Here is to our true Progressives that fought for Civil Rights their whole life.

[betsuni]

3. I had forgotten until I read her book that Hillary's speech was rated 35 in the Top 100 Speeches

of the 20th Century. Also, that when she worked for the Children's Defense Fund after law school she was sent to South Carolina to gather evidence for a lawsuit to end the incarceration of teens in jails with adults and to Alabama to expose segregated schools trying to evade integration.

She was also sent to a community to find out why so many families kept their children out of school and it was because the schools couldn't accommodate those with disabilities. It was a clarifying moment for her, she said, and I thought this was interesting:

"As a campus liberal in the foment of the sixties, I took 'consciousness raising' seriously. But talking about fairness alone wouldn't get a ramp built for this girl's wheelchair at the local public school. Raising public awareness would be necessary but not sufficient for changing school policies and hiring and training new staff to give students with disabilities an equal education. Instead of waiting for a revolution, the kind of change this girl needed was more likely to look like the sociologist Max Weber's description of politics: 'a strong and slow boring of hard boards.'

"We wrote a report. We built a coalition of like-minded organizations. And we went to Washington to argue our case. It took until 1975, but the Children's Defense Fund's work eventually helped convince Congress to pass the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, requiring all public schools to make accommodations for students with disabilities. This kind of work isn't glamorous. But my experience with CDF convinced me that this is how you make real change in America, step by step, year by year, sometimes even door by door."