March 1947: Influential Black Americans Howard Franklin Jeter, John E. Nail, Harold Doley, William Jefferson & Margaret Sloan-Hunter

Also, women's suffrage leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, historian and diplomat, Deborah Lipstadt & peace activist, Thomas

March 6, 1947 (Pisces): Retired diplomat, Howard Franklin Jeter, born.

Jeter served as U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria [where my mother met civil rights icon, James Meredith, at the University of Ibadan in 1964].

March 6, 1947: Real estate agent in New York City, significant for developing Harlem, John E. Nail, dies.

March 8, 1947 (Pisces): Investment banker and former ambassador, Harold Doley, born.

He is the founder of an investment banking firm in the U.S., taking emeritus status in 2003 [the year I was married].

Doley was appointed by then-President George W. Bush to the President's Board of Advisors Commission on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. 

March 9, 1947: Women’s suffrage leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, dies.

She campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920.

Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900 to 1904 and 1915 to 1920.

She founded the League of Women Voters in 1920 and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904, which was later named International Alliance of Women.

She “led an army of voteless women in 1919 to pressure Congress to pass the constitutional amendment giving them the right to vote and convinced state legislatures to ratify it in 1920.”

She “was one of the best-known women in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century and was on all lists of famous American women.”

Please vote for our first woman president on November 5 to honor all of the suffragists that made Kamala Harris’ nomination possible.

March 14, 1947 (Pisces): Former politician from Louisiana whose career ended after his corruption scandal and conviction, William Jefferson, born.

He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for nine terms from 1991 to 2009 as a member of the Democratic Party.

He represented Louisiana's 2nd congressional district, which includes much of the greater New Orleans area.

He was elected as the state's first Black congressman since the end of Reconstruction.

On November 13, 2009, Jefferson was sentenced to thirteen years in federal prison for bribery after a corruption investigation, the longest sentence ever given to a congressman.

He began serving that sentence in May 2012 at a Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facility in Beaumont, Texas [that is murdering prisoners by providing no cooling in the summer heat and denying women abortions with no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother].

He appealed his case after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on similar issues.

Considering these findings, on October 5, 2017, Jefferson was ordered released, pending sentencing or other action, after a U.S. District judge threw out seven of ten charges against him.

On December 1, 2017, Judge T. S. Ellis III accepted his plea deal and sentenced Jefferson to time served.  

March 18, 1947 (Pisces): Historian and diplomat, Deborah Lipstadt, born.

She is best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019).

She has served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism since May 3, 2022.

Since 1993 [the year I graduated high school], she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lipstadt was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In 1994, President of the United States Bill Clinton appointed her to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and she served two terms.

On July 30, 2021, President Joe Biden nominated her to be the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism.

She was confirmed by voice-vote on March 30, 2022, and sworn in on May 3, 2022.

Lipstadt was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

[My father is Jewish and I will write about him and my Jewish identity when I get to my birth year (1975) in the timeline]

March 20, 1947 (Pisces): Peace activist, Thomas, born.

Thomas was an anti-nuclear activist and simple-living adherent who undertook a 27-year peace vigil – the longest recorded vigil in US history at the time, with the title passing to his co-protester Concepción Picciotto after Thomas' death  – in front of the White House.

March 31, 1947 (Aries): Feminist, lesbian, civil rights advocate, and one of the early editors of Ms. Magazine, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, born