Rosa Parks and Raymond Parks Shared a Love For Each Other and For Civil Rights. And as Valentine’s Week comes to an end, they are the final recipients of my Valiant Valentines Award (VVA) (joining Tim Robbins & Susan Sarandon, Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee, Lucie & Raymond Aubrac, and Robert Capa & Gerda Taro) which honors couples who loved together and worked together to make the world a better place.

When Rosa met her husband in Montgomery, Alabama, Raymond, a 29-year-old barber, was active in the NAACP and the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, 9 young black men who had been convicted (8 of whom were sentenced to die in the electric chair) for raping two white women, despite no real evidence. As a couple, they became even more involved in civil rights and Rosa became the secretary and later youth leader of the local NAACP branch. Raymond, whose education was limited by segregation, had educated himself and encouraged and supported Rosa to pursue her education.

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Roses in honor of Rosa Parks make a great gift because it allows you to give someone something beautiful, support a beautiful cause, and honor the legacy of a beautiful woman. Organic Style, an eco-friendly, socially responsible, Fair Trade on-line boutique, is selling the Freedom: Rosa Parks Rose bouquet, and donating a portion of its proceeds to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which Rosa co-founded. The Institute’s youth leadership “Pathways to Freedom” program teaches students the stories and values of the civil rights movement, and encourages them to engage in social justice and, in turn, encourage social justice in their own communities, as they do in the video above made entirely by students in the Pathways Program.

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NAACP Image Awards, Academy Awards, Grammy’s are nothing new to the actor/activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. But for the first time ever, the dynamic duo win my Valiant Valentine Award. Valentine’s Day Week, kicked off my Valentine’s week-long series on the 5 coolest activist couples. I honored activist & actor Susan Sarandon and her partner, activist, actor & director Tim Robbins with a VVA, that’s a Valiant Valentine Award, for those of you just tuning in. Now I’m awarding another VVA to a couple who have shown their love for each other and for civil rights, human rights, and peace. And the award goes to…

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were not only award-winning and distinguished actors, but social change-winning and distinguished civil rights activists. The couple, married for 56 years, won NAACP Image Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and was honored by the Kennedy Center, not only for their roles on stage and screen, but for their roles as trailblazers who opened the door for so many black actors who came after them.

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The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is now here to give you the very best of Katie, Nicole, Giulia, Gina and Kerry! If you worry about missing your favorite bloggers’ posts as they push their way down the page each and every week - Never Fear! Check out our most popular posts of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.

Katie:

Woody Guthrie: This Grammy Is Your Grammy / This Grammy Is My Grammy

Rambo Fights for Burma’s Freedom + 5 Steps You Can Take To Help Burma In 5 Minutes

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Nicole:

“Yes We Can” Obama Music Video a Unique Celebrity Endorsement

Top 10 US Grant, Scholarship and Fellowship Awarding Foundations

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Giulia:

Ba-Da-Bling Commercials Pulled in New York

“Safe Sex or No Sex” Shirts Get Teens Suspended

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Gina:

10 Internet Videos Featuring Celebrities Advocating For A Cause

Close Up: An Introduction to Iranian Cinema and Cinematic Rainbows

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Kerry:

Sheryl Crow’s Apocalyptic Peak-Oil Song

Solar Powered Soldiers Wear Uniforms with Built-In Batteries

The “Yes We Can” pro-Obama music video released last Friday is a unique celebrity endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate. Star-studded videos have been produced to support a number of causes, from world famine to opposing apartheid in South Africa, but it’s unusual for them to be inspired by a particular candidate. Yet high-profile personalities like Scarlett Johansen and Kareem Abdul Jabbar have come out in numbers in their hopes to win over your hearts and votes for Obama.

Will.i.am of the musical group The Black Eyed Peas, and Jesse Dylan, son of Bob Dylan, produced and directed the video. Will.i.am said in an interview that he was inspired by Martin Luther King, and the video has a decidedly “I Have A Dream” feel to it, with its black and white overlay of imagines and words taken from Obama’s post-New Hampshire primary speech set to song. The filmmakers said that they did not coordinate the production or release of the video with the Obama campaign, nor did they know if he was aware of the video. With the publicity it’s been receiving over the weekend, I think it would be safe to say that he is.

If you haven’t seen the video yet, check it out below. You can also by visiting Amnesty International’s Music For Human Rights website to see what your favorite musicians are doing to promote human rights around the globe.

The IWW, International Workers of the World, or Wobblies, are uniting against Starbucks’ union busting activity, which includes firing workers for attempting to organize. National Labor Relations Board, slightly to the right of the IWW, has charged Starbucks with breaking the law 30 times. And e-mails leaked to the Wall Street Journal reveal how Starbucks officials block union activity: “Below is a summary of the recent developments in New York City regarding our attempts to thwart a potential union situation.”

Protesting outside the Starbucks on Fifth Avenue and East 33rd Street, organizers also criticized Starbucks for refusing to pay their employees overpay for working on Martin Luther King Day. Meanwhile, inside the store, a Starbucks spokesman attempted to do some damage control (I think) by responding that while Starbucks does not honor the holiday for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, the company does observe and over time for other holidays. Wow! I feel so much better!

Tell Starbucks to refrain from “thwarting a potential union situation,” and intimidating its workers and their unionization efforts.

As I blogged on Friday, Young People For, the program that empowers young progressive leaders to promote social change in their communities, and the Republican National Committee do not share much in common. But over the Martin Luther King Day three-day weekend, these two groups shared the same hotel, where YP4 held their national summit and the RNC held their winter meeting. The diversity among YP4 was truly stunning, as young people from different parts of the world, different ethnicities, different gender identities, different sexual orientation, different life experiences gathered in one place to connect around social change and community building. To be fair, the members of the RNC were also diverse: their skin color ranged from golfer’s tan to translucent; they celebrated diversity by wearing black ball gowns of different sizes and shapes; and their fur coats came from a variety of animals, making the affair a truly inclusive and representative one.But this weekend’s irony is not limited to the RNC YP4 coincidence. The greater irony is the RNC MLK coincidence. How appropriate it is for Republicans, many of whom, including Dick Cheney, fought hard against making Martin Luther King Day a holiday, to take advantage of this three holiday to hold their winter meeting. As they planned committee activities and events for an administration that has eroded–and is still eroding– so many of the gains of the civil rights movement, for which King fought and died, did these RNCers think they were honoring Martin Luther King’s memory?