First Ladies' Firsts
The role of the First Lady has changed over time due to shifting social values as well as the individual personalities of the first ladies. Try to identify the correct first lady in each question based on the following descriptions.
1. What president's wife first spoke on national radio, broke precedent by inviting noticeably pregnant women to stand with...
Lou Hoover.
2. Several First Ladies were widely known as counselors to their husbands, but which one engineered her husband's run for ...
Helen Taft.
3. What First Lady was the first (and only) woman to have married a President in a White House ceremony?
Frances Cleveland.
4. What president's wife was the first to descend into a mine?
Julia Grant.
5. What president's wife was the first to invite spirit mediums to the White House to conduct séances?
Mary Lincoln.
6. Who was the first woman to see her husband being sworn in as President? A famous writer described her as "a fine, portly...
Dolley Madison.
7. Who was the first woman widowed as First Lady to be present for the inauguration of her husband's successor?
Jacqueline Kennedy.
[Question 1] The first photograph of either a president or a first lady broadcasting from the White House is of Mrs. Hoover. She began national broadcasts in 1929, even setting up a practice room in the White House where she could "improve [her] talkie technique." Many of her broadcasts were made from President Hoover's country retreat, Camp Rapidan, where she often devoted her programs to speaking to young people, urging girls to contemplate independent careers and boys to help with the housework. Mrs. Hoover had a degree in geology from Stanford University, as did her husband. She had accompanied him to China for two years, where he hadsupervised the country's mining projects. She later used the Mandarin Chinese she learned then to communicate with her husband privately when they were in the presence of others.
[Question 2] Her father and her maternal grandfather had both served in Congress. When she was 17, she had gone to Washington with her parents to visit their family friends, President Rutherford Hayes and his wife Lucy, and she had spent a week as a guest at the White House. She was politically ambitious, but saw little opportunity for women to advance their own political careers. She married William Taft, a lawyer, who would probably have been content to practice law, or to become a judge, but she strongly encouraged him to accept political appointments, and finally, to run for political office. On her husband's inauguration day, the outgoing President, Theodore Roosevelt, left Washington immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, and she skillfully maneuvered herself into the car, next to her husband, that drove them both back to the White House. William Taft coped with stress and unhappiness by eating. During his presidency, his weight ballooned to 340 pounds, making it necessary for theTafts to replace the White House bathtub with a super-sized one.
[Question 3] Bachelor President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom on June 2, 1886, in a White House ceremony at which John Philip Sousa played the wedding march. After the ceremony, the newlyweds escaped to a honeymoon cottage in nearby Deer Park, Maryland, where reporters camped out in the bushes. Frances Folsom was the daughter of Cleveland's former law partner. Cleveland had known her since she had been born, and had bought her first baby carriage. He was 27 years older than her.
President John Tyler's first wife, Letitia, was the first woman to die during her husband's presidency, in 1842. He remarried while he was President, to Julia Gardiner, at her church in New York City, on June 26, 1844. President Wilson's first wife, Ellen, died in the White House on August 6, 1914, and he remarried, to Edith Bolling Galt, while he was President, on December 8, 1915, in a ceremony at Edith's Washington, D.C. home.
[Question 4] Julia Grant, although it happened after her husband was no longer president. Mrs. Grant went down the Big Bonanza silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada with her husband after hearing that he had wagered that she would be afraid to go. The Grants, along with their son, Ulysses, Jr., visited the mine on October 28, 1879, more than two years after Grant had left office. The mine's fabulous production of silver during the Civil War had done much to undergird the Government's financial credit internationally. Lucy Hayes later descended into the same mine with her husband, President Rutherford Hayes. On May 21, 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt made the national news by visiting the Willow Grove coal mine in Bellaire, Ohio, to observe the working conditions of the miners.
[Question 5] After the Lincolns' son Willie died in February 1862, she grew despondent. A few of her acquaintances suggested that she and her husband could still receive consolation from him in the afterlife through the intermediary of a spirit medium. Mrs. Lincoln invited several—the exact number is disputed—to the White House for private consultations. Both Lincolns attended a few séances elsewhere in Washington, although it is a matter of conjecture whether the President regarded these as anything more than a kind of entertainment.
