Happy Valentine's Day! This Day In History!

On February 14 around the year 278 A.D., Valentine, a holy priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, was executed. Under the rule of Claudius the Cruel, Rome was involved in many unpopular and bloody campaigns. The emperor had to maintain a strong army, but was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. Claudius believed that Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families. To get rid of the problem, Claudius banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Valentine was arrested and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14, on or about the year 270. Legend also has it that while in jail, St. Valentine left a farewell note for the jailer's daughter, who had become his friend, and signed it "From Your Valentine." For his great service, Valentine was named a saint after his death. In truth, the exact origins and identity of St. Valentine are unclear. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of 14 February." One was a priest in Rome, the second one was a bishop of Interamna (now Terni, Italy) and the third St. Valentine was a martyr in the Roman province of Africa. Legends vary on how the martyr's name became connected with romance. The date of his death may have become mingled with the Feast of Lupercalia, a pagan festival of love. On these occasions, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius decided to put an end to the Feast of Lupercalia, and he declared that February 14 be celebrated as St Valentine's Day. Gradually, February 14 became a date for exchanging love messages, poems and simple gifts such as flowers.

An end to Saturday mail

SPECIALS An End to Saturday Mail To cut costs, the U.S. Postal Service plans to end Saturday mail delivery this summer FEBRUARY 06, 2013 By Kelli Plasket with AP reporting WILLIAM THOMAS CAIN—GETTY IMAGES A U.S. Postal Service carrier delivers mail to a home along his postal route in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday that to trim costs, it will soon stop delivering mail—but not packages—on Saturdays. The plan will save the struggling agency $2 billion each year, according to Postmaster General Patrick Donahue. The USPS lost about $16 billion during its last budget year. "Our financial condition is urgent," Donahue told reporters at a press conference. JOSE LUIS MAGANA—AP Postmaster General Patrick Donahue speaks during a news conference at USPS headquarters in Washington, D.C, on February 6. Under the USPS’s plan, stamped letters, magazines and advertisements will no longer be delivered to homes and businesses on Saturdays beginning August 10. Packages would still be delivered on Saturdays. Package delivery, one of the agency’s few growing services, has increased by 14% since 2010, while first class mail has declined 20%. Additionally, post offices that are open on Saturdays will remain open, and post office boxes will receive Saturday mail. According to the USPS, more than a third of U.S. businesses are closed Saturday, and Saturdays have the lightest volume of mail. U.S. Postal Service officials say their research has shown that nearly 7 in 10 Americans support the switch to five-day delivery as a way for the post office to reduce costs. “The Postal Service is advancing an important new approach to delivery that reflects the strong growth of our package business and responds to the financial realities resulting from America's changing mailing habits," Donahue said in a statement. Postal Problems Over the last several years, the USPS has had to address swift changes to the way Americans communicate. In 2001, 53.6 billion stamped letter were mailed. In 2012, there were just 23.2 billion. This trend mirrors e-mail’s fast rise in popularity—for many people, it’s both a cheaper and faster way to communicate. Since 2006, the Postal Service has cut costs by about $15 billion, including reducing the size of its career workforce by about 28%, or 193,000 employees. The agency continues to seek legislation from Congress to gain more flexibility in controlling costs. The USPS is an independent agency and receives no tax dollars for its day-to-day operations, but it is still subject to congressional control. In the past, postal officials said they needed permission from Congress to change the mail-delivery schedule, but they now believe they can make the change without new legislation. Still, Congress could act to stop the delivery change. Plus, the Postal Service needs Congress’s help to solve its money problems. In a statement, the USPS said it “encourages the 113th Congress to make postal reform legislation an urgent priority.”

A Bus Ride Into History

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American woman who worked as a seamstress, boarded this Montgomery City bus to go home from work. On this bus on that day, Rosa Parks initiated a new era in the American quest for freedom and equality.

She sat near the middle of the bus, just behind the 10 seats reserved for whites. Soon all of the seats in the bus were filled. When a white man entered the bus, the driver (following the standard practice of segregation) insisted that all four blacks sitting just behind the white section give up their seats so that the man could sit there. Mrs. Parks, who was an active member of the local NAACP, quietly refused to give up her seat.

Her action was spontaneous and not pre-meditated, although her previous civil rights involvement and strong sense of justice were obvious influences. "When I made that decision," she said later, “I knew that I had the strength of my ancestors with me.”

She was arrested and convicted of violating the laws of segregation, known as “Jim Crow laws.” Mrs. Parks appealed her conviction and thus formally challenged the legality of segregation.

At the same time, local civil rights activists initiated a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. In cities across the South, segregated bus companies were daily reminders of the inequities of American society. Since African Americans made up about 75 percent of the riders in Montgomery, the boycott posed a serious economic threat to the company and a social threat to white rule in the city.

A group named the Montgomery Improvement Association, composed of local activists and ministers, organized the boycott. As their leader, they chose a young Baptist minister who was new to Montgomery: Martin Luther King, Jr. Sparked by Mrs. Parks’ action, the boycott lasted 381 days, into December 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the segregation law was unconstitutional and the Montgomery buses were integrated. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the beginning of a revolutionary era of non-violent mass protests in support of civil rights in the United States.

It was not just an accident that the civil rights movement began on a city bus. In a famous 1896 case involving a black man on a train, Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court enunciated the “separate but equal” rationale for Jim Crow. Of course, facilities and treatment were never equal.

Under Jim Crow customs and laws, it was relatively easy to separate the races in every area of life except transportation. Bus and train companies couldn’t afford separate cars and so blacks and whites had to occupy the same space.

Thus, transportation was one the most volatile arenas for race relations in the South. Mrs. Parks remembers going to elementary school in Pine Level, Alabama, where buses took white kids to the new school but black kids had to walk to their school.

“I'd see the bus pass every day,” she said. “But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world” (emphasis added).

Montgomery’s Jim Crow customs were particularly harsh and gave bus drivers great latitude in making decisions on where people could sit. The law even gave bus drivers the authority to carry guns to enforce their edicts. Mrs. Parks’ attorney Fred Gray remembered, “Virtually every African-American person in Montgomery had some negative experience with the buses. But we had no choice. We had to use the buses for transportation.”

Civil rights advocates had outlawed Jim Crow in interstate train travel, and blacks in several Southern cities attacked the practice of segregatedbus systems. There had been a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, but black leaders compromised before making real gains. Joann Robinson, a black university professor and activist in Montgomery, had suggested the idea of a bus boycott months before the Parks arrest.

Two other women had been arrested on buses in Montgomery before Parks and were considered by black leaders as potential clients for challenging the law. However, both were rejected because black leaders felt they would not gain white support. When she heard that the well-respected Rosa Parks had been arrested, one Montgomery African American woman exclaimed, “They’ve messed with the wrong one now.”

In the South, city buses were lightning rods for civil rights activists. It took someone with the courage and character of Rosa Parks to strike with lightning. And it required the commitment of the entire African American community to fan the flames ignited by that lightning into the fires of the civil rights revolution.