On this day 9/30/49

 SEPT 30

On this day in 1949, the Berlin Airlift ended, and with it the largest humanitarian aid effort in history. It had gone on for more than a year. At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into sections, controlled by France, England, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The city of Berlin was divided into east and west, and on June 24, 1948, Soviet troops blockaded all land traffic in and out of the western sector of the city in an attempt to push the population into the east and consolidate control.

Over the next year, more than a million civilians and 20,000 Allied troops were fed and supplied by air alone in what was dubbed "Operation Vittles." West Berlin needed 4,500 tons daily just to subsist, and the top military planners doubted the plan's success. But the weekly records kept getting broken.

The highest level of activity came when Tunner instituted an Easter "blitz," which involved a takeoff every 36 seconds and delivered 13,000 tons in just two days. The first skirmish of the Cold War could have easily gone hot, as Soviet planes darted at the Allied supply chain, staged awkward parachute training near the flight paths, and trained flood lights on the planes to distract them. When the Soviets finally relented and removed the blockade on May 12th, hundreds of thousands of cheering West Germans greeted the first land convoy. The airlift continued for a few months to be safe, but on this day the 276,926th flight touched down in Berlin, bringing an end to "Operation Vittles."

Tough as Nails Ginsburg

 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died Sept. 18, 2020, still holding her seat on the Supreme Court. An earlier article by CNN gives this  view of her life.

From FB 3.15.2020

Picture this, if you can. During a party, it was revealed, that she sat on the floor, giggling and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken out of a bucket. (college age)

She was born on March 15, 1933, growing up in a working-class neighborhood in New York where she learned the cello and read Nancy Drew books.

She would spend Friday afternoons at the library, housed between a Chinese restaurant and a beauty parlor, reading Nancy Drew, according to CNN. She said she read the books because "Nancy was a girl who did things. She was adventuresome."

She was also a "twirler," performing with her baton at football games and even in a Manhattan parade.

If you still don't know who this little girl grew up to be, here's a hint . . . she was given a nickname . . . T A N.

She is "TAN," says her personal trainer, Bryant Johnson, and "by TAN I mean Tough. As. Nails."

Of course, most admirers call her by a different nickname nowadays - "the Notorious RBG".

"Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become something of a cultural touchstone," according to CNN. "From murals and movies to lipsticks and tote bags, the Notorious RBG (as some would call her) is uniquely heralded in society."

She is a four-time cancer survivor, and she turned 87 today, Sunday.

Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg "has been a pioneer for gender equality throughout her distinguished career," according to the ACLU.

Co-founder of the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU, Ginsburg said, "Women's rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy."

The Peace Page has written about this little girl before, called "Kiki" as a child, how her mother, Celia Bader, provided a strong role model for her daughter at an early age, taking her young daughter on frequent trips to the library. Her mother herself had not been able to pursue her educational dreams, instead sacrificing her education to work in a garment factory to help her brother pursue his college education, a common sacrifice women made in the early decades of the 1900s.

Despite battling cervical cancer, her mother taught her young daughter to be independent, dreaming of the day she could watch her daughter graduate from high school and be something in this world, a dream she was not able to achieve herself. Her mother, however, died from her cancer the day before Ginsburg's high school graduation.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg would use her mother as a role model, to use her as inspiration to never give up and to fight for the privileges and rights that men took for granted.

"The study of law was unusual for women of my generation," she said. "For most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S."

Ginsburg, who was one of only nine other females in her class of more than 500 at Harvard Law School, would be asked by the dean of the law school how it felt to be taking up the spots of more-deserving, qualified males. After graduation, many firms would not hire her despite her high honors. She wrote, "The traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews. But to be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot—that combination was a bit too much."

But, Ginsburg never gave up. As director of the Women's Rights Project, she litigated gender-equality cases, winning five of the six cases she argued before the Supreme Court. In 1972, she received tenure at Columbia Law School, becoming the school's first tenured female professor.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second woman ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court and is known as the legal architect of the modern women's movement. When she was nominated to the Supreme Court, her final thank you was “to my mother, who was taken from me much too soon. . . . I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons.”

Despite fears of her slowing down because of her age and her battles with cancer (four times since 1999 — colon, lung and, twice, pancreatic cancers), she has admitted slowing down only a tiny bit - it's well documented that she used to do 30 push-ups twice a week and the only passion she has had to give up was water skiing.

And, she is still TAN - tough as nails.

Vogue wrote how she is still no fan of the title, "Mrs", preferring "Ms." When she was referenced as “Mrs.” in a 1972 profile in The New York Times, she wrote the reporter to ask: “Did the Times rule out Ms.?”

But, in an interview with NPR, when she was asked whether she had any regrets, she responded, "I do think I was born under a very bright star. I get out of law schools with top grades; no law firm in the city of New York will hire me; I end up with a teaching job and time to devote to evening out the rights of women and men."

Which she continues to do, now as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

And, although she can no longer be found sitting on the floor, giggling and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken out of a bucket like she did in college - In seven months, she will become the third oldest sitting United States Supreme Court Justice, surpassing Roger B. Taney, who was still sitting at 87 years, 7 months.

