Phyllis Jones didn’t know she was witnessing a watershed moment in American history 40 years ago as her feet dangled in the reflecting pool while Martin Luther King Jr. gave his now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I didn’t realize I was part of history,” said Jones, then a 21-year-old woman from a small community in Louisiana who had just moved to New York to take a job in a sewing factory.

But that experience in Washington helped launch a lifetime of political activism for Jones, an Oakland resident and charter member of Black Women Organized for Political Action.

“Now people ask me, ‘Was the dream fulfilled?’ Not really, but it’s better, ” said Jones, who is retired from teaching in the Peralta Community Colleges

NEW YORK – The two men were covered with soot, their eyes bloodshot from the smoke and heat. One found a clear stairwell, the other tore open a wall with a crowbar. In all, they rescued at least 50 people from the burning north tower of the World Trade Center. In the end, it was they who perished.

The heroics of Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz were reconstructed by The New York Times for its Friday editions from interviews with those saved, affidavits and nearly 2,000 pages of transcripts released by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the trade center’s owner.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Found by 7d)

(CBS/AP) In the frenzy of phone calls that followed the terrorist attack on the first of the twin towers, trapped workers begged in vain for an escape route and anguished wives desperately sought lost husbands. Screams and sirens echoed in the background as bodies dropped out of the sky.

“Yo, I’ve got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building onto … in front of One World Trade,” says a male caller. “People. Bodies are just coming from out of the sky. … up top of the building.”

The haunting images emerged Thursday as the Port Authority released 2,000 pages of transcripts from emergency calls and radio transmissions that provide the first glimpse into the confusing and devastating circumstances facing the agency and the building’s occupants in the moments after the attack.

Read the rest of this entry »