Call them by their Rightful Names: Uniting a Divided America

Throughout history, one of the preferred methods of dehumanizing others is to call them derogatory names.   You do not call them by their rightful names.  This is why the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day that I was honored to be a part of last week is so important.  On the day that commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the names of those who died during the Holocaust are called out.  Each one is singularly remembered –their birthday, their age, their birthplace and their place of death.

Call them by their rightful names. They are not numbers; they are not objects. They are people –people with a past and because of this annual remembrance a present and a future.

For me, the reading of a few pages of the six million Jews who lost their lives was a moving experience and one that captures the spirit of my own work to remember those of African descent who lost their lives to injustice and oppression.There are some who run away from this history, but I feel as I felt earlier this week the power of honoring in death those who were dishonored in life.

It’s a kind of restitution, if you will, to call out a name who was supposed to be forgotten but whose identity lives on because WE choose to honor them.  To call them by their rightful names is to turn the tables on evil, to break the silence and to powerfully draw a line in the sand: Never again.

By the same token, there are over 4000 recorded names of men and women who were lynched in America.  Bryan Stevenson, Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and other organizations like the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation are doing much to honor those who died in such a devastating way. Equal Justice Initiative is setting up markers around the country to identify where and how these victims died. The NJOF has an annual memorial service on June 18 in Washington and around the country to honor victims of the “Maafa;” a KiSwahili  term for “terrible occurrence” or “great disaster.”    I hope men and women of good conscience will support these types of memorial efforts.

As they honor the dead, they are calling for reconciliation with the living with the belief that real reconciliation can only be based on a foundation of truth.

Our denial will not save us.  

Call them by their rightful names.

Sources:

https://www.ushmm.org/remember/days-of-remembrance/remembrance-day-calendar

Call Me by My Rightful Name, a novel by Isidore Okpewho

 Yom Hashoah at Binghamton University, April 24, 2017

Picture credit:  Hajarat Adewole

Harriet Tubman and the Fragility of Freedom

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I took my students to the Harriet Tubman house in Auburn NY and that we were given a brilliant tour by Reverend Paul Carter and his wife.   There were many things about this tour that stood out for me beyond anything and everything that I had read about Harriet Tubman.

There was her heroism as an Underground Railroad conductor, her service in the Civil War as a spy and her provision of a home for the aged after the war.  Her initial purchase of the Auburn property in 1857 was remarkable in of itself because it was, after all, 1857.  How many women owned property in 1857 much less a black female former slave?

But one thing still lingered in my mind—well actually two things.  The first is Harriet’s pig farm.  So Harriet buys the first parcel of this land from fellow Auburn abolitionist, former Governor and US Senator William Seward, and sets up a pig farm.  Sometime after that, we are told that Harriet lost almost all of her 40 pigs.  Someone in the area fed them all food laced with poison.  In one night, her entire livestock and source of income was destroyed.

Harriet had already been through so much – countless harrowing trips to the South rescuing slaves as well as service as a scout and nurse in the Civil War.  Now here she was officially a free woman with property, but STILL not able to hold onto that property in peace.

I wonder what Harriet felt the morning she woke up to find herself still a free woman but a woman whose freedom was so fragile.   How did she go on?

Here she was practicing self reliance yet being cut off at the knees.  Yes, slaves were freed by the 13^th Amendment but there were no reparations for their unpaid labor.  Pensions even for the thousands who served in the Civil War were hard to come by.   Harriet herself fought for many years before receiving a monthly pension of $20 in 1899.

No one could have been surprised if this event had broken her...but it didn't.

According to many accounts, Harriet was a woman of faith who prayed about everything.  So we don’t know exactly how she recovered her resolve to go on after such a devastating loss but we do know that she seemed to keep putting one foot in front of another.

At some point later, she gave $500 towards the building of the AME Zion church and it is that church who to this day has preserved her property and her memory.  They have been the bearers of witness of Harriet’s home drawing on published records and oral histories of her existing descendants.

Maybe Harriet Tubman is speaking to some of us today—some of us who given recent events in the United States and in the world are wondering how we can go on and what to do next.  Maybe Harriet Tubman and how she dealt with loss can be a source of inspiration for us today.  

 

She recognized the fragility of her freedom but was undaunted.  She put one foot in front of another and fought the good fight to the end.

Anne Bailey

Author of AfricanVoices of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Sources and for more information.

http://www.harriethouse.org/ame.htm

Fergus  Bordewich.  Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad.  

Photo credits: http://www.harriet-tubman.org/moses-underground-railroad/