Prominence
Called "the Mother of Civil Rights in California" from work begun in the 1860s, her achievements went unsurpassed until the 1960s. Pleasant was once the most talked-about woman in San Francisco. When other African Americans were rarely mentioned, she claimed full-page articles in the press. Her dramatic life was part of the story of slavery, abolition, the gold rush, and the Civil War; she helped shape early San Francisco, and covertly amassed a joint fortune once assessed at $30,000,000.
Read more about this topic: Mary Ellen Pleasant
Famous quotes containing the word prominence:
“The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)