. Todman
On February 1, the anniversary of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in, the Secretary’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion will host a panel reflecting on the legacy of Ambassador Terence A. Todman who courageously fought to desegregate the Department’s dining facilities in Virginia.
This panel is open to the public and will be streamed at: https://interactive.state.gov/profiling-courage-todman/February 1
9:00-10:00 a.m. EST
***3:00-4:00 p.m. (15:00-16:00) Sarajevo time
This will be the fifth installment of the S/ODI series: “DEIA in Action” and will discuss how Ambassador Todman’s legacy inspires current Department efforts to build a more just, equitable, and accessible workplace for all employees.
Panelists include:
- CDIO Ambassador: Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley,
- Ambassador Todman’s son: Terence Todman, Jr.,
- Director of forthcoming PBS documentary “The American Diplomat:" Leola Calzolai-Stewart, Former U.S. diplomat: Chris Richardson, and
- Acting Director of the National Museum of American Diplomacy: Susan Cleary.
S/ODI Senior Advisor, Maryum Saifee, will moderate the discussion and there will be an opportunity to ask questions in the interactive chat.
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Podcast: Busted: America's Poverty Myths
Busted: America's Poverty Myths
On the Media’s series on poverty is grounded in the Talmudic notion that “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” Brooke Gladstone traveled to Ohio to learn from people living the varied reality of poverty today, and to unpack the myths that shape our private presumptions as well as our policy decisions. In each episode, we feature the voices and complex stories of individuals, as well essential context from scholars, to lay open the tales we tell ourselves.
This is a 5-part podcast with the following titles:
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