Eleanor Roosevelt
Let’s talk about Eleanor Roosevelt for a minute.
She became an orphan at 8. But when her mother was alive, she nicknamed Eleanor “granny” for having an old fashioned personality.
And Eleanor loved field hockey. So much so that as she reflected back on life, she remarked that her happiest day was when she made her high school field hockey team.
And when she got married, it was her uncle Teddy Roosevelt who walked her down the aisle.
And she stood up for equality. In one example, “in 1938, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare held its inaugural meeting in Alabama’s ‘Magic City.’ Upon her arrival, Roosevelt sat directly beside an African American associate, ignoring the designated whites-only section en route. After being told that Birmingham’s segregationist policies prohibited whites and blacks from sitting together at public functions, the first lady asked for a ruler.
‘Now measure the distance between this chair and that one,’ she said after somebody produced one. Upon examining this gap separating the white and black seating areas, the first lady placed her chair directly in its center. There she defiantly sat, in a racial no-man’s land, until the meeting concluded. ‘They were afraid to arrest her,’ one witness claimed.”
And she believed in a better world, or in her words, a world in which “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
Source: http://mentalfloss.com/article/59326/11-facts-eleanor-roosevelts-130th-birthday
