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Irish History January 2012 CHRISTA CORRIGAN McAULIFFE by Mike McCormack, AOH National Historian Ed and Grace Corrigan met at Crosby High School in Waterbury Ct in 1940. In 1946 they were married just as Ed was entering Boston College. They agreed that children would have to wait, but love changed that as Ed was entering his sophomore year. On Sept 2, 1948 - their first child was born. They baptized her Sharon Christa Corrigan, and called her Christa. When she was only 6 months old, Christa contracted a severe illness that hospitalized her for 28 days. She recovered, but hospital and medical bills took the family's savings. Boston Mayor Michael J Curley, a legendary benefactor of the poor, came to the rescue with a cold-water flat for $23. a month. It wasn't much, but it was a home and that's where Christa began to grow into a gifted child, bright and inquisitive. The family's lean years ended with Ed's graduation, and they moved to Waterbury where he became an accountant. They placed little Christa in modeling school, and she earned an appearance on a local TV fashion show at the age of 4. A year later, Ed took a job at Jordan Marsh in Boston, and the family moved to Framingham, where little Christa won the title of Summer Princess at the local playground. It was becoming clear that this little girl was someone special. She became a Brownie; a Girl Scout; took dance, voice, and piano lessons; religious classes, and sports practice, cramming the most she could into every minute of the day. Then in May, 1961, Christa watched, with her schoolmates, as Alan Shepard, aboard a Redstone Rocket, took America's first trip into space. She told a classmate that one day she too would go into space, but in the 1960's that was only wishful thinking, and she knew it; in those days women were nurses, secretaries, or teachers, so she pursued a career as a teacher. At High School, Christa met Steve McAuliffe, and from that day, dated no one else. To say that she was an active teenager is an understatement. She earned National Honor Society recognition, and entered Framingham State College, all the while working nights in a local shipping company, baby sitting, captaining the college debating team, singing with the glee club, and acting in school plays; yet still made the Dean's list 3 times. Eight weeks after graduation, she and Steve were married at St Jeremiah's. Steve and Christa moved to Washington where Steve attended Georgetown Law School and Christa worked as a teacher. Just like Ed and Grace Corrigan, they had to cut corners until Steve's graduation, after which they returned north to Concord, New Hampshire where Christa got a job teaching at Concord High School. In typical fashion, she also led a Girl Scout troop, taught Catechism at St Peters, worked hospital and YWCA fund-raising campaigns, and appeared in Community Theater productions. In her leisure time she joined a volleyball league, a tennis team, and jogged. She was still cramming as much as she could into every minute of the day. There was just no time for added activities - until that August day in 1984. On that fateful day, Steve and Christa were driving home when they heard a news item from the White House on the car radio. Today, the President said, I am directing NASA to begin a search of our elementary and secondary schools to choose, as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program, one of Ameria's finest - a teacher. Christa felt her stomach tingle; she looked at Steve and, knowing the dynamic lady he had married, Steve just smiled and said, Go for it. Christa Corrigan McAuliffe applied to NASA for the position of first civilian in space, and she wasn't disheartened to learn that over 11,500 others had applied with her. With her customary determination she persevered; this was what her whole life had prepared her for - she had lived life to its fullest, and this was the leading edge. Through interviews, examinations, and training, the process of elimination gradually reduced the number of applicants to 113, and Christa was still in the running. She was elated, and felt that whoever the lucky passenger would be, she was honored just to have come this close. But she came even closer, as her parents knew she would, for when they number of finalists had been reduced to 10, Christa was one of them. Then, on July 19, 1985, Vice President Bush announced that Christa McAuliffe would be America's first civilian in space. Among the runners-up were some with better credentials in certain fields, but Christa was judged the best all around. She was the girl next door, and it was felt that there was no better person to relate the adventure of space to the average American than she. On the sunny morning of January 28, 1986, forty years after their marriage, Ed and Grace Corrigan stood in a crowd of dignitaries, watching the space shuttle, Challenger, lift off. It was carrying their beautiful Christa, and her companions, across the morning sky on a column of flame, headed for the reaches of outer space. The pride in their eyes was so visible that media personnel trained their cameras on them to record their reaction. What they recorded was seen, and will never be forgotten, by almost every man, woman, and child on this planet. The pride became shock, and turned to grief as the shuttle became a ball of flame, and turned into a sky full of twisted falling metal. In the blink of an eye, baby Christa, the summer princess of the Framingham playground, was gone; the teenager who wanted to fly to the moon was no more. School children wept openly at the loss of their favorite teacher, and millions recoiled in horror at the tragic turn of events. From our poor vantage point on the clay of this earth, we felt Ed and Grace Corrigan's pain. But what of Christa? According to NASA, the crew felt no panic nor pain. They had been vaporized in an instant, so what of Christa? Well, think of it. Christa had lived life to its fullest, never wasting a precious moment; and she was experiencing her fondest dream. How often have we said, if this be a dream don't wake me, knowing that anything after would be a letdown. Christa McAuliffe never knew that letdown. She was in the middle of living her dream, she was at the peak of her emotions as she buckled into Challenger for the flight into space. Can you imagine her excitement as the giant shuttle lifted off into the heavens. And what better end could her dream have had, for within moments of liftoff, Christa McAuliffe reached Were there Irish slaves? The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white. From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland's population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain's solution was to auction them off as well. During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers. Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They'll come up with terms like "Indentured Servants" to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle. As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts. African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master's free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude. In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new "mulatto" slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed "forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale." In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company. England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat. There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it's own to end it's participation in Satan's highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery. But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they've got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened. None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot. http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html |
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