[Question 6] The famous writer was Washington Irving. James Madison was generally shy and reticent among crowds and at parties, but Dolley was a social gadfly and an accomplished hostess. She was also a couple of inches taller than her husband.
[Question 7] Lyndon Johnson, with his wife Lady Bird on one side and Jackie on the other, was sworn in aboard Air Force One less than two hours after JFK's assassination. The ceremony was delayed to wait for Jackie to arrive. The most famous photograph of the event has Jackie in the foreground, standing in a pink suit still stained with her husband's blood, with LBJ in the center with his hand upraised taking the oath, and with Lady Bird in the background.
- Betty Boyd Caroli, First Ladies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
The statue stands in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, AL. The park, which predates the civil rights movement, was used by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as a staging point for nonviolent protests in 1963. Protesters, many of them local schoolchildren, massed here to organize for sit-ins, boycotts, and marches; in the streets around the park, law enforcement officers drenched protestors with fire hoses and menaced them with dogs. Photographs of these events created some of the most enduring images of the movement. 
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park in Seattle, WA, honors the memory of King with an abstract sculpture inspired by his final speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop." No specific event in the civil rights movement or in King's life took place at this location; like memorials, events, and other observances nationwide, the Memorial Park sculpture, by Seattle artist Robert Kelly, reminds the surrounding community not of specific historical events but of the assumed spirit of King's life and of the civil rights movement.
Sculptor Patrick Morelli's BEHOLD stands in the Peace Plaza in Atlanta, GA. Around the plaza range sites important in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., including his birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached as co-pastor with his father. Newer sites also surround the statue and plaza: The King Center, the location of King's tomb, founded by King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visitor Center, maintained by the National Park Service.
The Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial does not yet exist, but the memorial's design has been completed and ground broken, ceremonially, on the proposed site. When finished, the envisioned four-acre memorial will be positioned along the edge of the Tidal Basin, along a sightline stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Jefferson Memorial. Difficulties and controversy have dogged the memorial's progress, including backlash when Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin was chosen to carve the nearly-three-story-tall statue of King that will anchor the memorial.
The National Park Service's travel itinerary 
1. Frederick Douglass: "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!"
2. Ida B. Wells: "The race problem or negro question, as it has been called, has been omnipresent and all-pervading since long before the Afro-American was raised from the degradation of the slave to the dignity of the citizen. It has never been settled because the right methods have not been employed in the solution. It is the Banquo's ghost of politics, religion, and sociology which will not down at the bidding of those who are tormented with its ubiquitous appearance on every occasion. Times without number, since invested with citizenship, the race has been indicted for ignorance, immorality and general worthlessness--declared guilty and executed by its self-constituted judges. The operations of law do not dispose of negroes fast enough, and lynching bees have become the favorite pastime of the South."
3. Booker T. Washington: "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house."
4. Malcolm X: "If you don't take this kind of stand, your little children will grow up and look at you and think "shame." If you don't take an uncompromising stand--I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do. And that's the way every Negro should get. Any time you know you're within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don't die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
6. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps. They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man's color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years."
7. W. E. B. Du Bois: "A saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers have raised themselves?"
7. Marcus Garvey: "Men and women of the white race, do you know what is going to happen if you do not think and act now? One of two things. You are either going to deceive and keep the Negro in your midst until you have perfectly completed your wonderful American civilization with its progress of art, science, industry and politics, and then, jealous of your own success and achievements in those directions, and with the greater jealousy of seeing your race pure and unmixed, cast him off to die in the whirlpool of economic starvation, thus, getting rid of another race that was not intelligent enough to live, or, you simply mean by the largeness of your hearts to assimilate fifteen million Negroes into the social fraternity of an American race that will neither be white nor black. Don't be alarmed! We must prevent both consequences. No real race loving white man wants to destroy the purity of his race, and no real Negro conscious of himself wants to die, hence there is room for an understanding and an adjustment, and that is just."
