By Jos Truitt • @jostruitt • 12 years ago

The inventor, the activist, and the activist-scholar

Steve JobsThree brilliant men who shaped the world died yesterday.

Steve Jobs is the name everyone knows. It’s hard to overstate the impact on our lives of this man most of us have never met. I’ve barely spent a waking moment away from an Apple product since I learned of his death yesterday. Listening to my Ipod, working on my computer – even when I was in the kitchen my housemate was at the table on her Mac laptop. Jobs’ work enabled new forms of communication like, oh, this blog.

Fred ShuttlesworthReverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth may be less well known to white America. He was a life long civil rights activist, leading many actions that played a vital role in ending Jim Crow. And he didn’t stop there, continuing his work into the 2000s. Good has a great overview of Shuttlesworth’s activist career.

I was most personally impacted by the passing of Derrick Bell. Bell was a legal scholar who played a major role in the formation of critical race theory, a field of legal thought that has had an extraordinary impact on understands of race and racism. Bell was a storyteller – his work is a far cry from a lot of dry legal scholarship. He even wrote fantastical allegories about race – his story “The Space Traders” is well known outside the world of legal scholarship.

Derrick BellBell’s challenging writing on Brown v. Board of Education (he famously suggested the ruling was actually in the interest of white folks) opened my mind to new, more critical ways of investigating race and the law. Simply put, I would not think the way I do today without Bell’s work, and I know the same is true of many activists and writers committed to racial justice.

Bell was a trailblazer, the first tenured Black professor at Harvard Law School. Yet he famously resigned from positions at the Justice Department, Harvard, and Oregon Law School in protest of institutional actions. Bell was always willing to give up positions of power in service of his ideals.

I never knew any of these men, and I know most readers didn’t either. But it’s undeniable they’ve had a lasting impact on many of us. Their work lives on, and we are changed by it.

Boston, MA

Jos Truitt is Executive Director of Development at Feministing. She joined the team in July 2009, became an Editor in August 2011, and Executive Director in September 2013. She writes about a range of topics including transgender issues, abortion access, and media representation. Jos first got involved with organizing when she led a walk out against the Iraq war at her high school, the Boston Arts Academy. She was introduced to the reproductive justice movement while at Hampshire College, where she organized the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program’s annual reproductive justice conference. She has worked on the National Abortion Federation’s hotline, was a Field Organizer at Choice USA, and has volunteered as a Pro-Choice Clinic Escort. Jos has written for publications including The Guardian, Bilerico, RH Reality Check, Metro Weekly, and the Columbia Journalism Review. She has spoken and trained at numerous national conferences and college campuses about trans issues, reproductive justice, blogging, feminism, and grassroots organizing. Jos completed her MFA in Printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute in Spring 2013. In her "spare time" she likes to bake and work on projects about mermaids.

Jos Truitt is an Executive Director of Feministing in charge of Development.

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