Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

This week, the 74th session of the General Assembly of United Nations began in New York.

To mark the occasion, we wanted to pay tribute to one of the most important and meaningful

accomplishments of that body, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Adopted at the 3rd UN General Assembly held in Paris, this document, as Ken Burns

notes in the Roosevelt, was history's first attempt at laying out the principles under

which all nations should behave toward their own citizens and toward each other.

It was largely the work of one delegate from the United States, former First Lady Eleanor

Roosevelt.

It was not an easy task.

In leading the drafting committee, Mrs. Roosevelt was relentless, as tough as she was tactful.

She drove her fellow delegates so hard that one felt compelled to remind her that they

had human rights too.

If they wanted shorter days, the Adore Roosevelt's favorite niece answered, they should make

shorter speeches.

At 3am on the morning of December 10, 1948, the General Assembly approved the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights without a single dissenting vote.

After the historic vote, the entire General Assembly did something it had never done before

and has never done since.

It rose to give a standing ovation to a single delegate, Eleanor Roosevelt.

And this week, we put Eleanor Roosevelt's speech on the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights into the Words Matter Library.

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