"EQUALITY TOUR"

 “EQUALITY TOUR”

Caroline’s birthday is today, July 3, and in her honor, our daughter Susan has joined us in a week of touring some of the human rights sites in central and upstate New York.  This is also July 4th celebration week, and instead of emphasizing “independence,” I want to lift up the idea of equality, which is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence.

We began our tour at Auburn, New York, which is where Harriet Tubman settled in after fighting for equality in her Underground railroad trips, in her spying and scouting and leading troops for the Union in the Civil War, and in her support for women’s suffrage and for rights for older people.  She was simply one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, and we were glad to visit her home in Auburn.  On an earlier trip, we had visited her birthing grounds on the Eastern Shore of Maryland – in a remarkable coming together of geography, she and Frederick Douglass hailed from the same areas on the Eastern Shore.  

    We also visited Frances Miller Seward’s home in Auburn, commonly known as the William Henry Seward home, but it was actually Frances’ home.  She helped to push Henry into the anti-slavery camp, and she also helped Harriet Tubman purchase her home in Auburn.  Frances Seward, Harriet Tubman, and Martha Coffin Wright (younger sister of Lucretia Mott), all were contemporaries and friends in Auburn, and a fine book called “The Agitators” by Dorothy Wickenden was written last year about their relationships and witness.

    The next day we went to Rochester to see Susan B. Anthony’s home there.  It was on Caroline’s bucket list for a long time, and our tour of her house brought up many feelings and a deep sense of gratitude.  Anthony was a powerful witness for abolition and women’s suffrage, and although she missed the original Seneca Falls Conference in 1848, she soon joined up with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to form an incredibly powerful team in promoting both the abolition of slavery and the development of the rights of women.  Though Anthony did not live to see the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 (she died in 1906), it was her work that was at the heart of that Amendment.  In Rochester, she and Frederick Douglass became friends, and we were pleased to see a sculpture of Douglass and Anthony at tea in a garden near her home, and we found both of their graves in the Rochester cemetery.  What giants and witnesses they were!

    Next we went to the Shaker Heritage Society near Albany – there we saw the Shaker worship house and the home of founder Mother Ann Lee.  Lee believed that while Jesus was the male face of God, she was the female face of God. The communal group that she founded in England became known as “The Shakers,” because of their ecstatic dancing worship.  The Shakers held all possessions in common, and their motto was “Hands for Work, Hearts for God.”  Ann Lee was a strong women’s rights advocate, and they also harbored people escaping from the evils of slavery.  Lee emphasized celibacy and separate quarters for women and men, because she believed that the emphasis on sex turned women into sex objects, and she thought that marriage diminished the status of women.  She went on missionary trips in New York and other places to seek to recruit followers, but she ran into tremendous opposition because of her radical commitment to the idea of equality.  She was often beaten up on her missionary trips, and she died at age 48 because of all the beatings.  Obviously she was one of the earliest feminists in American history.  

    We closed out our tour at John Brown’s farm in North Elba, where he moved in 1849.  Funding for him was provided by Gerritt Smith, whose home we had visited earlier in the week in Peterboro, also home to the National Abolition Hall of Fame.  Here in North Elba in the Adirondack Mountains, Brown had planned his participation and leadership in the civil war in Kansas, and later his transforming raid on the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry in 1859.  We took a tour of his modest home, and saw the living room area where his funeral was held in December, 1859, after he was hanged in Charlestown, West Virginia.  We also paid homage to his grave near his home.  I grew up in the white supremacist South, and in that time, I heard and believed that Brown was a lunatic terrorist.  Over the years, I have learned of a different John Brown, that he was one of the few white men who was willing to put his life on the line to seek to end slavery before the Civil War. 

      As we celebrate the 247th anniversary of the inscribing of the idea of equality into the American mindset, let us remember these and so many other witnesses who have worked and fought and suffered for the idea of equality.  We are in a time now when the commitment to the idea of equality is being tested once again, with a white supremacist SCOTUS and a growing and violent body of folk seeking to turn back the power of this American idea that all people are created with equal dignity before God and before the law.  We are being asked to find our place and our work in that great parade of witnesses, so let us take our steps too.