Justice Ginsburg remembered a while back after her pancreatic cancer, a senator "announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months . . .That senator . . . is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.”

And from Letters From an American by Heather Cox Richardson Mar 31, 2024

"...[T]his last day of Women’s History Month [I] highlight the work of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who challenged the laws that barred women from jobs and denied them rights, eventually setting the country on a path to extend equal justice under law to women and LGBTQ Americans.

Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933, in an era when laws, as well as the customs they protected, treated women differently than men. Joan Ruth Bader, who went by her middle name, was the second daughter in a middle-class Jewish family. She went to public schools, where she excelled, and won a full scholarship to Cornell. There she met Martin Ginsburg, and they married after she graduated. “What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain,” she later explained. Relocating to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for her husband’s army service, Ginsburg scored high on the civil service exam but could find work only as a typist. When she got pregnant with their daughter, Jane, she lost her job.

Two years later, the couple moved back east, where Marty had been admitted to Harvard Law School. Ginsburg was admitted the next year, one of 9 women in her class of more than 500 students; a dean asked her why she was “taking the place of a man.” She excelled, becoming the first woman on the prestigious Harvard Law Review. When her husband underwent surgery and radiation treatments for testicular cancer, she cared for him and their daughter while managing her studies and helping Marty with his. She rarely slept.

After he graduated, Martin Ginsburg got a job in New York, and Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she graduated at the top of her class. But in 1959, law firms weren’t hiring women, and judges didn’t want them as clerks either—especially mothers, who might be distracted by their “familial obligations.” Finally, her mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, got her a clerkship by threatening Judge Edmund Palmieri that if he did not take her, Gunther would never send him a clerk again.

After her clerkship and two years in Sweden, where laws about gender equality were far more advanced than in America, Ginsburg became one of America’s first female law professors. She worked first at Rutgers University—where she hid her pregnancy with her second child, James, until her contract was renewed—and then at Columbia Law School, where she was the first woman the school tenured.

At Rutgers she began her bid to level the legal playing field between men and women, extending equal protection under the law to include gender. Knowing she had to appeal to male judges, she often picked male plaintiffs to establish the principle of gender equality. 

In 1971 she wrote the brief for Sally Reed in the case of Reed vs. Reed, when the Supreme Court decided that an Idaho law specifying that “males must be preferred to females” in appointing administrators of estates was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who had been appointed by Richard Nixon, wrote: “To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other…is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” to the Constitution.

In 1972, Ginsburg won the case of Moritz v. Commissioner. She argued that a law preventing a bachelor, Charles Moritz, from claiming a tax deduction for the care of his aged mother because the deduction could be claimed only by women, or by widowed or divorced men, was discriminatory. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit agreed, citing Reed v. Reed when it decided that discrimination on the basis of sex violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

In that same year, Ginsburg founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Between 1973 and 1976, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court. She won five. The first time she appeared before the court, she quoted nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sarah Grimké: “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

Nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3. Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law.”

In her 27 years on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg championed equal rights both from the majority and in dissent (which she would mark by wearing a sequined collar), including her angry dissent in 2006 in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber when the plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter, was denied decades of missing wages because the statute of limitations had already passed when she discovered she had been paid far less than the men with whom she worked. “The court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” Ginsburg wrote. Congress went on to change the law, and the first bill President Barack Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

In 2013, Ginsburg famously dissented from the majority in Shelby County v. Holder, the case that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The majority decided to remove the provision of the law that required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval before changing election laws, arguing that such preclearance was no longer necessary. Ginsburg wrote: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” As she predicted, after the decision, many states immediately began to restrict voting.

Ginsburg’s dissent made her a cultural icon. Admirers called her “The Notorious R.B.G.” after the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., wore clothing with her image on it, dressed as her for Halloween, and bought RBG dolls and coloring books. In 2018 the hit documentary "RBG" told the story of her life, and as she aged, she became a fitness influencer for her relentless strength-training regimen. She was also known for her plain speaking. When asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, for example, she answered: “[W]hen there are nine.”

Ginsburg’s death on September 18, 2020, brought widespread mourning among those who saw her as a champion for equal rights for women, LGBTQ Americans, minorities, and those who believe the role of the government is to make sure that all Americans enjoy equal justice under law. Upon her passing, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Justice Ginsburg paved the way for so many women, including me. There will never be another like her. Thank you RBG.”

Just eight days after Ginsburg’s death, then-president Donald Trump nominated extremist Amy Coney Barrett to take her seat on the court, and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rushed her confirmation hearings so the Senate could confirm her before the 2020 presidential election. It did so on October 26, 2020. Barrett was a key vote on the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion.

Ginsburg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” 

Setting an example for how to advance the principle of equality, she told the directors of the documentary RBG that she wanted to be remembered “[j]ust as someone who did whatever she could, with whatever limited talent she had, to move society along in the direction I would like it to be for my children and grandchildren.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Tribute 2020 by Pam Wegner