Coretta Scott King is most often remembered as the long-time spouse of the great civil right leader Martin Luther King Jr., but she was more than that. King was a singer, organizer, and an activist in her own right. She would have turned 82 today.
After her husband’s death, Coretta Scott King took a leadership role in the movement for change. Just four days after his tragic assassination, she led sanitation workers on a march in Memphis. She went on to found the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and became an activist for women’s and gay rights.
For always believing in – and working towards – what America could be one day, happy birthday, Coretta Scott King. You’ll be missed.
The Hubble Space Telescope turned 19 over the weekend, and it’s done a lot in those 19 years. MSNBC has some fun facts about what the Hubble has done in those years:
Since the telescope’s launch aboard the shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, Hubble has traveled 2.8 billion miles in space during more than 100,000 orbits around the earth. More than 570,000 pictures have been taken of about 29,000 celestial objects. The data transmissions sent back from Hubble add up to almost 39 trillion bytes – twice as much as all the data contained in all the books in the Library of Congress.
Wow.
When most of us turn nineteen, we’re generally just happy to have finished our midterm papers on time.
So Happy Birthday, Hubble! Here’s to another super-productive 19 years!
Every Monday, we’ll promote the best of the submitted stories from readers to the main section of the blog. This first story, from Tom, is a great story about a family reunion on his special day:
It was going to be a pretty basic birthday: finish up with work, grab some drinks with friends, open up a fedex’d package from the parents. I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, so there was nothing wrong with a standard birthday with friends.
But I had a surprise in store. Six months earlier, I made the trip up to Vermont to visit my brother for his birthday. He wanted to come down for mine, but was (supposedly) just too busy with work.
An hour into my get-together, who walks in but my brother Andy. Great surprise, and it was nice to have him in town for the weekend.
To follow along with our Presidential theme for the day, we’d like to mark the 218th birthday of our 15th President, James Buchanan.
James Buchanan has never been considered one of our most popular Presidents—in part because his bumbling attempts at handling the slavery conflict led to the Civil War.
Buchanan was similarly unpopular during his lifetime, and he was the only American President to remain a lifetime bachelor.
Every Friday, we’ll bring you a fun fact about birthdays. For our inaugural Fun Fact Friday, an inaugural fact…
When asked what celebrity they’d want at their birthday parties, most Americans say no one—they’d rather celebrate with close friends and family.
There’s one exception, however…
One in three Americans would like to celebrate their birthdays with President Barack Obama.
While it might not be realistic for most of us to hope for an Obama appearance at our birthday celebrations, he did drop by Senator Ted Kennedy’s 77th birthday bash in March.
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This weekend, my 12-year old daughter and her friends are hosting a surprise birthday sleepover for one of their friends whose mother lost her very short battle with lung cancer this past July. Each year, her Mom would have a huge sleepover birthday party for her which all the girls looked forward to. This will be the first birthday she will have without her Mom and it will probably be difficult for her and her Dad and brothers.
